A COLLECTION OF REPORTBACKS FROM THE PALESTINE MOVEMENT by the LAKE EFFECT COLLECTIVE
With the season of encampments unsteadily behind us and a great deal of mass struggle to come, getting clear on last year’s events feels more and more important. In the last year, two failures occurred simultaneously: first, the Democratic Party’s flagrant complicity in and unabashed apology for genocide destroyed its popular mandate and cost its candidate a dozen million votes, interrupting the symbiotic process by which the outright evil of the Republicans allows the Democrats to launder their public image in the space between seats at the table. Second, in the encampments, a rift opened up between militants and NGO-bound, management-minded negotiators. ‘Escalation’, shorthand for the popular adoption of radical, university-disrupting tactics to damage the bottom lines of boards of trustees and call attention to the genocide in Gaza, was a tactical question that contained an entire strategic horizon in nuce. We couldn’t see it then, but all of the simplest things that we were doing, and all of the commitments we found the easiest to make, would eventually open up onto our uncertain present: the young radicals from the encampments have found themselves abandoned into a second Trump presidency, without the Democratic Party or even a range of nominally friendly, really domineering NGOs to take over. The liberals stayed home, and now, it’s just us. As a collective, our orientation to mass politics is a wager, at the moment, on the dozen million people who abstained from voting for either of the two parties; if any time in our recent history was ripe for the emergence of an independent political organ that united the anti-system, illegal militants of the encampments with the dispossessed masses who made 2020 an insurrectionary situation, it’s now.
In the spirit of clarification, we’ve put together a library of all the Palestine movement reportbacks we read during the last season of struggle. They might not all be useful for your specific purposes, but they add up to a picture we’re all just beginning to really grasp. Stay brave! See you in the street!
Lake Effect Collective
(A note: as radicals in the Midwest, we’re obviously more in touch with local networks here, and we relied on our movement’s tenuous national information ecosystem & our friends to hear what we did about the encampments elsewhere. That means we definitely missed a lot! If you’d like to contribute your own that we missed, or you have something cool we should put on here, email it to lakeeffect@riseup.net!)
ARCHIVE
APRIL 21
New York City, NY: First We Take Columbia
New York City, NY: Create Two, Three, Many Columbias!
APRIL 23
Arcata, CA: Report from within the Cal Poly Humboldt Building Occupation
APRIL 25
Atlanta, GA: Emory is Everywhere
Austin, TX: Day One: University of Texas Austin Students Take the Lawn
APRIL 26
New York City, NY: Columbia University’s “Crisis”: A Political Economy Sketch-Map
APRIL 28
Chicago, IL: Taking Deals and Selling Out: Northwestern University Organizers Betray the Movement
APRIL 29
Arcata, CA: From Redwood Trees to Olive Groves, the Commune Grows
APRIL 30
Tucson, AZ: Why We Must Support the UArizona Student Encampment
Tempe, AZ: A Report Back from the ASU Liberated Zone
MAY DAY
Urbana-Champaign, IL: Defending the Camp
MAY 5
Bloomington, IN: The Dunn Meadow Liberated Zone
MAY 8
Tucson, AZ: Aux Armes! May Day at the Olive Grove
MAY 10
New York City, NY: From Harlem to Palestine, Globalize the Intifada
Santa Cruz, CA: For Those Who Would Act When Genocide is Ignored
MAY 12
Los Angeles, CA: The Cops Brought Guns
MAY 14
Oakland, CA: Bonk: UC Office of the President Attacked
MAY 19
Portland, OR: Eight Days for Gaza: A Report on the Occupation and Defense of the Portland State University Library
MAY 20
Tucson, AZ: Audacity!
MAY 24
McInnes, BC: Enclosures of Possibility
MAY 30
Tucson, AZ: All Spectators are Cowards or Traitors
JUNE 2
Berkeley, CA: Student Intifada as our Historical Duty: Fulfill it or Betray it
JUNE 3
Chicago, IL: UChicago Reportbacks and Letter to the Encampment
JUNE 4
Ferguson Township, PA: Pro-Palestine Vandalism, Arson at Centre Co. DoD Building
JUNE 9
Ann Arbor, MI: The Pigs Can Try, but They’ll Never Stop Us
JUNE 15
Seattle, WA: The LZ is gone but we remain committed to disrupting and destroying all systems complicit in genocide!
JULY 5
Chicago, IL: Fight Like A Flea: Lessons From the Casbah of Bassel Al-Araj
JULY 9
Romulus, MI: Maersk Warehouse and Distribution Service Center Beautified
JULY 21
Toronto, ON: A Postmortem of the Failures of UofT’s So-Called People’s Circle for Palestine
JULY 29
Michigan: Map of Weapons Manufacturers
AUGUST 1
Chicago, IL: Reflections on the UChicago Popular University for Gaza Encampment
SEPTEMBER 1
Ann Arbor, MI: It Doesn’t Matter How Peaceful You Are
SEPTEMBER 5
New York City, NY: Statement of the CUNY 28: Palestine is Everywhere, We are All Outside Agitators
SEPTEMBER 7
Chicago, IL: Seattle is Never Coming Back
SEPTEMBER 8
Chicago, IL: Report Back from the Make it Great Like ’68 Protest at the DNC
SEPTEMBER 10
Davis, CA: From the Camp to the Campus
SEPTEMBER 11
Chicago, IL: No Life in the Master’s House
SEPTEMBER 14
Richmond, VA: Over 100 March in Richmond, VA in Solidarity with Palestine, Clash With Police
OCTOBER 10
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Admin Homes and Israel-Linked Businesses Redecorated on October 7th
OCTOBER 14
Austin, TX: Flood the Tech Core: A New Front Opens Up in Austin’s Movement for Palestine
Chicago, IL: Statement on the Week of Rage Action and Ensuing Police Brutality
OCTOBER 26
Chicago, IL: “The DNC is That Way!”
NOVEMBER 28
Philadelphia, PA: Home of Ghost Robotics CEO Flooded
DECEMBER 27
New York City, NY: No Peace
DECEMBER 31
Chicago, IL: On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement
JANUARY 6
Montreal, QC: How We Stormed Concordia University: De-arresting, Painting, Shutting Down Classes and Exams
MISCELLANEA
To Them, We are All Outside Agitators
Not Liking Someone Doesn’t Mean They’re a Cop
