What follows is an interview conducted on 9 May 2024 with Ernesto Huerta, from Students for Socialism, about the student encampment on the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Ernesto spoke with Hugo M. from Red Ant.

The Gaza solidarity encampment at UCLA

How involved were you with the encampment at UCLA?

I was there basically every day. So the encampment lasted for about seven days. I was there day one and I think I spent five nights there; there were one or two nights where I didn’t sleep in the encampment but spent the entire day there. I was there with our group, Students for Socialism, and helped out wherever I could. Everyone else in Students for Socialism were able to do a lot of things in the encampment, help out with all the different logistics, whether it be like security, or even just participating in all the little political discussions that were going on. We ran our own little mini book club during the encampment. Whenever the attacks came – and there were basically attacks every single day (the one that got the most attention was obviously the most severe but things had been escalating and there had been Zionist aggression from day one) – we all participated in the defence of the encampment.

I want to ask you about the organisation within the encampment. From afar, it seemed like it was quite well organised. For example, I had seen a TikTok of a woman crying because people were rejecting her requests for an interview. So, did people take pride in how well it was running when it was running?

There was pride that it lasted for so long, and that it was basically well kept. I mean obviously it could always be better, it could always be more organised. But it did the job and that was the most important thing, especially if you compare the UCLA encampment to USC [University of Southern California], for example, which is the other major university in Los Angeles. It’s like UCLA, USC: that’s the big rivalry, right? And USC was immediately supressed on day one. The encampment was basically torn down and they had to bring it back a few days later. But that was definitely not as organised and as large as UCLA. At UCLA, it started on the first day, with 50 tents already up, 50 people basically, with their own barricades, own security system, own logistics, whether it be like a medic tent, or food and a kitchen, all that stuff had already been planned in advance. By the end of day one the camp had … I wouldn’t say it doubled in size, but it grew significantly, almost doubled in size. By the end of the day people had to move the barricades and expand the perimeter of the encampment. And that was done in an organised fashion. So I would say there was a good level of organisation at the UCLA encampment, in particular in the beginning, when it had the most amount of steam. I think that’s also why it was able to stay as long as it did and defend itself.

How involved would you say was the wider Los Angeles community in the camp at UCLA?

That’s a good question. Not that involved. That’s one of the problems, especially in the very beginning of the encampment, it was a little… obviously it’s going to be student centred, that’s fine, like that’s the encampment, that’s the whole purpose, but there’s a limit to how much power the students actually have. A lot of the power that the encampments have around the country is the power of the public opinion, and the power of all the other people in the city coming to your support. If you act in a way that continues to gain and rejuvenate that public support and that sympathy, not just in terms of passively people agreeing with the encampment, but if you transform that passivity into people coming out every day to help defend the encampment and help offer bodies in whatever way they can… That switch didn’t really happen until the very end – that calling upon the rest of the city to say that this is public property, all people have the right to protest here and occupy space here, every person in California has the right, and not just a legal right but a moral obligation to come and help out the students and defend the encampment. That really only happened after the Zionist attack. And that was only for a day because the Zionist attack happened on 30 April and the morning of 1 May. Then the camp was swept at the end of 1 May or very early morning 2 May – at 1am. It was all within 48 hours where that transition happened. Some people in Los Angeles would come to the encampment, especially during the weekends, with their family. But there wasn’t an organised effort to call upon the people of Los Angeles to stand with us until after the Zionist attack on 30 April.

I saw someone online, I think his Twitter profile said something about being an IDF veteran, and his tweet was that he had infiltrated the encampment. So, I’m wondering what the process was for actually letting people in, because I know it was fenced off.

The encampment had different security protocols that changed over time. There were wooden barricades, nothing super strong, around the encampment. Originally people could just come in and out, and they would just have to sign in, give some information. As the attacks escalated, it became harder for ordinary people to come in. People had to be either vouched for or… I can’t remember at the end what was the decision around the system. The encampment didn’t have necessarily the right orientation towards security in that aspect. In the end, all the restrictions on people getting in and coming out felt a little redundant, because as you said, whatever we did Zionists still got through. If a Zionist wanted to come in, they would come in, they would find a way. Having these very high-bar requirements for people to enter ended up making the encampment lose a bit of its mass character. It became harder for new people to join the encampment. And it just kind of became the same old faces when the encampment needed to grow and be welcoming to all the students who weren’t already involved and to the rest of the city. And that definitely had some big effects, that orientation towards security, especially in the moment of the Zionist attack.

