We’re Turning Our Backs to You!

Because I refused to cooperate with UChicago’s disciplinary hearings against me in relation to the Popular University for Gaza encampment last May, I have been suspended for the autumn quarter. Or, as the official letter from UChicago puts it, I have been “placed on an administrative leave of absence.”

Upon reading the suspension letter, my mind went to Israel’s practice of “administrative detention.” Not because there is any comparison between the severity of being blocked from attending classes for nine weeks and the dystopian Israeli military court system. It is because the words chosen made me think of Layan Kayed, a brave Palestinian student organizer who was brutally arrested by the Israeli Occupation Forces on April 7, 2024, and today remains (as do 10,000 other Palestinians) in Israeli prison. In 2022, along with other UChicago and McGill students, I had a conversation over Zoom with Layan. She described how, during the first time she was incarcerated by Israel, she and other Palestinian women created a covert school within the prisons for each other so that the jailers could not disrupt their education. I believe conversations like this one planted the seeds which sprouted into the Popular University on our campus this year, as they taught us about Palestinian legacies of popular education rooted in grassroots solidarity and resistance.

The phrases “administrative leave of absence” and “administrative detention” are abstract, detached, and bureaucratic. They don’t immediately evoke University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) cops in riot gear or soldiers with assault rifles and tear gas—though this is the reality for the encampments and the occupied West Bank. But that’s enough of my analysis—just read Layan’s article linked above! As a reminder to those who have extended their support to student protesters in the U.S. and not yet to those organizing in Palestine, it is even more urgent to do the latter. Now, if you’re still reading my essay instead of Layan’s, let me explain.

If I had decided to once again work with the excellent lawyers from Palestine Legal and the National Lawyers Guild who have supported anti-genocide students through every instance of repression thrown at us, from the sit-in to the most recent mass pepper spray attack by UCPD, I probably wouldn’t be in this situation today. 

When I demanded of Jeremy Inabinet, the associate dean of students at the “Center for Student Integrity,” that he say my late friend Elijah’s name in his next email as a condition for my participation in the disciplinary procedures, I fully expected him to follow the playbook of racist gaslighting framed as “neutrality” that his colleagues and higher-ups like Paul Alivisatos and Ravi Randhava have perfected throughout their careers. This essay is a tiny act of resistance against the mirage of “neutrality” that UChicago policy tries to create, which I view as a central part of this institution’s racist, genocidal complicity.

In spring 2024, I filed for a voluntary leave of absence, expecting to return to classes this autumn quarter. I intended to take those nine weeks to grieve and spend time with my friends and family, then return after the summer to finish my degree in history and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.

One factor that influenced me to file for leave was the ongoing U.S.–Israeli genocide of Palestinians. This genocide, and the barbaric, indiscriminate war on all resistance to it, has imposed death, injury, starvation, disease, and deep emotional wounds across occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In the process of protesting this genocidal war, which is led by the U.S. government, I have witnessed friends be threatened and sanctioned by their universities and employers and be brutalized, harassed, and detained by the police and other racists. I’ve personally experienced many of these forms of violence over the past year.

The second reason I decided to file for a leave of absence was that in February 2024, the life of my best friend, Elijah, came to an end. The picture at the top of this article is Elijah looking out at the lake. The picture on the right is Naji al-Ali’s immortal Handala, which deserves some research from you. Elijah has his back to us—he sees something in the lake that we cannot. Handala has his back to us because Naji al-Ali would not draw his face until Handala, like other refugees, was able to return home to Palestine.

Elijah and I attended Lindblom Math and Science Academy, located in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, together for seventh and eighth grade. We stayed the closest of friends even as I changed schools. Elijah attended Lindblom for high school, while I reluctantly attended Jones College Prep in downtown Chicago, something my parents encouraged me to do because it’d give me a better chance to be admitted to an elite university like this one. By my third year at UChicago, Elijah was struggling with mental, spiritual, and physical conditions that one psychiatrist called schizophrenia. In November 2023, he departed unannounced from the transitional housing center he stayed at, which led me, his other friends, and family to search the city for him.

The skills I learned organizing and struggling for Palestine were the same skills I used in searching for Elijah. Putting up flyers around the city, staying disciplined and active in the face of deep uncertainty and pain, sharing tips and resources in a group chat…

But in the end Elijah was discovered near Lake Michigan—he had drowned. During his beautiful life, he was one of the most intellectually and artistically influential people for me. Our long phone conversations are what drove me to study the dynamics of racial capitalism here, and our shared experiences continue to be a big factor in my desire to become a Chicago Public Schools teacher.

Elijah taught me how to listen and think outside the box, which I believe are some of the most valuable things anyone could teach. I’d text him a quote by Frantz Fanon, and he’d reply with a video by Bobby Hemmitt. One of my last memories with him was at the apartment of a Palestinian friend in Chicago, where he freestyled smoothly over Fairuz songs.

