Top: UCSD encampment Rally (May 5, 2024). Bottom: UCSD (Dec. 4, 2024). The sign (top) that reads, “This is where you make waves,” has been replaced with a more generic and benign sign that reads, “UC San Diego” (bottom).
Paris, Pine Forests, and the Authorities at UCSD
In 1851, Louis Napoleon, nephew of the more far more celebrated Napoleon Bonaparte, engineered a coup d’etat against the Second French Republic that had emerged from the revolutionary insurrections of 1848, becoming the subject of Karl Marx’s celebrated “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Revolution of 1848 was the third such event in France in the span of 60 years, marked by street protests and the building of barricades in working-class districts to prevent the entry of police seeking to arrest protestors. Following the coup, Louis Napoleon appointed a new prefect for Paris, Baron Haussmann, with a mandate to undertake massive redevelopment of the French capital. Haussmann proceeded to destroy much of the medieval fabric of the city, replacing it with the now-famous Grands Boulevards — ostensibly to beautify and “modernize” Paris — but this redevelopment had a more sinister motivation. By destroying the small-street organization of Paris and replacing it with a system of wide thoroughfares, Haussmann created a street grid ideal for the rapid deployment and movement of armed forces to quell insurrections. In this way, Paris, under Haussmann’s order, was one of the first large-scale examples of how space could be weaponized to preempt protest.
A century later, in 1948 Palestine, following the partition plan of the United Nations to divide the territory, Zionist armed forces began to evict Palestinians from the areas of the projected Jewish State. By late 1949, roughly 750,000 Palestinians — 80% of the Palestinian population living in what eventually emerged as the State of Israel — had been evicted from their homes and, by decree of the Israeli Knesset, would never be allowed to return. In the wake of this mass eviction, roughly 500 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were emptied of their residents. However, the new State was far from finished with the ghost-like remnants on the landscape and set about destroying the built structures in almost all of these places. In 1949, David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, announced that a critical undertaking of the newly established State of Israel was to plant one million new trees on the landscape to show the world how to “make the desert bloom.” What Ben-Gurion did not say, however, was how this new, planned treescape reflected the State’s efforts to cover up the many towns and villages that Israel had emptied of their Palestinian residents. Both Ben-Gurion and the Jewish State’s motivations were to erase the memory of Palestinian lives and culture that had previously dominated the landscape by planting conifer trees over the ruins of the once-vibrant society.
On May 6, 2024, UC San Diego’s chancellor ordered three police units to demolish the Gaza Solidarity Encampment built by students near Geisel Library — in protest against the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza — and arrest the protestors inside. What motivated these students was not only the horror of the genocide but also the complicity of the U.S. government in funding and supplying Israel with the weaponry to carry out this carnage, as well as the complicity of universities like UCSD in conducting research for the weapons systems used in this resupply effort. Interestingly, the University had decorated the campus with all sorts of banners proclaiming the importance of “making waves” and “changing the world,” perhaps motivated by UCSD’s history of being home to figures like Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse, who encouraged students to protest against injustices, whether it be the Vietnam War or racial prejudice.
On the fateful day of May 6, however, the University turned its back on its own history and decided that protesting against the mass killing of Palestinians was illegal and a threat to the campus community. Most revealing of all is what the University did in the aftermath of eradicating the encampment. Wittingly or not, it took cues from Haussmann in seeking to prevent future protests by reordering the space where the most radical protest in UCSD history had taken place. At the same time, it followed Ben-Gurion’s example in seeking to erase memories of the protest by planting hammocks on the encampment grounds. Complementing these efforts, UCSD’s chancellor and administration have censored their own sloganeering about “making waves” and “changing the world,” blatantly turning them into hollow, hypocritical phrases. The photos that follow recount this story of eradication and erasure.
Top: UCSD encampment Day 3 (May 3, 2024). Bottom: “Erased from Space and Memory”: The site has now been remade into a space for “hammocks” in an effort to preclude protest on the site and eradicate the memory of the encampment.
Top: “This is Where You Make Waves”: Indeed, students at the UCSD encampment followed the spirit of what the campus projected about itself to the world (photo taken by an encampment observer). Bottom: Campus authorities not only made every effort to erase the encampment in space and memory, but they also censored their own sloganeering about the University as a space of change and replaced it with the more generic and benign signage that reads, “UC San Diego.”
Top: “Let Your World Change This World”: Day 4 encampment Rally, Saturday, May 4, 2024 (photo taken by an encampment observer). Bottom: The University is determined not only to erase the memory of the encampment but also to disown its idealistic sloganeering and replace it with “UC San Diego.”
Top: “Encampment ‘Shabbat Night,’” Friday, May 3, 2024. Bottom: Police confront encampment protestors, Monday morning, May 6, 2024.
Top: “Cleaned”: Hazmat crews cleaning up the last remnants of the encampment on the morning of May 6, 2024, after protestors were beaten and arrested by police. Bottom: “Erased”: The site, replanted with hammocks, is now purged of any trace of the encampment. The administration enlisted lessons from Paris and Baron Haussmann in recasting the space to preempt protest. In an irony not lost on anyone who knows about the 1948-49 Palestinian Nakba, UCSD administration has followed the path of the State of Israel in seeking to destroy and cover up all traces of the event that University leaders are seeking to bury, erase, and forget. For many, it will be impossible to forget.
Gary Fields is a professor in the department of communication at UCSD and took all the photos in this essay except for the two indicated.
