Upstream - [TEASER] Palestine Pt. 12: Resistance in the West w/ Max Geller and Sanyika

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Palestine Pt. 12: Resistance in the West w/ Max Geller and Sanyika." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. From the student-led encampments on college campuses all over the U.S. to direct actionists in the UK bursting through weapons factory walls with sledge hammers in their hands—the fight for Palestinian liberation in the West takes many forms. The response—repressive, heavy-handed, and fascistic—has also taken many forms, from draconian charges to outright mob violence. In this Patreon episode, we’ll take stock of some recent on-the-ground actions, from the Palestinian solidarity encampment at UCLA to the work of Palestine Action in both the US and the UK. And we’ve brought on two guests to help walk us through it all.  Sanyika is the current co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Chapter at UCLA and a current, second year law student at UCLA who has been an organizer for the past 10 years, most recently at the UCLA student encampment for Palestine. You might have heard about the UCLA encampment after news of a violent series of attacks by Zionists hit headlines after the encampment was attacked on May 1st. The Zionist attack was followed up in the early hours of May 2nd by a police attack, where the LAPD and highway patrol attempted to clear the encampment using rubber bullets and flash bangs. The violence and brutality of the zionists and the police on those days captured the country’s attention as news feeds were packed with images and videos that left us feeling like we were staring fascism in the face. But we also saw the community response of over a thousand people who showed up to protect and defend the encampment.  Our second guest for this episode is Max Geller, a public-facing member of Palestine Action in the UK. Max is a return Patreon guest who you might recall from our episode Palestine Pt. 7: Direct Action w/ Max Geller of Palestine Action, part of our ongoing series on Palestine.  In this episode, we take a deep dive into the UCLA encampment—its origins, its demands, its fight against campus administrators, zionists, and cops, while situating this specific encampment within the broader encampment movement, which is very much still active. We also explore one of the most recent actions by Palestine Action which has left 11 direct actionists facing felony charges in the UK. We talk about the importance of direct action and organizing, what we can learn from the past eleven months of actions, the struggle for liberation both in the West and in Palestine, and how we can plug in and get involved ourselves.  Cover art: Sanyika Further resources: Palestine Action Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) UC Divest The Mapping Project Join us in supporting Palestine at MECA, Anera, or the Palestinian Red Crescent Society Related episodes: Palestine Pt. 7: Direct Action w/ Max Geller of Palestine Action Upstream's ongoing series on Palestine Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Since October 7th, I just think, you know, nothing can ever be the same. None of us have ever seen the scale of horrific imagery coming through our phones every day. This genocide has been live streamed every day for the last year and of course we're all going to be changed by that experience, the

experience of watching such horrors unfold. It would be horrible if we weren't changed. I don't think anyone's activism will ever be the same. I know Palestine Action will never be the same. Before October 7th, our actions were, if you can believe it, much tamer. You never used to see people commandeering vehicles and driving them through weapons factory walls before. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's what we're living through right now.

And just as the Palestinians in Palestine have set the standard for all of us, it is up to us to respond to that standard and heed their call and escalate for Gaza. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond. From the student-led encampments on college campuses across the US to direct actionists in the UK bursting through weapons factory walls with sledgehammers

in their hands, the fight for Palestinian liberation in the West takes many forms. The response, repressive, heavy-handed, and fascistic, has also taken many forms, from draconian charges to outright mob violence. In this Patreon episode, we'll take stock of some of the recent on-the-ground actions, from the Palestinian Solidarity Encampment at UCLA to the work of Palestine Action in both the US and the UK, and we've brought on two guests to help walk us through it all. Sanyika is the current co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild chapter at UCLA and a current second-year law student at UCLA

who's been an organizer for the past 10 years, most recently at the UCLA Student Encampment for Palestine. You may have heard about the UCLA Encampment after news of a violent series of attacks by Zionists hit headlines after the Encampment was attacked on May 1st. The Zionist attack was followed up in the early hours of May 2nd by a police attack where the LAPD and Highway Patrol attempted to clear the encampment using rubber bullets and flash bangs. The violence and brutality of the Zionists and the police on those days captured the country's attention as news feeds were packed with images and videos that left us feeling like we were staring fascism in the face. But we also saw the community response of over a thousand people who showed up to protect and defend the encampment.

