A New world is coming: the Gaza solidarity encampments are part of that collective imagination

As we witness the rise of student encampments flourishing across universities in the US and now beyond the US, at CAR we are reminded of the lyrics of Bernice Johnson Reagon song “ A new world is coming”.

We are so grateful for these pockets of resistance, of hope, of joy as we continue to drown in the waves of our grief for every single Palestinian life lost, over 34,300 thus far. Furthermore, as a community of healers , health workers and organizers we are absolutely horrified by the uncovering of mass graves in the hospital grounds of Al-Nasser Medical Complex and Al-Shifa Medical Complex. Spaces that were meant for refuge and healing rapidly converted to spaces of mass executions.

At CAR with our global letters of liberation to Palestine and work on the Right of Return , we have continued with a steadfast commitment to the liberation of Palestine. We are grounded in Palestine as a land which is pushing us now more than ever to build in real time the new world we dream of. We know that this new world begins with the emancipation of our minds as Franz Fanon teaches us, “What matters is not to know the world but to change it.” Universities need to be spaces that facilitate the emancipation of our minds and build collective resistance to stop settler colonial violence, the students are practicing this right now.

The wounds of white supremacist ideology in our universities are deep, with many of us responding to these open wounds daily in our communities. Through the demands of divestment from the genocide in Palestine, we are moving in a way that no longer places a bandage over the wound but requires an examination of the wound and shared struggle to heal. The basic prescription right now is to take back education as a tool for liberation and to honor the ancestral lineage of similar student protests that have moved our world towards repairing rather than deepening wounds.

The time has come to return our universities to spaces for building the world that we want. We want education to be the motor of our movements, driving forward the consciousness shifts we need to later build power and organize collectively for our liberation.Instead, what is happening currently, is that we have to build parallel movement spaces to our universities which allow us to unlearn the violence of systems of oppression including, the medical, military and prison industrial complex and of course settler colonialism.

We end this statement by quoting another resistance song that comes to mind at this moment, a song by the union organizer Florence Reece Which Side are you on ? From CAR we ask that you choose the side of liberation, that you step into the light that the student encampments are bringing and continue towards our north star of a liberated Palestine.