To breathe so as not to shiver

In 2024, Zakia Maseels participated in the student protests against the collaborations of the University of Leuven with Israeli universities. He reflects on the diverging dynamics, needs, and ambiguities of an encampment. As a symbol of hope and democracy, it also shows the difficulties that a grassroots initiative encounters.

It starts off as a jump. Students in the US and UK have occupied university buildings in protest against an unfolding genocide in Gaza (in May 2024 the word still signaled activist leanings). Their governments and universities are complicit, via military support, financial backing, trade links, research collaborations and ideological covers of various sorts. In Belgium, students at the University of Ghent just established their encampment, Brussels had plans to do the same. In Leuven, the country’s most traditional university with a largely depoliticized student population, it was uncertain whether enough people would show up to make it happen. A group of students and staff had organized stubbornly around the issue but attracted only moderate support. ‘We’ll organize by the weekend,’ they said, ‘occupy the building a few days later. If it ends by nightfall we can at least say that we tried.’

Almost four months later, Shaimaa College – named after the daughter of the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, both of whom were killed in an Israeli airstrike – was evacuated after a court order established the unlawful occupation of the premises. In between, the encampment served as a political, cultural and pedagogical hotspot for the solidarity movement with Palestine. Just as a lit match radiates a bright light whose colors blend indistinctly, it is difficult to grasp what actually happened during this period. What is extraordinary only registers as a vague comprehension in the moment itself, as the mind quickly adjusts to new normalities: daily meetings, communal kitchens, life in tents, discussions with witnesses, poets, politicians and weathered activists, research initiatives that feel more like detective work than anything else. After it transpired, and only then, is one obliged to explain to oneself what was radically new during those months.

The encampment made solidarities emerge that the anonymity of regular life usually keeps below the surface.

In the first instance, an encampment is a strategic tool, an instrument to wield against one’s opponents. It serves as a permanent eye sore for a university system that tries to hide its political allegiances under the banner of ‘neutrality’, unwilling to admit that its practical collaborations with Israeli universities implicate it in the unfolding atrocity. Disruptions of university life were minimal so as not to give juridical grounds for expulsion. Instead, the encampment worked as a machine of amplification. It attracted the attention of supporters and sceptics alike, who often felt themselves compelled to formulate an opinion. Some pensioned passersby pressed that it was important to see that ‘there are two sides to each conflict.’ Others were disappointed by the temerity of the movement, reminiscing of the good old days when cobblestones would regularly fly across pavements.

The encampment also made solidarities emerge that the anonymity of regular life usually keeps below the surface. A pizzeria delivered free pizzas to student protesters that were posted outside, a nearby coffee store allowed material to be stored overnight and a print shop offered its services free of charge. Solidarity often passes through the stomach, as families from various backgrounds prepared dishes that filled the stomachs of those camped inside. The struggle against occupation and genocide practices multiculturalism actively, and when words sometimes fail to translate, spices do not.

I once gave a ride to a Palestinian father and son who lived half an hour’s drive from the city. They stayed in a social housing unit on insecure visas and had prepared hummus-filled wraps for the encampment. As we approached Leuven the father said we had already crossed half the length of the Gaza strip. Over 2 million inhabitants, they had stopped counting the dead.

An encampment becomes a hub for organizing.

An encampment becomes a hub for organizing. Once started, one cannot contain the various colors and shapes that enter it, as people see the unique opportunities it affords. Different motivations surface. Some couldn’t bear silently watching the news for one extra day. Others saw the encampment as a moment in a longer struggle for liberation, with the potential for it to spill over onto society at large. Still others viewed it as an end in itself, a moment of direct democracy that glimpsed another way of living entirely.

This creates tensions which usually doom an initiative in the long run. In the short to middle term, however, their sheer number creates an energy that multiplies any previous effort. Protest marches are organized simultaneously with sit-ins. While some address the media, others do investigative work behind the scenes. Every day, this activist octopus reaches out to new spaces, to discuss progress made, roadblocks encountered and new paths to explore. An encampment speeds up time: an action that is sometimes prepared over months becomes achievable within a few days.

The encampment doesn’t only look outside, but also inwards. Its first imperative is its own survival: how do we keep this initiative going beyond today, tomorrow, the next week or month? The most mundane questions become the most pressing. People that occupy a building must have adequate sleeping equipment, need to be fed, have access to clean sanitation. Curfews must be imposed so as to guarantee a minimum of sleeping comfort. Dishes must be washed two, three times a day. Someone has to steward at the entrance night and day to prevent unwanted visitors.

