Student Encampments

Chicago for Abortion Rights stands in unequivocal solidarity with the students, faculty, and community members at universities and colleges around the Chicagoland area and across the United States who have staked out encampments and autonomous zones. These students are showing us the way to liberation, reclaiming their campuses for the people in the name of Palestinian liberation, and an end to this genocide. We add our voice to their demands that administrations “divest, disclose, and repair.” We join them as they demand that the United States and its academic institutions cease to be financial backers of Israel’s scholasticide and mass murder of Palestinians.

Since October, the world has watched in horror as Israeli forces — funded and armed with U.S. tax dollars and weapons — decimate families, bomb hospitals, and kill infants, children, and parents. Make no mistake, reproductive justice includes Palestinian liberation. Every single pregnancy that has been disrupted, child who has been murdered, pregnant person made to starve and robbed of access to any medical care, let alone prenatal or birth care, is a direct assault on reproductive freedom. While our U.S. government endangers its own residents through abortion bans and the erosion of our bodily autonomy, it endorses and funds the murder, matricide, and infanticide being perpetrated against Palestinians.

That many campus authorities have not hesitated to call in violent police forces to brutalize protestors, threatening them with violence, arrest and expulsion, proves the urgency of their protest. Their brave actions follow in the footsteps of anti-war student demonstrators in 1968, who showed the world what people power looks like in protests that spread across the world. Just last night, we witnessed horrific violence carried out by the NYPD against protestors on Columbia and CCNY’s campuses. Students were brutalized in a hall reclaimed and renamed for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who spent her final hours begging for help, surrounded by her dead family.

We assert that state violence anywhere is an arm of imperialism that must be stopped. In the last 7 months, the Israeli Defense Forces have killed a reported 35,000 Palestinian people, and tens of thousands more remain missing or imprisoned. These same forces are known to train numerous US police departments, whose officers are violently suppressing the First Amendment rights of students across the country. The thread of humanity that connects our struggle to that of families in Gaza is undeniable. We know that without intersectionality, we are nothing. In Gaza, countless universities have been leveled by bombs paid for by the U.S., their students and teachers murdered or forced to flee. We join the chorus of brave student voices across the country saying “not in our name,” and we add our voices to their unwavering demands and commitment to justice.

The students establishing campus encampments and liberated zones are shining a light by which the rest of us can see the path ahead, one that leads to liberation and an end to settler-colonial occupation from Gaza to the United States. We may never truly know the devastation this genocide has wrought on families from Gaza to the West Bank, and their relatives here in the United States who have lost parents, siblings, and kin. But in the liberated zones at UChicago, DePaul, Columbia, UCSC, University of Texas, Emory, and dozens more, students show us that we keep us safe. To the student organizers, journalists, and protestors, we thank you and we are with you.

All power to the people. Free Palestine.

Until liberation,

Chicago for Abortion Rights

Statement released: May 1, 2024