I entered Kirkland Hall on March 26 because it was necessary. After months of hard work, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) referendum the student body pushed to a vote had been canceled by administration — and with it, our first tangible step to end Vanderbilt’s participation in “Israel’s” illegal occupation of Palestinian land and genocide of Palestine life. We, members of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations within the Vanderbilt Divest Coalition, pleaded to administration to reinstate the referendum, but they refused. We requested meetings with administrators, but they declined. We staged a 155-hour sit-in on Rand Lawn — enduring freezing temperatures throughout the night, but they disregarded us.
We were losing hope. The brutalization in Palestine continued to take precedence over any and all other pursuits — what does it mean to study when just across the sea, infants are being slaughtered before being named? What was there left to do?
So often, I have heard the Kirkland Hall sit-in characterized as “violent.” To this, I say, you do not know violence. Violence is not graffiti or barricades, neither of which were used in the Kirkland Hall sit-in. Violence is not screaming for peace. Violence is not trespassing or a “violation of community guidelines.” Those who declare this violence know nothing of violence. Violence is what is happening in Gaza. As a Palestinian, the past 10 months have been extremely horrifying to bear witness to. In me lives the images of a 13-year-old boy run over by a truck, guts splayed, brains scattered; a pale little girl limp in the arms of her grandfather; mass graves; men stripped naked and humiliated; women forced to give birth on streets without medication; emaciated children; bombs.
I come from a tradition of Palestinian resistance. It is my obligation to participate in the fight for the freedom of Palestine. My father, mother and two older sisters were all members and leaders of Palestinian student groups in their time at university. When I came to Vanderbilt, it wasn’t a question of whether or not I’d join SJP — it was a birthright. Vanderbilt has stepped on this identity.
Not unlike other universities, it has tried to suppress and dissipate the Palestinian resistance movement on campus, and it has done so in a cruel manner. Due to participating in the Kirkland sit-in, I am the only student to have been suspended for two semesters. Despite going through a four-month appeal process, which included the submission of over 20 pages of refuting evidence, Vanderbilt has not budged in the reconsideration of this sanction. The latest and final correspondence from Dr. Jeremy Bourgoin, director of student accountability and my personal accountability officer, states the following, “I hope that over the course of her suspension she can reflect and evaluate her future decision-making before returning to the university.”
If the intent of my two-semester suspension is truly “reflection,” it should be noted that I have spent countless hours in reflection from the moment I was evicted from campus. From March 26 until April 8, I was not permitted to be on campus for any reason. From April 8 until May 1, I could step foot on campus only to attend classes. In between classes, I spent hours roaming public sidewalks. I did class readings on park benches. At 18 years old, I was stranded in a city quite foreign to me. Unhoused and without reliable transportation, I went wherever I was welcomed. It was through the generosity of strangers that I could sleep in beds instead of on the streets. In one month, I stayed in four apartments around the city, two of which were in East Nashville and required a daily 30-minute commute to Vanderbilt. With limited access to food and unable to use the university meal plan I’d paid for, I fell ill several times and grew increasingly fatigued each day.
Upon returning home, I was hospitalized for a week. The doctors diagnosed me with late-onset type 1 diabetes and informed me that I was in a state of diabetic ketoacidosis and had been so for over a month. I was told I was lucky to be alive. For five weeks, I’d been under a constant state of duress, fatigue and pain. If this was not punishment enough to warrant reflection, I do not know what would be.
As my peers settle into another year at Vanderbilt, I continue to sit in reflection in my childhood home. Surrounding me are the memories and traditions of Palestine. Tatreez hangs from the walls, my parents prepare Maqluba, I make tea with fresh mint from the garden. In my reflection, I’ve reached multiple conclusions. Perhaps my removal from campus intends to quell the Palestinian resistance movement at Vanderbilt; perhaps it is to dissipate the Palestinian resistance which lies inside me; perhaps there is no logic, no sensibility. Though it should be known, as we see from Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora, no amount of cruelty, abandonment or exile will ever be enough to drown Falasteen.
The removal of myself and others from campus must not be mistaken for the dissipation of the Palestinian resistance movement at Vanderbilt — just as the exile and slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza must not be mistaken for the dissipation of Palestinian culture, memory and resistance. The steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their resistance movement will outlive us all. In the immortal words of Ghassan Kanafani, “You might have heard news through the imperialist propaganda system that the Palestinian people are currently exhausted, that they have given up the struggle and that they are defeated by the reactionary Israel. Comrades, do not believe them. There is no end to our struggle.”
Mine is yet another story of our society’s attempts to erase the Palestinian people and their resistance movement, though we see this erasure everywhere. Growing up, the Red Cliff Reservation was just a short walk up the hill from my maternal grandparents’ house on Lake Superior, known in Ojibwe as the Gichigami. At my paternal grandparents’ home in Amman, Jordan, I’d stare at the Dead Sea (البحر الميت), thinking of the Palestinians living under siege on their own sea. The different names for these bodies of water, serve as physical reminders of peoples colonized, stripped of their right to care for and love the land they had grown from. Yet despite these brutal attempts at erasure, indigenous peoples persist. Likewise, arrests, suspensions and expulsions of students who refuse to study during times of unspeakable injustice will not erase our movement.
Vanderbilt and the people who uphold its ivory tower — in silence, obediently and without question — have failed to dissipate the Palestinian resistance movement on their campus. They have failed firstly because my suspension will never kill my right and willingness to not sit idly by while my cousins are killed, while children starve and mothers weep. Further, they have failed because the removal of four students from campus will never remove the Palestinian resistance that lives on in the veins of so many students who continue to study on Vanderbilt’s campus. For as long as there is life and as long as there is breath, there will be Palestine, and we will return.