The attacks

I saw People’s City Council LA describe this Zionist attack as a “battle”. This was the attack before the night when the police shut down the camp. How would you describe that?

A battle is definitely the correct assessment. I think a battle is what it ended up being, but it began as a coordinated fascist assault on the encampment. A lot of the mainstream media calls it a ‘clash’ between protestors. But it was an attack against us. We weren’t doing anything at that time. Let me give you some context.

Unlike the other private universities, or even the other public universities, UCLA’s response to the encampment was not to immediately suppress us with police. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t want to retaliate against us. They found a way to retaliate against us – almost indirectly, through proxy. And that was by emboldening and empowering the Zionists in West LA. So, from day one, Zionists came to the encampment, got through the barricades, and got into violent scuffles with different people in the encampment. But these were individuals, or small groups of people, and it was all done in the daylight.

The second day, Zionists came very early in the morning, at 4am, with loudspeakers. They played Israeli music all throughout the morning to prevent people from sleeping. And then they came later that day, in the afternoon, doing the exact same thing but with a larger crowd. And that became their favourite tactic for the next couple of days, during the day and the night, 24/7: come with loudspeakers and just torture the students, with Israeli music. At one point they started playing the sounds of crying babies for hours to annoy the students, to prevent them from sleeping and from resting, to prevent different discussions from going on. All this happened at night and it during the day at school time, while classes were in instruction. Classes were right next to these speakers. This happened for multiple days, but the University did nothing, didn’t ask them to turn down their sound. In fact, the University allowed the Zionists to organise an enormous stage with professional loudspeakers right next to the encampment, to play clips and interviews from 7 October and speeches coming out of Israel, to play that through the loudspeakers for 24/7, basically berated the encampment. The University gave them a whole part of Dickson Plaza. The far east side where the stage was set up was the Zionist counter-protest zone. That was the delegated protest zone.

There were many instances of isolated violence, where the Zionists would come into the encampment and attack people. The Zionists left unmarked packages at the encampment in a hoax threat. Or maybe it was a real threat, we don’t know. Zionists packed a bag full of mice and threw it into the encampment. Most of the mice were dead, some of them were alive and escaped. So there were all these different instances of the Zionists just trying to mess with the protestors, annoy them. This was the tactic of the University – allow the Zionists to clear us out so that the University doesn’t have to do it itself and take all the bad press.

This finally escalated to the attack which happened 30 April around 10pm. That day, a little bit earlier, the University had said that the encampment is unlawful, you have to leave, anyone who’s not “affiliated” with the University is going to be subject to serious charges. They issued a declaration of war against the encampment, but they did it privately. They only sent one message; it was a statement to organisers of the encampment. They sent a more public email to the rest of the student body and the faculty. The email was more agitational, in terms of like what the University’s political perspective is, but the private declaration was more like ‘We’re done with you. You’re going to face repercussions if you stay’. It was very much targeted against the encampment leaders. So, it was obvious: the Zionist attacks had been happening for the past few days and the University was basically giving them more justification. Finally, it said on paper that this encampment needs to go and that it will sweep it, basically. So, it gave all the justification that the Zionists needed for that night. Many people in the encampment already expected a big Zionist retaliation against us. But now, now the University had given them the green light to get rid of us. If it wasn’t going to be the police, it would be the Zionists. Somehow the encampment was going to go down.

And that’s exactly what happened. A little after 10pm, as the encampment began to die down, people started to go to sleep or leave to go home. Scores of new Zionists, — they were wearing these hard masks, different types of face coverings, they were all wearing black – started to show up in waves. It became a very large crowd that probably numbered over a hundred at the high point. More than a hundred actually. It was a very, very large crowd. And these people were armed, they had pepper spray, fireworks, I think people had reported seeing different types of knives or switch blades, things like that. And they were very aggressive.

