Space and domination: The ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment
Jul 27, 2024
As of the 14th of July 2024, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the Australian National University (ANU) is 76 days old. For Palestinians, 14,000 kilometres away, past the iridescent waters of the Riau Islands, through the rice paddies of India and the vastness of the Saudi sands; for Palestinians trying to survive in their home, an agonising struggle for liberation has raged for 76 years.
Writings from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment – Part 4
This is Part Four of a six-part series of articles from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Apart from the Introduction by Emeritus Professor Tamara Jacka, all articles are written by student members of the encampment. To protect the authors against identification, we have kept them anonymous.
Space and domination: The ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment
Seventy-six years ago, in 1948, the state of Israel was founded, in the process violently dispossessing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. There is contention over the number of Palestinian massacres that occurred in the resultant Arab-Israeli war, but it is unequivocally clear in both Palestinian and Israeli testimonies that massacres occurred. Thirty-four years on, in 1982, the United Nations General Assembly called Israel’s massacre of a Palestinian refugee camp – one of many conducted as part of Israel’s ongoing annexation – a genocide. Twenty-seven years on from that, a report was released confirming Israeli soldiers’ use of Palestinian children as human shields, a practice the Israeli Defence Force assured was abolished, despite published testimonies from Israeli soldiers confirming its continued practice.
Fifteen years on from that report, students around the world set up protest encampments on their universities’ grounds, rallying against institutional complicity with the ongoing Palestinian genocide. This brings us to now. As of the 14th of July 2024, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the Australian National University (ANU) is 76 days old.
For Palestinians, 14,000 kilometres away, past the iridescent waters of the Riau Islands, through the rice paddies of India and the vastness of the Saudi sands; for Palestinians trying to survive in their home, an agonising struggle for liberation has raged for 76 years.
The ANU encampment is but a footnote in this long page of history, situated halfway down University Avenue and composed of a series of marquees, laden with tarps, made up by tents of all colours pitched close to the ground, forming a hub where smatterings of students and community members come and leave throughout the day – to talk, plan, and organise. In the mornings the frost clings to the surface of the tents’ polyester skin, melting as the sun rises. In the evenings, the biting cold recrudesces, and hot water bottles, thermals and gloves are passed around, restoring warmth against the numbness.
The great irony, of course, is the position of the encampment at the ANU, a federal institution. The Australian government’s bloody history with the Middle East bubbles to the surface in all spaces of the campus grounds, obviously present, simultaneously invisible.
If you walk in a straight line, down Childers St behind the camp, you reach the Menzies library – the same Menzies who saw Israel as a ‘shining symbol of delivery from bondage.’ Follow Fellows Road from there, and you happen upon Chifley library, named after Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who supported the British partition of the State of Palestine. Walk on, turn left and walk further, and you arrive at the Hanna Neumann building, the top floor of which holds the same Australian Signals Directorate implicated in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Complicity bleeds out the stone, here.
Foucault speaks of heterotopias – spaces that are capable of juxtaposing in a single space other, impossible real spaces. Heterotopias are a normative re-ordering of a space, a place that is present yet somehow, undeniably different in character – places where differing acceptable standards of behaviour or understandings of a space are permitted, such as the festival or the cemetery. Something is different about these spaces. They are localised distortions of the societies they occur in, both reflective and unreal.
Within the neoliberal society we find ourselves in, heterotopias gain new significance. For the great mechanisms of capital which constrain the arms of politics, the crisis of the Palestinian genocide is not the moral reprehensibility of supporting it – with arms, with norms, with policy – the problem is the encampment, which re-orders society’s understanding of the space and brings this country’s complicity in genocide into the light.
Ten minutes from the encampment is the BAE Systems office. The foyer reeks of a minimalist modernism – porcelain white marble makes up the floor and desk, glittering white adornments. BAE Systems is a key part of the F-35 fighter jet supply chain to Israel, producing the jets that have destroyed 70 percent of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and homes. Mere minutes from the encampment, the invisible gears driving the machine of Palestinian genocide whir here, inaudibly.
Without the encampment, I would not know how close it lives. I have been to classes in the Hanna Neumann building, studied for nights and days in the Chifley library and walked past the BAE Systems office more times than I can count. The global supply chain which supports this ongoing genocide lives on my campus, makes up the administration, and at the same time denies its role – understanding that if it remains unseen, masked by normativity and a passive, widespread complicity, then there is no blood on their hands.
The aim of the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment is to force the university’s divestment from weapons companies supplying the genocide and to immediately cease their complicity. In doing so, the encampment brings to light the unseen rot existent around it – the military industry which fuels, consumes, and chokes the campus.
The greatest success of the military-industrial complex lies in its ability to operate invisibly, in offices around the country that seem almost to fade into the background, in hushed bi-partisan bills bolstering its funding and in news broadcasts which speak of bloody conflict, but not our role in it. The encampment revolts against the space, for the authorities, an intolerable presence, with its Palestine flag waving high above, defying the implicit norm. Power which previously operated quietly, wakens to silence the encampment’s visible insistence; that the society we partake in enables the same bloodshed we see on the screen.
Encampment students have been called Trotskyists. We have been told that we are aggressive, violent, dangerous, provocative, disrespectful, and unnecessarily divisive.
But I would characterise us merely as people, peacefully residing, for a cause we believe to be righteous – for Australia to cease complicity in a genocide.
We, as students within this paradigm of complicity, have the right to protest. If politicians like Albanese or Dutton think it unacceptable to take up space for this, I believe it is for the same reason they refuse to condemn Israel’s genocide and refuse to divest and sanction: it would mean acknowledging that the bloodshed began at home.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Succumbing to the Zionist Lobby: higher education institutions abandon ethics and integrity
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