The encampment, in other words, brings its own social reproduction out in the open. It reminds of all the experiments that have attempted to break with the privatization of reproduction by the family unit: from Plato’s utopia of collective child rearing, feminist projects of communal laundering and cleaning services, or the Argentinian community ‘soup kitchens’ that sprung up during the period of hyperinflation. The encampment breaks with the privatization of care. It doesn’t hide the conditions that allow activists to take to the streets (the encampment is the condition), but shows them as connected with each other because of their shared needs.

The encampment breaks with the privatization of care.

When the encampment takes charge of its own social reproduction, it effectively establishes equality as the baseline that guides its activities. When you start from scratch (an encampment always starts from scratch in a certain way), it becomes difficult to justify why some should have to clean the toilets while others don’t. Certainly, some can more often scrub the floors and others occupy themselves with stewarding. And it stands to reason that frictions play up because some feel like others are avoiding their tasks. But any inequality must be justified, and if it can’t be reasonably defended it will be instantly reversed. By reassembling the boundary between public and private, and making equality its guiding principle, the encampment provided a vivid example of the democratization of everyday life.

People enter a struggle as entire individuals. More than other political forms, the encampment emphasizes the need for emotional and affective sustenance. If the joys are shared, so must be the sorrows. From the perspective of the struggle, this entails a much stronger emphasis on the shared, lived experience of the participants. The poetry recited in multiple languages, the open mics, the testimonies of hurt and persecution, even the meetings on political strategy and perseverance: our needs are as much affective as they are material, as much social and cultural as they are biological.

If the encampment provides inspiration, it is mostly because it opens up an awareness of the range of experiences contained in ourselves. Next to its functions of amplification, strategy and social reproduction, it also served as a pedagogical or a civic center. In the first instance, the books, lectures, meetings and discussions play an indispensable role in increasing our knowledge. Going beyond moral outrage, one must study what and who we are fighting, how it operates, what its weak points are, our own strengths and weaknesses and the tools at hand. Beyond this, it teaches us what we are (and sometimes aren’t) capable of becoming. There is an essential plasticity to ourselves, a capacity of transforming ourselves beyond who we are now. This is not a task performed individually, but happens through our encounters with others. ‘I am who I become with others in struggle.’ This might be an appropriate motto for the encampment.

Internal strife among participants is unavoidable, as are diverging agendas. Meetings that dragged for hours over minor issues were common.

Political activity teaches that struggle from below ennobles. Protesters acquire clarity of voice, and strength in their backs, because they stand for something, and against something else. Lines are drawn and boundaries refused to be crossed. There is an honesty of conviction here that smart-talkers and cynical calculators are unable to efface. Such clarity does not contradict strategic calculation. On the contrary, protesters adapt their strategies based on the context, audience and available means.

This clear-headedness also allows us to say how the protest has fallen short. No amount of signs and chants has prevented a genocide from taking place. Universities have been pressured, but never wilted. Internal strife among participants is unavoidable, as are diverging agendas. Meetings that dragged for hours over minor issues were common. This shouldn’t surprise us. In politics – as in personal relationships – grand schisms most often express themselves through the seemingly insignificant. And while the student movement faced issues similar to other horizontalist grassroots initiatives such as Occupy, one shouldn’t assimilate them too easily. Strategic calculation was commonplace, with short-term gains often weighed against long-term goals.

Chances were missed during these hectic months, such as forging stronger alliances with unions, civil society organizations and cultural institutions. But we could also see it inversely: that others missed the chances that were opened up by the encampment. Be that as it may, over the span of a few spring and summer months the encampment stood as a symbol of hope and solidarity in increasingly cruel times. It showed that strategy and justice are not opposites; that one can move forward in the knowledge of one’s own ambiguities; that strength and vulnerability go hand in hand; that you can let yourself be affected by others without losing who you are. It also showed how to judge the opinions of those who have never risked themselves. Approach with caution those who speak of equality, tolerance and freedom when they have never swept the corners of a space so that smaller intruders would stay away, when they have never shoved their hands in rubber gloves to clean sanitation, when they have never spoken up without listening first.

Hope often only shows itself sparsely to retreat beneath the surface. I imagine that it stays there, brewing, waiting for its opportunity to burst out again.

Zakia Masseels is an alias. The real name is known to the editors.