It was during my voluntary leave of absence, and after Elijah’s passing, that the UChicago Popular University for Gaza encampment took place. One of the key stances of those who participated in the encampment was that the struggles of the working class in the U.S., particularly diaspora and Black people, are inseparable from the struggle of the Palestinian people against Zionist occupation and U.S. imperialism. I saw this very directly in my friendship with Elijah.

He was always skeptical of UChicago as an institution. I remember sitting in Hutchinson Commons and dying of laughter with him because of all the pretentious paintings of (white) “important UChicago-ans” staring down at us.  Having grown up in Chicago, he knew from experience about Black people being displaced because of the University’s expansionism. He wasn’t surprised to hear what I learned in classes like “The Philosophy of Civic Engagement”—that Black academics at UChicago were put through real indignities due to the systems of racially restrictive covenants and segregation that the institution perpetrated.

Beyond his critical eye for white supremacist nonsense, Elijah saw the value of education as inherently tied to self-knowledge, both of himself as an individual Black man and through a collective practice of overcoming colonialism. I think that his struggle against the psychiatric system boxing him into dehumanizing definitions, whether as “a schizophrenic” or otherwise, was a sign of real strength in this regard. When, during my second year at UChicago, he attended “Counterterrorism and Empire,” an event organized by SJP in protest of Israeli general Meir Elran’s class “Security, Counterterrorism and Resilience: The Israeli Case,” I was really proud. He wasn’t a “registered student,” but he came to dinner with all the panel participants afterwards and talked to students and professors alike. Without his jokes and insight by my side, it would not have been the same.

I easily get lost in storytelling about Elijah, so let me return to the discussion of the current disciplinary case against me, in the context of the Palestine solidarity movement on campus. The protests against UChicago’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians have clear, coalition-based demands, which developed over years of student and community organizing. The simplest of these demands, which in November 2023 the UChicago administration preferred to arrest 26 students (including myself) and two faculty over, rather than acquiesce to, was a public meeting about divestment.

After our mass arrests and quick release, a large number of cultural organizations on campus co-wrote and signed a statement in support of UCUP’s demands, denouncing repression by UChicago administration and the UCPD. I personally met with Randhava, executive director of the “Center for Identity + Inclusion (CI+I),” which houses the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA), to see what OMSA was willing to do in collaboration with the organized “students of color” whom it serves. There I got an initial taste of the racist gaslighting framed as neutrality that I have named above.

Randhava not only refused to provide any support to the arrested students as a collective, but he also refused the suggestion of a Palestinian student to put out a social media post highlighting the work of Palestinian poets whom Israel has killed since October (like Refaat Alareer, who was killed in December 2023 and whom UChicago hosted in 2014 to share his work). Randhava claimed that such a post would “violate the Kalven Report,” but when I asked him to put this reasoning in writing, he retreated to deeply absurd and humiliating excuses such as that he “actually doesn’t have access to the OMSA Instagram password.” (As the executive director of CI+I!)

This is just a taste of racist gaslighting framed as neutrality—the pristine example came from President Alivisatos himself. The encampment created leverage that the sit-in in November could not. The administration panicked in the face of our steadfastness and decided to meet with us. In a meeting, which I attended as a delegate from the camp, Paul Alivisatos, famed defender of free inquiry and expression, refused to acknowledge U.S.–Israeli scholasticide in Gaza—he refused to acknowledge the fact that Israel has destroyed all Gazan universities since last October.

By the time the disciplinary cases were initiated against the alleged, as Inabinet’s letter put it, “leaders” of the camp, it was summer. Inabinet gave me a deadline in June for our meeting, then proceeded to go on vacation golfing until the day before that deadline, rendering any communication between us impossible. In July, I visited my family in Iran, and, as I later expressed to Inabinet, it was impossible for me to access any UChicago services there because of the U.S. sanctions targeting Iran. By August, we hadn’t met, and Inabinet threatened that, due to my being on voluntary leave, he’d suspend me if I didn’t “resolve the disciplinary matter” before the quarter began. I told Inabinet the reasons behind my voluntary leave, and I asked him to acknowledge it and say Elijah’s name in his next email. I knew, because of his neutrality, that he probably wouldn’t. But in honor of my friend, and as a small act of resistance, I insisted. UChicago knows how to, and often does, express condolences toward specific people to the campus community. But only in the form and manner of its choosing.

In October 2022 during the height of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran, Nick Seamons, the executive director at the Office of International Affairs at UChicago, sent me an email to check in about any stress I may be feeling. This showed a real geopolitical acuity and attentiveness to current events. There have been no similar emails sent to me or Palestinian, Lebanese, or Yemeni students since October.

Regarding people like Elijah, and the people I have been struggling alongside for months to achieve divestment, UChicago’s silence is intentional. And so long as Inabinet, Randhava, Alivisatos, the board of trustees, and all the other “neutral” actors at this institution are intentionally silent, intentionally deploying their same old policies and police and procedures in the middle of a genocide, they deserve for us, who bring this place life, to turn our backs on them in defiance. I ask you, dear reader, to do so too. Then maybe we, or the generation after us, or the one after that, will see what the fruits of our collective resistance look like.