Our second guest for this episode is Max Geller, a public-facing member of Palestine Action in the UK. Max is a return Patreon guest who you may recall from our episode Direct Action, which is part 7 of our ongoing series on Palestine. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the UCLA encampment, its origins, its demands, its fight against campus administrators, Zionists, and cops, while situating this specific encampment within the broader encampment movement, which is very much still active. We also explore one of the most recent actions by Palestine Action, which has left 11 direct actionists facing felony charges in the UK.

We talk in general about the importance of direct action and organizing, what we can learn from the past 11 months of actions, the struggle for liberation, both in the West and in Palestine, and how we can plug in and get involved ourselves. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Max Geller and Sanyika. Sanyika, Max, it is a pleasure to have you both on. It's a pleasure to be on.

My pleasure too. Sanika, I'd love to start with you. If you could please introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing and also how you first got involved with organizing for Palestinian liberation. Yeah, my name is Sanika. I am a current second year at UCLA Law. And I have been what you could call organizing for over 10 years now.

So I was first getting involved when I was 14, basically after the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. And that was a radicalizing moment for a lot of people. So it was really influential when I saw that Palestinians were also showing solidarity to Black youth in Ferguson who were uprising against police brutality and not knowing much about Palestine. That really like sparked an interest in me and I ended up like taking Arabic later in high school and then keeping Arabic in college and doing a study abroad in Beirut and during all of that time I became a lot more familiar with the Palestinian liberation movement

and kind of like how that came to shape the black liberation movement. And through that relationship, like I not only better understood what it was that Palestinians were enduring through decades of genocide, but also how those struggles came to shape the struggle domestically and internationally for Africans everywhere.

Incredible. Yeah, thank you so much for that intro. And Max, so our Patreon community probably recognizes you from our episode a few months back on direct action and on Palestine action, specifically. But just in case they missed it or in case they need a little refresher, can you please introduce yourself and talk about the work that you do with Palestine Action? Sure. My name is Max Geller.

I am one of the public-facing members of Palestine Action here in the UK. We are a vibrant movement who have, for the last four years, been taking direct action and shutting down Israeli weapons factories throughout the UK. Thank you. All right. How about we start with you, Sanyika?

So as you mentioned, you're an organizer with the UCLA encampment. And I'm sure most of our listeners are familiar, but I'm wondering if maybe you can just talk a little bit about the encampment, your role in the encampment, how it got started. And then I'd love to also hear a little bit about the demands that you all have been making.

Yeah, the UCLA encampment is, I didn't really realize how big the audience that we had was until even now like months after the encampment because even like the summer I went to Cuba and I got to talk with some of the Palestinian students at the medical school there and they even mentioned like you know UCLA's encampment when they talk about the response to the triumph of October 7th, and I started a law school and there wasn't a law student SJP that I knew of, like nationally. And that's Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP.

Yes, yes. And basically, I didn't know that any formation like that or similar to it had existed for law students, to my knowledge, before October 7th. But I was like, okay, there's an SJP here. I'm interested in, you know, getting involved with them. But I was primarily focused on being involved in NLG, which we had to revive. In the aftermath, we kind of came around to getting involved with not only the undergrad SGP, but also the graduate student SJP, and then law students kind of coalesced into LSJP, and then there's a national LSJP formation, and throughout the entire past two semesters or quarters for undergrads, there've been like rallies and different actions. And sometime before the encampment that got super famous,

there was another attempt at an encampment at one of the conference centers. And essentially it had kind of not lasted longer than like, I think a few hours. And I wasn't able to be a part of it just because of the the point of the semester that it was but there were a bunch of students who then helped start the second encampment. So sorry just real quick was that first one swept or? It was swept it was immediately like shut down and I think the smart thing that everyone decided to do was just

to recuperate for a later time. And then obviously in between that time, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, all these schools started popping up, Cal Poly Humble. And we were like, okay, we're definitely going to do this, but we weren't sure about the timeline in which we were going to make it happen. And by the time that I was getting more and more looped in, I think I was definitely a person to push a sooner timeline just because it was exam season and all of these things. So we knew that when we were assessing the possibility, the risks, and the pros and the cons of the encampment, one of the things that I have said before, but I will say again, is that we did not anticipate the reaction that was going to come and I'm sure we'll talk about later.

