CW: Police Brutality, Genocide.

December 7th, over a hundred students gathered in Gerberding Hall to protest the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine as a whole, and the UW’s staunch support of an authoritarian apartheid state. Students flooded into the building with flags, keffiyehs, and a list of demands for UW president Ana Mari Cauce: including material divestment from Israel, an end to the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campus, and cutting ties with war profiteer Boeing. Over the past two months, a low estimate of nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been massacred in a drastic acceleration of Israel’s 75-year ethnic cleansing campaign. As the IDF targets schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps under the flimsy pretext of “eliminating Hamas,” Zionists continue to argue that these tens of thousands of martyrs are justified collateral damage.

In a whirlwind of irony, those who speak out against state terrorism are labeled terrorists, and those most liberal with accusations of antisemitism are the least disturbed by police manhandling Jewish protestors. Drawing inspiration from the 1968 Black Student Union occupation of Gerberding Hall, the newly-formed United Front for the Liberation of Palestine UW planned a sit-in to demand a meeting with President Cauce. 

After entering the building, the crowd quickly took the third floor and began to repurpose office supplies to spread their message. They occupied Gerberding for over ten hours, talking, chanting, sharing food, and celebrating Palestinian culture with music and dabke. Together they created a space where basic needs could be met and community could be built. Their work created a culture of community care and abundance, if only for a short moment, without asking permission from the oppressive system of higher education.

The university responded to this peaceful protest by sending in UWPD and SPD to forcibly remove protestors from the space.

Early on, UWPD Chief Craig Wilson attempted to remove a student sitting in an office chair, for no apparent reason other than, ‘I want that chair. It’s a special chair.’ He failed. This was seen as an early win, and deterred UWPD from taking further action until much later.

After Five, police repression escalated. As the sound of the crowd chanting outside echoed through the hall, the protestors sat in a circle and were dragged out one by one. Students’ arms and wrists were twisted behind their backs at unnatural angles in a gross display of violence from the state and from their own university. Police picked people off, isolated them, and pulled their masks down to photograph their faces, targeting Black and Brown students first and most aggressively. This continued for nearly four hours. President Cauce could have stopped this violence at any time by simply agreeing to a meeting, but instead, she opted for her own students to be dragged out of her ivory tower. 

Outside, SPD forces kept arriving, standing around in full gear to intimidate peaceful protestors instead of investigating the unrelated shooting that had just happened on the Ave.

At the same time, right-wing reactionary media and neoliberal news outlets combined their efforts to film and intimidate protestors outside of Gerberding hall. Internet fascist personalities streamed footage of peaceful protestors, calling on the university to punish student demonstrators with expulsion. A Daily reporter in a full business suit showed up to participate in #DestroyTheDailyDecember by being impossible to take seriously. The Daily and the rest of the corporate media continue to spout Zionist propaganda with impunity. 

At the end of the night, all protesters were released and allowed to return home. UWPD and SPD expended exorbitant amounts of resources, sending over 30 officers from SPD and a significant amount of the UWPD staff. Despite heavy police repression, students came together and created something beautiful in the name of resistance. In closing, a speaker told the crowd that this occupation marked a ‘pivotal point for solidarity organizing in the US,’ citing that people nationwide will see what happened in Seattle and build upon it. For us here at UW, the day Palestinian flags flew atop Gerberding hall will not be soon forgotten.