Again: 10pm, people are asleep, people are calm. Nothing’s going on in the encampment. This big, large group of Zionists came organised, looking for a fight, and who started the fight. They start trying to tear the wooden barricades. The University had also set up these metal barricades, kind of like fences almost, I would say they’re about as tall as somebody’s waist or where someone’s belly button is. They’re a little heavy, but they can be moved by individuals. They’re kind of linked together, you see them at concerts, a very typical short metal barricade. But it you were to grab those, like if you had two people holding it and you ram it into another person, it’s a weapon. This is how the whole battle begins: around 10:30 the Zionists start to take down the wooden and metal barricades and decide to steal the metal barricades that had surrounded the perimeter of the encampment. The first altercations occur when the Zionists start to ram people with them. Students try to basically do a tug of war to save the barricades and keep them in place. That’s when Zionists pepper spray people. The students never attacked at all, they were just trying to keep whatever precautions existed there. At the same time the rest of the Zionist mob started to ram other places of the barricade, attack students, pepper spray students through the barricades. A few people went outside the barricades and were just completely beaten up by the Zionists.

That’s basically the course of events: it keeps on repeating for about four to five hours. Except it gets more and more intense. The Zionists move from pepper spray to fireworks; they launch multiple fireworks into the encampment. The fireworks end up hitting different tents and people in the tents, who are taking a moment to breathe because this attack is going on for a while. Multiple people get injured because of those fireworks. People are still injured because of them. And yeah, it’s a big stand-off, a battle as you said, between the Zionists, whose sole aim is to destroy the entire encampment, and the students, whose sole aim is just to keep it up. And the students are incredibly disciplined. Many students don’t even fight back, their main concern is just keeping the barricades strong and holding the line and not letting any of the Zionists come and rampage through the encampment. And during this whole battle, the campus security is watching this all happen. They’re taking pictures. Gene Block, the Chancellor, is watching from Royce Hall, from the second floor, watching it all occur for four to five hours. There are multiple calls made to the police. When they finally come, they stand nearby watching it all happen for about 30 minutes, and then they decide to move in, very slowly, very slowly. Through the course of an hour they disperse the Zionists. So starts around 10pm and officially ends around 4am.

What do you think about UCLA’s proposed investigation into this attack on the encampment?

UCLA hasn’t said much about that investigation, outside of the initial announcement that that’s what’s going to happen, and a couple of words condemning the attack and saying they will look into it. To be honest, I don’t think anything is really going to come from this: no type of accountability is going to come from the University, especially around this incident, unless the people who were directly affected unless the whole Palestinian movement on campus continues to sustain itself and continues to put pressure on the University. The University, its officials, its campus security, its administration, happened to be there the entire night. They were not necessarily in sight all the time, but they were watching this carnage unfold and they’ve admitted that. Gene Block has admitted that. And they basically allowed this to happen. So, do I feel like the University is now going to flip and now hold all these violent Zionists accountable? I really don’t think so. Not unless the students really pressure them to do that. And I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

As a result of the Zionist attack, UAW4811, which is the union which represents graduate student workers, student researchers, teaching assistants, it also now represents post-docs and many other workers – a little over 48 thousand workers — are pushing for a strike authorisation vote across the UC [University of California] system. It’s very likely that the UC will see another strike – there was strike in 2022 by the same union –in retaliation to how the University handled this whole situation, and for the fact they suppressed the encampment the next day. That’s the huge irony, isn’t it? That we were completely violently attacked, basically left for dead that night, and the University’s way of responding is saying ‘We’re going to investigate it, but for now, we’re just going to subject all of you to another round of violence’. So, it was two nights of back-to-back terror when they called the police on us and did a complete sweep – a battle, another battle that lasted about the same time.

So I don’t have faith in the University to conduct a good-faith and legitimate investigation upon these people. The burden falls on the students to bring justice for themselves, to investigate and find out who these people were. They were organised in a way that the previous Zionist attacks weren’t. I am sure that there were many UCLA affiliates there, probably students, who have connections to other organisations, as well as many non-students, who have connections to other organisations as well. Luckily, because we live in the 21^st century, all this stuff is on video. You can go on social media, and you can find many different videos of these people committing acts of violence, terrorising students. While many of them were wearing masks, a lot of them were not. We know the names of many of those people. They had been at the encampment before, terrorising us, and all you need to do is poke around a little bit and you find out some of the people who were involved. The fact that the University hasn’t officially banned these people, whose names we know proves that they’re not going to take this seriously unless we force them to.