But definitely assessing the political climate was one of the big things that we wanted to do with the encampment, but I think not assessing local political sentiments and attitudes and really trying to better anticipate responses was a big concern. It took a while, but demands wise, UC Divest has been a thing since the anti-apartheid solidarity struggle at UCLA, which was also huge. And UC Divest has had demands from, I mean, decades ago, but the most recent iteration of them that was made famous during the encampments was the demand that UC Regents divest from Black Rock, which we all know invests in warmongering companies and facilitates the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians. We also demanded that the UC regions reinvest back into the community's needs for housing,

food security, healthcare, safety, other things that students would actually want their money to go to. And we also demanded for the end of the siege on Gaza and the end to the occupation very clearly. And we wanted that, you know, the UC to protect Palestinian Muslim students, pro-Palestinian students and workers from, you know, repression or at least applying the same rights across the board, which again, not something that I think anyone really came to expect, but it's good to put it out there. And we wanted cops off campus.

That was the last one. Cops off campus, yes. Got it. So you alluded to this, and I'd like to ask you to maybe give us a little bit more information on the repression that you all faced at the encampment, the administration, Zionists, police, as you mentioned, cops. I'm wondering if you can sort of sketch us a picture of that

and maybe also situate it within the broader environment of repression against these encampments across the country and across the globe, both by the police and Zionists, as I mentioned. And I think we've been seeing it pick back up again across the country as classes resume this fall. So maybe if you can talk a little bit about that experience and then if you wanna sort of

zoom out and talk about the overall repression. Yeah, I mean, the first instance that I can think of when it came to repression and very specifically in the law school context, which is what I can speak to the best is the student at NYU, Reina, I believe, who was basically had their offer rescinded for a big law firm because of the statement that was put out after the triumph of October 7th.

And I think that specific to UCLA, the administration was itself pretty lax and hands off for a reason. And that reason being there was already a super staunch pro-Zionist block in the school that didn't really need the administration's hand to come down as much. And it relieves the school of a lot of liability. And that was the strategy that I think UCLA took, or administrators took, was very specifically one that was geared towards empowering

the most reactionary, most Zionist, most volatile sections of not only the school, but the larger community, as compared to, let's say, an NYU or Columbia that's kind of pushing those policies a lot more forward themselves. And that manifested in students who were being harassed and assaulted all semester nationwide, people in communities being assaulted, people in communities being murdered simply for being pro-Palestine, for being Palestinian or for being Muslim. And that was a big concern leading up that I think everybody's aware of. And when it came to our encampments specifically, as we are continuously finding out months later, there was high level coordination between not only the police forces, which range from LAPD to highway police to state police to

UC police, then private security companies, which one of them was explicitly like a Zionist security force and also made up of people who are allegedly ex-IoF, maybe not even ex, right? And so the main question is why would people like the police who train and work with the IOF, why would they take a stand against this fascist reactionary Zionist force that shows up to the school to harass students. And essentially the response that UCLA got, I think some of it has been well recorded and I think other parts aren't as well recorded, simply because of the nature of how wide the

response was from all sections of society in the Los Angeles context. It was high school students, it was old people who have families who should be in on a Tuesday night and they decided to come. You know, it was people who work for the police, it was people who have like no connection to the university or LA whatsoever, literally coming in to participate in this mob response. And that, again, range from behaviors of stalking, verbal threats, which often included rape threats,

it included physical assaults, there's a student, or at least a person who was involved with the encampments that I believe also had an amputation as a result of the response that that particular night that they came and You know one of the stories I remember the most vividly was that while they were like shooting fireworks the police finally came and the police were literally only there to take a counter protester to the hospital and One of the biggest issues was that we couldn't even get 911 to come. So the actual, like most prominent manifestations of violence came from the

reactionary counter-protesters. But then as we continuously saw the hands-off approach from the administration to literally services provided by the city were also taking this, oh, we can't do anything. And that, I think, is a story that if you know American history, you know very well, happens time and time again. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Max Geller and Sinyika. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Podcast Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us

to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.