Bowdoin College Students Launch First Gaza Solidarity Encampment of Trump Era
"As Israeli aggression obliterates Palestinian homes and guns down children in Jenin, as unspeakable suffering continues in Gaza, and as America descends further into fascism, we ask—what type of institution does Bowdoin want to be?"
Activists at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine have launched what is believed to be the first Palestine solidarity encampment since President Donald Trump took office, occupying the first floor of the liberal arts school's student union to protest the U.S. leader's proposal to take over the Gaza Strip and expel its native Palestinian population.
Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) occupied the first floor of Smith Union on Thursday night and erected tents there, The Bowdoin Orientreported. They named the encampment after Sha'ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old computer engineering student at al-Azhar University in Gaza who burned alive in a refugee tent encampment bombed by Israel last October.
The protesters—who reportedly number around 50—acted in response to Trump's Tuesday press conference with fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which the president floated U.S. ownership of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, and the construction of the "Riviera of the Middle East" there following 15 months of Israel's genocidal war on the coastal enclave.
Demonstrators also condemned Israel's ongoing assault on the illegally occupied West Bank, where the killing and injury of thousands of Palestinians since October 2023 has been overshadowed by the annihilation of Gaza.
"As Israeli aggression obliterates Palestinian homes and guns down children in Jenin, as unspeakable suffering continues in Gaza, and as America descends further into fascism, we ask—what type of institution does Bowdoin want to be?" Bowdoin SJP said in a statement Thursday. "One that cowers to authoritarianism, that chooses cowardice in the face of injustice? The choice is Bowdoin's."
The Orient reported that a Bowdoin College security official began asking student protesters to identify themselves around 1:00 am on Friday morning while Dean of Students Michael Pulju informed students about the disciplinary repercussions of their action, including the possibility of expulsion.
On Friday morning, more Bowdoin students showed up outside the student union to protest and try to enter the building, chanting, "Open Smith!"
According to the Orient:
The encampment... comes nearly a year after Bowdoin students voted in favor of the SJP-organized Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum, a resolution demanding that the college take an institutional stand against the scholasticide and stop future investments in defense-focused funds. At the beginning of the fall semester, the college established its Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility in response to the referendum but has yet to alter its investment practices or offer an institutional statement.
Lead SJP organizer Olivia Kenney told the Orient that the protesters plan to occupy Smith Union "until the demands of the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum are met" by the school's Board of Trustees.
Staff and students at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank recorded a message of solidarity with the "beautiful and wonderful" Bowdoin encampment.
"We woke up this morning to... the news of your encampment, and we've been following the news of the solidarity encampment at Bowdoin and Students for Justice in Palestine," they said in the message, which was posted on Instagram. "We see you, we love you."
"Thank you, from occupied Palestine in the West Bank, where students and faculty and employees alike can barely if at all get to campus because of the checkpoints and roadblocks," the message continued. "From all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, all of the universities that were actively destroyed in 471 days of genocide. Universities throughout the occupied West Bank, which are being surrounded and isolated."
"We are in this together," the message added. "We see you and thank you for raising your voices and screaming loudly that the space of a university is our space. It is a space where knowledge is exchanged. It is the space where we imagine and work to achieve the world that we want to live in, not the world that has been thrust upon us."