You’ve started to mention it, but I want to ask you now specifically about the final night when the police raided the encampment. How did that play out? Was it just a repeat of the previous night, swapping out the aggressor?

During the day of the actual Zionist attack, 30 April, the University had already declared the encampment unlawful, and it was unclear when they were going to sweep. The Zionists came that night and they lasted until the next morning,  of 1 May. During 1 May, the University called the police again. They brought in three different agencies – the LAPD, which is the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff’s department, and the CHP, the [California] Highway Patrol. So they brought in three different agencies, hundreds of police officers in riot gear, completely militarised. They began to line up dozens of their police vehicles at the bottom of Janss Steps. So, the encampment is on top of a hill, in between the famous Royce Hall and Powell Library. In order to get up that hill you have to walk up these steps called Janss Steps, also known as Tongva steps. But at the bottom, where you start to make that journey up, there’s a big plaza. That’s exactly where all the police had lined up. And we were informed through faculty and different allies within the University system that the University had already told many of the faculty that the police were ready to sweep, could be ready to sweep as soon as 6pm.

So, what we decided, is do what we had been wanting to do for a while, which is call upon the rest of the city to help defend the encampment, come to our support. And thousands did. Thousands of students who weren’t already involved came out to support, but also thousands of people from just the general LA area came out to support, and began to congregate along Janss Steps, along that grassy area alongside Janss Steps, and basically created such a large mass of people that the police, which had been lining up near Janss Steps, had to make the strategic decision to no longer intervene that way. They had to retreat and move to a different location on campus and had to come up with a new plan about how to enter the encampment and sweep the encampment. But, unfortunately for them, as the hours went by, starting from like 6pm, to 7, to 8, to 9, more people just kept on coming to UCLA, and this crowd kept on getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually the organisers realised that, especially once the police had moved away from Janss Steps, that there were also other entries to the encampment where there wasn’t necessarily an enormous crowd yet. So, because the crowd kept on getting bigger and bigger on the outside of the encampment, we were able to split the crowd multiple times and sent the crowds to different entrances by the encampment, to show their solidarity and defend the encampment, in essence. And really, by defence all I really mean is we just need a big mass of people there and the police will not want to deal with them. And that happened on another occasion, the police came in through one of the side entrances and there wasn’t actually such a big crowd on the outside of the encampment, but there was a crowd, and it was big enough that the police basically retreated and decided they didn’t want to deal with that.

So, this kind of game of back and forth, this sabre-rattling, of the police trying to go to this entrance or that entrance, basically goes on until 1 in the morning. And then at 1 in the morning, the police finally offer an official dispersal [notice], and at around 1:10am the police actually do enter the encampment. And they basically surprise people through the original entrance that they were going to go through, and they enter the encampment through Janss Steps. But all the people inside the encampment basically crowd around the police, and because the police are surrounded by hundreds of people in the encampment, they’re forced to retreat, basically. So, it’s a repeat of what had just happened a couple of hours ago, except now this time instead of having it happen on the outside, it’s happening on the inside. And the people on the inside are far more militant than the people on the outside, right? The people on the inside have been in the encampment for days, but the people on the outside who are participating in this kind of support rally are there for solidarity and many of them are there for the first time. But the people inside are able to, through their enormous numbers and just walking together, are able to surround the police and the police feel like they have to flee. And they flee out of Janss Steps.

But unfortunately that’s the only time that is possible. The police were able to get into many buildings, like Royce Hall, Kaplan Hall, Haines Hall, so they had many other vantage points into the encampment that were not going to be necessarily accessible to either the people inside the encampment or the support rallies going on outside. So, they had a way in. It just was kind of inconvenient for them. And I believe those are the ways they eventually entered the encampment, and once they entered the encampment, the students inside the encampment – almost very similar to what they did during the Zionist attack – they basically had a lot of discipline. All they were concerned with was the defence of the encampment and just to keep it going. And they were essentially non-violent, but the police came in with rubber bullets, with tear gas, and injured many people and arrested many people that morning. And I believe this lasted for about an hour or two after 1:10am. Actually, much longer, now that I think about it, because I think things were beginning to die down around 4 in the morning.

