The spring of 2024 will be remembered as a pivotal moment in the movement for justice in Palestine, as protests against the war in Gaza leapt from the streets of American cities to the quads of its campuses. The weeks that followed will be remembered, in turn, as a period during which the far right’s racist crusade against pro-Palestine activism was quietly taken up by academic administrators at the country’s top schools. In keeping with administrative responses to past student movements, such as those against the Vietnam War and South African Apartheid, American universities have once again revealed themselves, in the words of Palestinian-American scholar Noura Erakat, as “an extension of the state’s coercive apparatus.”
In New York, media and public discourse mainly focused on the Columbia University encampment and Hind’s Hall takeover. At New York University (NYU), where I’m a member of the full-time faculty, the repression was swifter and unlike anything I’ve seen in over a decade of teaching. The day that the first encampment sprung up, school administrators called on the New York Police Department (NYPD) to violently arrest dozens of faculty and staff and pepper spray students in a move condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union and on-campus groups. When another encampment emerged, it was again suppressed within days. By term’s end, students were walking to class amid newly constructed barriers and security checkpoints, testifying to an authoritarian campus climate that has only grown more severe in the time since. As Ellen Schrecker, an expert on American universities’ complicity during the height of anti-communist delirium has observed, a new era of McCarthyism is upon us.
It is within this context that Materials of Solidarity, curated by PhD student Nadine Fattaleh, opened this month at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, providing an on-campus refuge — albeit several blocks from Washington Square — in which to reflect on the injustices of the past year and plan for the future. Bringing together an array of printed political ephemera culled from student protesters, movement members, and Fattaleh’s personal collection, the exhibition frames itself as a response to digital repression, proposing in its press release that “print has returned” as a medium to counter the systemic censorship and anti-Palestinian bias that pervade social media and corporate newsrooms.
In one section of the gallery, pamphlets from interlocking justice struggles are arranged on shelves alongside a “People’s Library” with titles by Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Tiqqun, and others. Another portion of the space is given over to architectural renderings of the two NYU encampment sites. The drawings figure as memorials to — and blueprints for — the social geography that briefly animated Greenwich Village’s Gould Plaza and Greene Street Walkway, two nominally public spaces that NYU authorities have since subsumed within a bleakly repressive architecture of plywood, cordons, and rent-a-cop guarded alleys. Amid such monuments to unfreedom, it has become routine for students to mock the school’s description of itself as a “university without walls.” But these renderings remind us that for a few days in April, the university was just that: a site in which the walls came down, in which students, professors, staff, and community members joined together to stand with the oppressed and to reject institutional investment in companies profiting from Israel’s war crimes and brutal, decades-long illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
The centerpiece of the exhibition comprises a series of postcards bearing images related to the pro-Palestine movement with short, printed texts solicited from students and allies. Contributors have been kept anonymous to safeguard against the vicious doxxing from which academic institutions have been unable or unwilling to protect their communities. Viewers are invited to collect the postcards in small manila envelopes and disseminate them within and outside of the university, thereby enacting the exhibition’s revaluation of print media in the online era.
Imagery from the encampments features in many of the postcards: photos of protest signs, Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, and, inevitably, hoards of riot-gear-clad NYPD officers, many of whom presently face misconduct charges. On verso, contributors who participated in the encampments write movingly of the communities of care, collective learning, and emancipatory practice that were forged there. Others reflect on the scenes of horror that have emerged from the destruction of Gaza: “the man carrying his loved one in grocery bags, Sidra’s body hanging from that wall, Hind’s utter terror in that car.”
Several authors encourage us to look outward, connecting the struggle for a free Palestine to past movements or framing it in relation to prison abolition, Indigenous sovereignty, and decolonization. Artworks figure on multiple postcards, including a stunning portrait of late writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani by Palestinian-American artist Samia Halaby, whose retrospective at Indiana University was canceled in January under the spurious premise of “safety concerns.”
A handful of postcards come from students or allies with direct connections to Palestine. One writes of the pride they felt upon hearing from their aunt in Gaza, who, as a reprieve from daily horrors, began closely following the student movement on Instagram. Another reflects on returning to the West Bank after the protests and encountering a fruit seller who had ingeniously transformed the bars of a security checkpoint — part of what the author terms the “infrastructure of Israeli apartheid” — into an extension of his fruit stand. “We teach life,” the text concludes.
Some contributors’ remarks and positions will chafe against the sensibilities of well-meaning liberals. The right to resist occupation “by all available means” is reaffirmed. The iconography of October 7 — paragliders, a Caterpillar bulldozer breaking through a security barrier — is cast as emancipatory. A self-described “juvenile but deeply felt ‘fuck you’” — in the photographic tradition of Ai Weiwei — is aimed at the New York Times and its consistently skewed reporting on Palestine.
More than one author reflects on their Jewish identity in the context of the ongoing, US-funded extermination campaign in Gaza. One postcard features a photograph of a loaf of challah in the hand of a student wearing a keffiyeh. The text on the back begins: “Tikkun Olam: the responsibility to repair the world.” It is a principle of Jewish life, the contributor suggests, that has been trampled by ethnonationalist barbarism.
Visitors to the exhibition will also find plenty of exhaustion and melancholy across these testimonials, an understandable consequence of waging asymmetrical struggle against a multi-faceted system of oppression. Nevertheless, the dominant sentiments are those of joy and love: the joy of building, dancing, and protesting together; the love necessitated by and born out of sustained collective action.
Taken together, these materials of solidarity are an invitation to learn about and participate in what is perhaps the defining justice movement of the present. At the same time, they constitute an act of defiance against those whose ignorance, fear, lack of conscience, or obedience to power has made them collaborators in the new McCarthyism and, by extension, in the myriad atrocities that the repression of dissent continues to enable.
Among the postcards I took with me from the show, one carries a remark seemingly directed at academic community members whose complicity will be their legacy: “We will return with new lessons learned to succeed in our goals.” Another depicts a Palestinian mother and daughter embracing after being reunited through a prisoner exchange. The text on the back proclaims what a diminishing minority of the global community still refuses to hear: “The cause of Palestine is the cause of the world. As their sorrows are ours, so will be their victory.”
Materials of Solidarity continues at 20 Cooper Square Gallery (20 Cooper Square, Floor 3, Noho, Manhattan) through December 6. The exhibition was curated by Nadine Fattaleh.
