The UCSD Gaza Solidarity Encampment can be understood within three contexts: the settler colonial university, the legacy of student protest on campus and the Palestine Exception to Free Speech. In this section, we examine each context in detail before reflecting on the aftermath of the Encampment.
The Settler-Colonial University
San Diego shares a settler colonial foundation with universities in Israel. UCSD was built upon the Land of the Kumeyaay village Ystagua, which was ethnically cleansed by a succession of military bases, following which the Land was given to the state. 14 In much the same way, Hebrew University in occupied East Jerusalem was in part built upon stolen Land from the Palestinian village of Isawiya 15, and Tel Aviv University was built upon the Palestinian village Sheikh Muwannis, which was ethnically cleansed in the Nakba during March 1948. [16 Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University host military troops and institutes, and conduct research and engage in education that support the genocide in Gaza, and the occupation of and apartheid in Palestine, from the River to the Sea. 17a UCSD conducts military research that benefits the hardware and the technology that supports genocide in Gaza. 9 UC invests in companies that provide critical support for the genocide. 10These disturbing parallels make research, education and community engagement regarding Palestine of central importance to each and every person at UCSD - students, staff, faculty and administrators.
Israeli Universities and their counterparts in the US provided the material and discursive support to the occupation military to destroy every university in Gaza and murder or imprison many beloved Palestinian professors 17b, 18, 19, including Distinguished Professor Sufian Tayeh, materials physicist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza, murdered with his family on December 3, 2023 20, and Khitam al-Wasifi, department chair at The Islamic University of Gaza, biophysicist and powerful advocate for women in physics, murdered with her husband also in December 2023. 21
The History of Protest on Campus
The UCSD Gaza Solidarity Encampment also occurred in the context of a rich history of protest and encampments over the course of UCSD’s history. Out of numerous examples, these five cases illustrate the central importance of protests to UCSD’s evolution as a university, even those protests that contravened university policies and state and municipal statutes.
1) In Spring quarter of 1985, students at UCSD constructed a Shantytown on Revelle Plaza, which at the time was an important center of campus life, to visually illustrate the conditions under which Black People in South Africa were forced to live under apartheid. They occupied, completely took over and slept in the Humanities Library in Galbraith Hall for over a month. At no point did the university send in hundreds of police in riot gear to remove students. Instead, UCSD and UC administration learned from the student movement and the following year divested from companies doing business with and within South Africa. Both Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, leaders of the movement against apartheid within South Africa, acknowledged the central role of U.S. student movements in ending apartheid in South Africa, a fact that the UCs now use in promoting themselves. 22, 23, 24, 25
2) Starting in the 1970s, Women on the UCSD campus were organizing and advocating for a Women’s Center (the Women’s Resource Center student organization) – in response to the prevalence of misogyny on campus and the need for dedicated services and support. In the early 1990s, UCSD was the only UC campus without a Women’s Center. So in 1992, Women students and their allies constructed a Women’s Center, in the form of an Encampment, on Sun Goddess Lawn that operated for a week, providing services to Women and serving as a source of information to all about misogyny on campus. They were modeling what a Women’s Center would look like. No arrests were made and no police in riot gear invaded the campus. Following the Encampment, senior administration began to seriously consider proposals for a Women’s Center. Plans were approved in 1995 and the Women’s Resource Center opened in its current location in 1996. 26, 27, 28
3) In February of 2010 – Black History Month – a UCSD fraternity held an anti-Black, racist frat party, which the fraternity called the Compton Cookout, where they invited attendees to dress up as racist stereotypes of people who lived in Compton. The party was followed by numerous racist incidents in the coming weeks that echoed the terror of the Jim Crow era, including using the N word on UCSD-TV, placing a kkk hood on the Geisel statue and hanging a noose in Geisel Library. Black and Brown students at UCSD organized almost daily rallies, they blocked Library Walk completely numerous times, they occupied the chancellor’s office, which used to be located just off of Library Walk, for a day. They occupied the Price Center West courtyard for a morning and the Price Center East steps for an afternoon. No detentions occurred, no police in riot gear were called and no disciplinary investigations were initiated. In fact, the senior administration – Chancellor, Vice Chancellors, Provosts and Divisional Deans – held extended meetings with representatives of the Black Student Union and MEChA. The senior administration agreed to a set of demands made by the Black Student Union, These demands included requiring a DEI course for all undergraduates, creating the Black, Raza and Intertribal Resource Centers, creating the position of Vice Chancellor for EDI and returning the Kumeyaay remains. In summary, the campus significantly changed for the better as a result of student organizing and the responsiveness of the senior administration to that organizing. 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35
4) In response to continuing inequality and sexual harassment of Women at UCSD, in 2015 students organized a Free the Nipple protest in which dozens of Women and Men, both cis and trans, bared their breasts on the Price Center lawn adjacent to Library Walk, located across from the site of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 36, 37 The students visually created an explicit picture of what equality looks like. That protest connected with forerunners of the MeToo movement and Trans Advocacy on campus. No arrests were made, no disciplinary investigations were conducted. As ABC 10 News put it at the time “Typically, nudity in public spaces violates San Diego municipal codes and the UCSD student code of conduct, but the school told 10News they support the students and their First Amendment rights.” 38
5) During the UAW graduate student strike of 2022, student organizers created a two-week tent Encampment in Muir Quad. It visually illustrated the impact of substandard wages on graduate students, many of whom were not able to afford a place to live. The Encampment, which the students called Khoslaville, was not raided, it was not violently dismantled and students there were not detained nor subject to disciplinary procedures. One result of the strike was a better approximation to a living wage for graduate student workers at UCSD and all the UCs. 39
Many more examples could be cited, but in these five cases students connected injustices with global impact to actions that could be taken on the UCSD campus. The senior administration met with, listened to and/or learned from student organizing, and UCSD became a more open, a more welcoming and a better campus because of student organizing.