But arrests continued all throughout the morning, even by 7am I think there were still some things that were going on, although it was a lot less intense. And if you happened to be at the UCLA campus that morning from like 1 to 4, all you would hear is big explosion noises, because what the police were doing when they entered the encampment and tried to arrest all these students and clear the encampment, as a tactic to scare the students and distract the students and startle the students, the police would shoot flash bang [grenades] into the air. So, if you were literally just on the outside of the encampment, or just anywhere on campus and you looked into the sky, every minute or every two minutes you would see this big white flash and then this super loud noise. Almost like fireworks, except it sounds more like an explosion, or a bigger explosion than a firework. And that just went on for hours and hours and hours, while the police had to clear over two hundred people, and I think they arrested over two hundred people or something like that. I think it was the most amount of arrests at an encampment up until that point. Yeah, that’s basically how it went down. People were still getting arresting in the morning, and all of May 2^nd was basically getting people out, doing different types of jail support and stuff like that.

Do you know what specific charges had been pressed against the students that were arrested?

During the initial sweep, I’m not sure about the specific charges. The charges is an interesting question because a few days later, after things had died down, the organisers went back to campus and were going to continue the movement, and they met at a parking lot at UCLA before they did anything, they hadn’t done anything yet, they met in the early morning at a parking lot, around 40 of them were there around 6 in the morning, and they all got arrested and they were charged with conspiracy to commit burglary, and from my understanding not only is that a serious charge but it’s a far more serious charge than what anyone was charged with the previous nights during the sweep. So while I don’t know what the actual charges were for the sweep, I know that they had to have been more lenient than the conspiracy charge. It seems like the police, especially after the sweep, are going harder, like they’re going to punish us harder if we try to continue it.

Responses

What’s been the response of the University so far regarding the demands? Has there been any sign of any movement there?

Yeah, so, on May 1st, the day of the sweep, Darnell Hunt, who’s part of the administration, I think second in line after Gene Block, the chancellor, came to the encampment and they started negotiations. They started negotiations for about an hour, it was right before the 6pm supposed sweep time, and there really wasn’t much movement at all on either side, there was nothing, nothing was really achieved from that meeting. There was just a lot of excuses on the side of Darnell Hunt about the Zionist attack, about the sweep as well, because everyone knew the sweep was imminent, and the students were trying to get him on the record to say that he’s against sweep, but he obviously wouldn’t say that. Even though the whole conversation he was trying to say he was on the side of the students, or he’s being reasonable and he’s sorry for all the Zionist attacks, all this stuff, but he of course couldn’t say that he was against the sweep, and he kept on saying that ‘we don’t control the police, we’re just UCLA, we just call the police and when they’re here they do whatever they want,’ is basically what he said, ‘and it’s out of our hands’. Of course, a lot of that is not true. The University had and has a direct line to the mayor’s office, and the mayor controls the police. The mayor can control the police, the different heads of the police departments can control the police and they listen to the mayor, they should at least. So, they acted as if it was out of their hands, when 100 percent they had influence over what happened that night and the previous night as well. So, yeah, there really hasn’t been any movement whatsoever, in terms of negotiations or trying to meet certain demands. The University is not interested.

And what about responses to the attacks from city government, for example from the mayor’s office, Karen Bass’ office, or any local politicians?

I haven’t been paying too much attention to what the local politicians have been saying, the only thing is the mayor, because the night of the attack, she’s the one who mobilised the police. I don’t know exactly what happened, you can probably find it online, but she makes a statement saying that she’s sending in the police to UCLA to stop the violence or whatever. So, that’s as far as I know, and I think she did the same thing for the sweep. She said something about clearing the camp. So, as far as I know that’s really all their statements; condemnation of the encampment, equivocating or making both sides seem the same when in reality one side has been very, very disciplined and peaceful, and the other has been very openly violent from the beginning. Honestly, it’s a miracle that attack did not become deadly, considering how violent these people were and how much they were looking for blood that night. And the fact that we were left alone for four hours, it’s kind of incredible that nothing – obviously people were very hurt – that no one lost their life is a great miracle.

