Freedom of Association

Itamar Francez

In the days leading to the shutting down of the encampment, in discussions and debates among faculty, some colleagues expressed the view that the encampment should be shut down, offering the familiar narrative of disruption. They argued that the encampment made it difficult to work, teach, and learn on campus. Among the many things said in that debate, one stood out to me. The view was expressed (I’m paraphrasing, somewhat, as the comments were not made in a public forum) that the encampment made it insufferable for those of us with family in Israel and those who love Israel with its complexities and flaws.

In a discourse that, for various problematic reasons, has been largely framed around Jews, this angle was different. It did not mobilize Jewishness, an abstract category of personal and collective identity, but rather a concrete category of real, living human relationality, of care. People who have people they care about in Israel, this view implied, find the encampment particularly insufferable. As I am a person who has people I care about in Israel, this implication overwhelmed my aversion to public discourse, and I felt compelled to respond to it. This is an expanded version of the response I shared with my colleagues.

I am Israeli. I grew up there and lived there until my mid-twenties. I “served”—that is, was forcefully conscripted—into the Israeli military when I was eighteen. My entire family lives there as do some of my life-long friends, academic mentors, and intellectual interlocutors. There are many things about that place—not the state but the place and the people living in it—that I love very dearly and miss very intensely (Who can love a state? What does that even mean?).

It is as an Israeli who cares deeply about that place, and not so much as a Jew, that I had found the encampment, and the activism that preceded it, a much-needed source of solace in the aftermath of the awful October 7^th attacks. With all the unbearable noise that surrounds this unbearable war, from Hamas-supporting hipsters on Instagram to Israel-supporting antisemites, it was on campus and at the encampment that I could come together with other people in the UChicago community whose lives are deeply and painfully intertwined with this violence, who have people they care about and things that they love and miss intensely that are destroyed by it, and who urgently, achingly want and need it to stop.

When the public discourse in the US and in Israel is framed around “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli”, it is important to remember the fallacy of the presupposition of this framing. Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinians living, for generations, under brutal Israeli military occupation and apartheid, are all in this together. It is us and our families who have been meeting and inflicting violent death, in indiscriminate massive bombing, terrorist raids by Messianic settlers and Islamist militants, suicide bombings, rocket fire, gruesome lynching, kidnapping, and now also starvation and disease, all consequences of the ethnonationalism, religious zealotry, racism, greed, and corrupt governance that both fuel and grow out of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And it is us who desperately need and want to talk to each other, mourn together, worry together, and insist that we can, must, and want to live together differently. That is what the UChicago encampment has been about for some of us Israelis.

There is nothing about being Israeli, being a person who has people they care about living there, that entails finding an encampment protesting the occupation and the barbaric war on Gaza “insufferable.” It is the burning of families in their homes and the burying of thousands of children under rubble, not anti-Israeli demonstrations, that are insufferable for many of us. Israelis, Jews and Palestinians, have been insisting for decades on protesting together the myriad forms of collective punishment, the criminal reign of terror by contemptuous, Jewish-supremacist settlers, the land theft, the constant attacks on all forms of civil society, the dehumanization and total disregard for human dignity and life that are the reality of occupation and which breed these outbursts of atrocious, illegitimate violence.  

“Loving Israel” is not and has never been the monopoly of Zionists and nationalists. In the sense of having a real, and hence nuanced, complicated, ambivalent relation to the space between the river and the sea with its variety of inhabitants, in the sense of caring about them, about their rich, painful personal histories and the cultures they have created, loving Israel is simply our lot, the natural state of being of those of us who happen to live there or to be in exile from there, some by privileged choice, like me, others because of the total devastation of Palestinian society in the 1948 Nakba.

There are Israeli Palestinians, Israeli Jews, and Palestinians living under military occupation who have been fighting for decades together to create spaces where the kinds of association that were possible at the encampment would be possible in Palestine/Israel and to try to create an alternative to the racist, violent, and increasingly fascist state that Israel has become. One of the suffocating ironies of indiscriminate violence is that a disproportionate number of those brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7^th were activists of the already vulnerable Israeli peace camp.

I was not an organizer or even a particularly active participant of the encampment. I tried to have my lunches there during the week, I went to some of the teach-ins and rallies, sent photos of the Yiddish signs to my family in Israel who, like everyone, are fed radically distorted narratives about what is going on at  American campuses. Mostly I talked to colleagues and students who, like me, wanted a space where Arabs and Jews can find solidarity—not just human empathy but a political solidarity for which human empathy is the basis. Was I always comfortable in that space? Of course not. The encampment was big, it had all sorts of people and voices, all sorts of slogans. Some I found silly, some I found callous, shaped by abstract, broad frameworks that too easily romanticize or gloss over illegitimate forms of violence, rather than by the nuances that make up the lived realities of people who have been, unequally, living together and killing each other for more than a century, carrying different collective and personal traumas of racial violence, displacement, the destruction of families and entire communities. I didn’t like or agree with every single slogan I saw and heard, but that’s fine, such are slogans and such is the public sphere.

These kinds of spaces are hard won in Israel, a state which never liked them and has for a long time been doing whatever it can to deter and prevent their creation. These are not spaces where we say, “people are people, can’t we all just get along”. That is not what a state like Israel, or a school like the University of Chicago, cares to shut down. These are spaces for protest, for rejection of the status quo, for imagining institutions and pushing ideologies that prioritize people over institutions and ideologies. They are spaces for asking, to quote my Palestinian Israeli colleague Khaled Furani: “Is it our lives – the lives of its citizens – that matter to the state, or its own?” I came to the encampment for the people who, like me and like him, know that the answer must be, but isn’t, “our lives.” Shutting down (or rather, trampling and trashing) the encampment was also shutting down one more space for us.  

Rima Jawabra Khatib and Guy Elhanan hosting the  2024 joint memorial day ceremony, organized by Combatants for Peace

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 Itamar Francez is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.