The Palestine Exception to Free Speech
The Encampment also occurred in the context of repression of expressive activity regarding the genocide and occupation of Palestine, and repression of discussion of the violence of the genocide and occupation in classrooms during the period October 2023 – April 2024. This repression was facilitated through messaging sent out from official channels. Numerous students who were organizing protests were ensnared in student misconduct processes.
![Figure 1: March 6 March and Rally for Gaza. Image credit: Cydney Macon/The Triton [40]](/sites/default/files/2026-08/figure01-v1p0_0.jpg)
Despite the repression, students organized a number of rallies and marches, including one on March 6, 2024 with more than 2500 students, staff and faculty -- one of UCSD's largest protests. 40 Faculty who discussed the genocide or the history of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in class were unjustifiably put under investigation for anti-semetic hate speech. These actions by senior administration created a situation where students, faculty and staff felt there was no safe place to discuss the genocide. This repression of speech about the genocide and Palestine was one of the motivations for establishing the Encampment at UCSD.
Free speech is not fundamentally a legal construct, it is grounded in struggle and practice in the streets. An illustration of this distinction can be found in the Free Speech fights in San Diego in 1910-12, where members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union set up literal soapboxes on street corners and attempted to speak from there, enacting the ability to speak in public locations that were conducive to collective organizing. Police responded by beating and spraying workers with firehoses and arresting them. Vigilantes, tolerated and encouraged by the authorities, kidnapped prominent organizers and literally covered them with hot tar and rolled them in feathers. 41 The vigilante attack on the UCLA Encampment on April 30, 2024, where security and police stood back and allowed the violent assault to occur for four hours, and the violent dismantlement of the UCLA Encampment the following day recall the police-vigilante collaboration in suppressing speech in San Diego in the early twentieth century. 42, 43
Scholars and legal experts refer to the repression of speech about Palestine as the Palestine Exception to Free Speech. 44 This repression is rooted in anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. 45, 46, 47, 48
Aftermath
In the early morning hours of May 6, 2024, as birds in the eucalyptus trees were singing and students were sleeping, and as the Israeli Occupation Forces were beginning a genocidal ground attack on Rafah, a force of over 200 police dressed in riot gear invaded the UCSD campus, violently dismantling the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and arresting 64 students, faculty and community members. 49 This assault on our campus, ordered by Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, caused physical and psychological trauma that echoes to this day. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) declared UCSD to be a hostile campus for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students 50, 51. To quote from the analysis of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC San Diego:
When you unleashed a heavily armed police presence on our campus, you send a clear message: dissent is not welcome here. You criminalized our peaceful assembly, characterizing students who sought to raise awareness of an ongoing genocide as threats to be subdued. The brutal tactics you employed that day – batons, pepper spray, snipers and threats – were not just violations of our rights, they were a betrayal of the university’s foundational values of free expression and intellectual inquiry... 52
Almost exactly two years later, UCSD’s role in suppressing speech about the genocide and its hostility to Islam contributed to an elite-validated climate in San Diego that enabled the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego on May 18, 2026, in which three valued members were murdered. Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad prevented the attackers from getting to school children and Center personnel that horrible morning. 53 Graduate student in Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies Muhammad Yousef summed up these dangerous connections between racism and violence, in this context, writing in the UCSD Guardian:
“The murders of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad were neither unavoidable tragedies nor mere accidents but the direct result of hegemonic social structures and cultural representations which position Muslims as simultaneously violent and killable. Former drone engineer and current Chancellor Pradeep Khosla decried the shooting as “senseless.” But is it? Islamophobic violence is not beyond comprehension — it operates by its own logic and produces its own common sense, propelled by discrete material forces. So, to me, nothing about this latest tragedy is “senseless.”” 54
At the vigil honoring the martyrs on May 20, Omar Abusham of CAIR San Diego spoke of the need for accountability at UCSD, that the foundation for events like the violent attack on the Islamic Center is anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Arab racism, which UCSD senior administration and others such as the mayor of San Diego have fostered since October 2023:
"Concerns of the MSA [Muslim Student Association] have not been addressed on multiple occasions; I know that there was an Islamophobic display that was on campus only last week. These words are not just words, and we saw that on Monday. These words turned into action and this action led to the killing of three amazing individuals.” 55
When will Chancellor Khosla and the senior administration be held accountable for refusing to meet with the MSA during the 2024-2024 academic year? 56 The senior administration and the UC Regents have insisted that students and faculty arrested at UC Encampments be held accountable through seemingly endless disciplinary processes. When will Chancellor Khosla and the senior administration responsible for implementing the Palestine Exception at UCSD be held accountable for their actions? For their material and discursive support for genocide? For their suppression of speech about Palestine and the genocide? For their violent reaction to the UCSD Gaza Solidarity Encampment - an entirely peaceful protest well within the tradition of protest at UCSD? For their unlawful use of university funds to pursue their political agenda and the agendas of their donors and political allies? For their despicable contribution to the hateful environment that produced the Islamic Center of San Diego shooting and will produce further racist violence that is sure to occur in the future?
Return to Introduction ||| Advance to Methods
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- 32
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