What about the responses from professors, from tutors, and even from other campus staff, like the kitchen staff at the dining halls for example? Any solidarity with the protests?

Faculty, especially faculty in the social sciences, have expressed an enormous amount of support. There were actually a lot of faculty there that night of the Zionist attack and then of the sweep, and the faculty have their own list of demands. Today, actually, a few hours ago they held a little demonstration press conference type thing. They tried to deliver their list of demands to the administration but were blocked by security, and then they rallied at Charles Young Research Library, and did a kind of a rally/press conference thing where the faculty, dressed in all their gowns, condemned the University.

They want Gene Block to resign, they’re calling for the academic senate to pursue a vote of no confidence in the administration, which, from my understanding, will happen in a few days. They’re asking for complete amnesty for all the students involved, for all the legal charges to be dropped, whether they’re from the sweep or what happened at the parking lot, and they’re asking for accountability in terms of the Zionist attackers. So I would say the faculty is definitely mobilised. They want to get organised, and I think you’ll see in the coming weeks the faculty increasingly become more organised. By faculty I primarily mean the professors. The professors, the tenured professors, do not have a union. The lecturers do. So that’s an obstacle in terms of organisation. Because the graduate students, they’re ready to strike. They’re already pursuing that legally and they’re going to vote on striking on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And then if there’s a majority they’re going to actually strike, probably. But for the professors, and many of them do want to do something similar, many of them want to do a walk out, that’s going to require a different level of organisation because they don’t already have a union. The union is like a glue that keeps all the workers together; there are routine meetings, there’s elected leadership, all that stuff. The faculty right now is more of a network. But I think they’re trying to resolve it; they’re trying to organise.

In terms of other segments of the UCLA population, in terms of affiliates, I think the other constituencies at UCLA are going to be increasingly mobilised in the next weeks, especially if the UAW strike goes forward. There’s been talk of other unions wanting to go on strike, I think the lecturers. I don’t know about what’s going on with the other unions at UCLA, like the campus workers, I don’t know, but generally I would say there’s a great sense of sympathy. The majority position on campus is sympathy with the students at the encampment and condemnation of the administration for how it handled this whole thing. I think there needs to be more organisation on that front, to mobilise everyone else who wasn’t already involved, but I think it’s already in motion and it’s just going to take a couple more days or maybe a couple more weeks to really see that, to see all these people come out. And I will say, now that I mention it, there was another union, AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], I can’t remember which number, but the AFSCME local that’s responsible for UCLA had been coming out to the encampment, and one day they provided complete meals for those inside the encampment, and I think many of them were part of the different support rallies that were going on the day of the sweep. So, I think people are aligned with us politically and against the administration.

At this moment, the administration’s very unpopular, but at the same time, I think there is a general sense of fear and pessimism on the campus right now, because obviously the sweep meant that the encampment was destroyed, but also because of the severe charges that the students from the parking lot are facing, and now the campus is completely militarised. There are police all over the place. It’s hard to get into buildings. The police ask you ‘are you affiliated with UCLA or are you unaffiliated, show me your student ID’. It’s very tense on campus. And there have been reports of even more Zionist attacks happening, not as organised or as big as that one main attack, more like individual acts of terror, happening in the dorms, happening on campus. So, the tension is high, but also the anger is high, in terms of how people feel about the University. And I think especially through the strike and all these other mediums, and while after the sweep there’s been a couple of days of a low period for the movement at UCLA, I think there’s going to be a rebound soon, and people are going to mobilise in an even bigger way.

What now?

What’s the main course of action for the students now that the camp has been shut down? What’s the next thing that’s being planned? Is it sit ins? Student strikes?

