Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in June 2024, a couple weeks after police dismantled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. For the one-year anniversary of the encampment, this anonymous community member revisited his original piece recounting his arrest to remember the movement.

“Why are you protecting murderers? Why are you fighting for people who killed children?” I shouted at the dozens of men in riot gear at the UC San Diego Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Some of them glanced away, avoiding eye contact; they shuffled in their combat boots, visibly reassessing their actions. Others tightened their chest protectors or pulled out their nightsticks, as if they needed protection from the truth cutting through the morning air.

I was arrested minutes later on May 6 for peacefully protesting the United States’ subsidized depraved slaughter in Gaza and UCSD’s profiting from entities supporting the genocide. 

One day later, on May 7, Palantir CEO Alex Karp — whose company has made hundreds of millions from providing AI tools to the Israeli military — spit on the U.S. campus protests. “We think these things that happen across college campuses are like a sideshow. No, they are the show because if we lose the intellectual debate, we will never be able to deploy any army in the West, ever,” Karp said.

Which intellectual debate was he referring to? Was he referring to the false assumption that these protests were in any way antisemitic? 

Several groups — including Jewish Voice for Peace, the Kumeyaay Nation, and the Islamic Center of San Diego — joined the protests at UCSD in solidarity.

A recent story on Democracy Now discussed how these protests sparked uncomfortable debates. “You are not entitled to be intellectually safe. You are entitled to be physically safe,” said president of Brandeis University, Fredrick Lawrence.

Maybe Karp was referring to the intellectual debate over whether the protests represent a threat to the military industrial complex, which is designed to silence criticism.

If the UCSD protests were not antisemitic or discriminatory, why would anyone want to silence it?

Could it be that Israel has been pushing a narrative that conflates Zionism with Judaism in order to deflect and distract from its thousands of human rights violations?

While Judaism is a beautiful, historically rich religion that promotes acceptance and condemns killing and stealing, Zionism is a late 18th-century nationalist movement that sought to create a nation at the expense of the Indigenous people of Palestine.

But if you distract the public from human rights violations and dilute “the narrative” by discrediting any criticism as racist, it allows you to further your ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Was the “intellectual debate” that Karp was referring to the condemnation of the larger system that profits from colonization, apartheid, occupation, and exploitation of countries across the world — all of which are now contributing to the genocide in Gaza?

Karp’s guest on the panel was former Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director David Cohen, who interjected that Hamas references “death to Israel” in its mandate. However, in 2017, Hamas removed any antisemitic language from its doctrine, calling only to fight the Zionist occupation but not against Judaism or Jewish people. Cohen’s account also omits Israel’s history of violating dozens of U.N. human rights laws. The U.N. has also called out Palestinian armed groups for violations, though they are dwarfed by that of Israel.

Paraphrasing Karp’s words, “The protests are a corrosive, cancerous ideology that are dangerous to America and allow discrimination simply because the people being discriminated against are successful.”

It seems that Karp equates the calls for equality and human rights as some kind of academic debate on the economics of apartheid.

There is an actual genocide happening, but he tries to reframe and reduce it to an intellectual debate, rather than the live-streamed massacre that it is.

Despite the U.S. and Israel claiming to stand for justice and democracy, the two have historically violated human rights laws. Just look at the way Native Americans or African Americans were slaughtered in the Trail of Tears and Tulsa massacre, or herded into reservations. Or the way Zionist militias killed 17,000 Palestinians and displaced 750,000 thousands in the Nakba of 1948. 

But our leaders don’t seem to be appalled by the ongoing well-documented genocide in Gaza. No, they are more threatened by the possibility of losing power. On May 15, in a recent talk between former Sen. Mitt Romney and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Romney claimed that “Israel usually has really good PR.” 

Romney said, “Why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table for a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel.” Blinken responded, vaguely referring to the “social media ecosystem,” where context and history get lost. Blinken explained, “The emotion of the impact of images dominates. We can’t discount that. But it also has a very challenging effect on the narrative.” These statements seem to suggest that Blinken is more concerned about Israel’s public image than the butchering of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. 

And what is this context and history that Blinken is referring to? That depends on whose narrative you follow.

Israel was charged in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and several other countries with genocide.

Israel presented its defense to the ICJ, and it found that Israel is committing a “plausible genocide.” Yet, the U.S. continues with the rhetoric that Israel is killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians under the guise of “self-defense.”

Months of rallies, city council meetings, and calling congress members urging them to cut funding to Israel culminated in watching college students half my age and I having our rights assaulted in a predictable dance of fascism. Most of the media and law enforcement labeled non-student protestors like me “outside agitators,” usually with no evidence to confirm it.

Martin Luther King Jr. was also commonly called an “outside agitator,” a designation that justifies aggressive policing while seeking to undermine and delegitimize the constitutional principles of freedom of speech.

As the toilet paper ran out in jail, the swelling and numbness caused by being zip-tied for four hours diminished. Moments of disillusion were broken by the voices of supporters chanting outside, heard from inside the building. I thought of the Vietnam protests of earlier generations, and how some protesters said that crackdowns would only amplify the message of liberation.

At 4 a.m. on that Monday, before any sign of the attack, I expressed my gratitude for the students I met at the encampment. I met people of all races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations — all in solidarity. We discussed the challenges of explaining our resolve to family or friends, the conflicts, the tears and the connections. We discussed how it is a personal journey to reexamine our own choices. Although Karp did try to justify genocide, he also says that it is important to be the same person in public as you are in private.

We all have to decide for ourselves what to believe. Are we separated by our own belief in fear or unhealed mistrust of others? Or are we connected by our vulnerability and our willingness to accept our bond with a larger community, with the land, and with ourselves?

If Karp says that we, the protesters, are the cause of this corrosive, regressive ideology endangering America, then, by that logic, we are also the source of healing and progress.

Which narrative do you choose?