Letter from ‘Kibbutz Israel’

In the wee hours of May 8, police officers in Washington, DC violently cleared the pro-Palestine encampment at George Washington University (GW) with the help of pepper spray, arresting 33 people. University president Ellen Granberg had called the cops on what she claimed was an “unlawful” on-campus expression of solidarity with the victims of Israel’s current genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has officially killed some 36,000 people in less than eight months, although this number is no doubt a grave underestimate.

Granberg denounced the encampment as “an illegal and potentially dangerous occupation of GW property” – an ironic choice of words, to say the least, given the context of the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the Israeli military’s decidedly dangerous behaviour. Now, the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” – which is not so much a conflict as a psychopathic Israeli campaign to usurp other people’s property – is playing out in a battle for the landscape in the capital of the United States, Israel’s BFF and devoted arms supplier.

I witnessed the aftermath of the police assault on the GW camp, as I had just arrived back in DC from self-imposed exile in Mexico for a brief visit with my mother. Having never excelled much at optimism, I had found it enormously heartening that the pro-justice narrative was gaining ground in a country pathologically disconnected from reality. Graffiti and placards in support of Palestine had proliferated across public and private space alike, and pasted onto the window of the #33 bus I found a priority mail envelope addressed “FROM: THE SEA; TO: THE RIVER” – a reference to the Palestinian slogan,“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”