I think it’s all kind of up in the air, it’s going to be decided by all the different aspects of the University in the coming days. The one thing that is clear is that there’s going to be a lot, a lot of energy towards the strike. If the strike actually happens, that’s going to be very historic, it’s going to be 48 thousand workers across the UC system on strike, and I think if the UAW strikes, many other workers on campus will follow suit in whatever way they can, maybe it’s not going to be an official strike. For the faculty, for example, I’m pretty sure if we can succeed in organising them, many of them will walk out. The whole class system will be paralysed because of it. On top of the fact that the undergraduates I think are starting to regroup and are probably going to try and organise some other kinds of actions. It’s still unclear whether it’s going to be, like you said, sit-ins, or big demonstrations or even bringing back the encampment. I think for now though, the leadership of the struggle has fallen into the hands of labour, and I think that’s a really good development, at least temporarily, while all the other aspects, in particular the students, are allowed to regroup. And I think in a week or two, the three main heads of the University – the faculty, the graduate students and the undergraduate students – are going to unite in a big strike. It’s going to be a labour strike obviously for the grads, but also the students and the faculty. I think just the first phase of this struggle has ended. It’s going to keep on going until the end of the school year. And for us the end of the school year isn’t until the first or second week of June, so we still have time, and the pressure is just mounting.

Do you think there’s a changing consciousness among the general student body, the students who haven’t been involved in the encampment or in the protests?

Yeah, 100 percent there’s been a changing consciousness, especially after the Zionist attack and the sweep. I think those two things are the biggest consciousness changing points in this struggle. We’re hearing students who never talk about politics, never mentioned anything about Palestine in the past seven months, basically having these revelations that the police are [not] here to protect us, that the police suppressed all these peaceful protesters, that the University administration waited for hours and hours and allowed the Zionists to attack all of them. There’s been this complete shock for those who were previously apathetic or apolitical, and now they have an incredible amount of sympathy for not just the students and the protestors, but ultimately for the cause of a free Palestine. And it’s mobilised all those people, or at least it’s prepped all those people to be mobilised.

It’s still an open question whether we will be successful in bringing all those people into the movement, but that’s where we’re headed and that’s what we’re going to try to do. But if you were to take any social group, any friend group that exists at UCLA, if there was one person in that group who was involved in the encampment and all their other friends weren’t, it’s very clear now that, especially after this whole past week, all the entire friend group is definitely going to be politicised, is going to care about it. This is the only thing that people can talk about right now because it’s dominating every aspect of their lives. The classes are online now, they were online this whole past week. Why? Because of the sweep, because of the encampment, because of all the violence. So, it’s everywhere. The students have varying opinions about it, but I would say that the majority are now, for the first time, activated, and it’s up to us to go and not just allow them to be passive supporters on the sideline but to find an avenue for them to be active participants.

What path forward do you see for the overall demands to be met? Do you think that a strike that involves all of the three main sections of the University would be successful in getting the University to actually consider the demands?

To be honest, I think it’sunclear where we are right now in the moment. It’s hard to say because we’ve never seen something like what I’m describing, which is such a high level of organisation at the UC system, on the UC campuses, that would involve all these different forms of strike. So we’ve never seen how the university responds to that. I would hope yes, I would hope so. But I would also say that really the main thing, the main victory of this whole movement, regardless of whether we’re able to achieve divestment or not, is going to be the immense radicalisation of the millions of young people who are participating, but also our ability to push the envelope of what people think is possible. It was an incredible feat that the people in the encampment defended their encampment from Zionist attack completely alone for four to five hours. That removed fear from the hundreds of individuals who stood there. And I think that’s going to be the ultimate takeaway from this whole movement, that there’s now going to be a new layer of the population that are fighters, that are organisers, that are radicals, that are socialists, that are ready for the next bigger fight. That’s something that I really haven’t seen, even 2020 didn’t have the same effect. Maybe 2020 woke people up, maybe 2020 pushed people to do new things, to go to protests and stuff. But with this movement, since it is explicitly an anti-imperialist movement, the fact that it’s happening under a Democratic Party administration, the only thing you can really compare it to is the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 60s and early 70s. And just like back then, it’s creating a whole new layer of young people who have a firm conviction that the system, the system of capitalism, needs to be overturned and replaced by something new. And that’s really the main victory.