Thursday, March 28 marked the commencement of the final show of force for Palestine Liberation Week and an ongoing sleep-in by students on the lawn in front of Pomona College’s Smith Campus Center (SCC). Throughout the day, various community members led educational events on Palestinian liberation and divestment strategies on the lawn as well as a discussion on resistance-focused art and a poetry reading.
Beginning on March 17 and concluding on March 30, Palestinian Liberation Week is an annual event series hosted this year by Pomona Divest from Apartheid and organized with Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Claremont Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Arab Students Association (ASA), Pitzer Southwest Asian North African Alliance (SWANAA) and the Claremont Colleges Muslim Student Association (MSA) designed to teach and organize students on the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Occupation.
Palestinians observe Land Day, or Yom al-Ard, on March 30. The day commemorates March 30, 1976, when six unarmed Palestinians were killed and more than 100 were injured by Israeli forces during protests against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.
Claremont SJP, Claremont JVP, ASA, Pitzer SWANAA and MSA expanded on the importance of liberation week in a joint Instagram post.
“These weeks are a great opportunity to become more politically educated about Palestine, be in community with other organizers, and continue to struggle against our schools’s complicity in apartheid and genocide,” the post said.
The weeks included both talks and workshops, hosting activists from across the country including speakers such as 2024 U.S. presidential candidate Cornel West, Tufts University Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East Khaled Fahmy and writer Nada Ella.
On March 25, Pomona Divest from Apartheid announced their “final show of force for Palestine Liberation Week” on Instagram, adding two full days of events to the Liberation Week that were scheduled to take place on March 28 and 29.
Although the first event on March 28 was scheduled for 11 a.m., organizers arrived early to set up a “mock apartheid wall” and to take advantage of the morning’s heavy foot traffic to raise awareness for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Composed of eight large, upright wooden slabs placed next to each other, each panel of the wall was hand-painted by 5C students. The finished product was meant to allude to the 280-mile long wall in Occupied Palestine Territory on the West Bank.
Constructed in 2002, the wall in the West Bank has been condemned as illegal by the UN’s International Court of Justice for ”facilitat[ing] … the theft of Palestinian property.“
Painted in the Palestinian flag’s signature shades of red, green and black, the mock apartheid wall features artwork, poems, graphical statistics and phrases such as “We Are ALL Complicit” and “Theft of Palestinian land.”
Alongside the construction of the wall, students set up tents on the lawn commencing a sleep-in where they sit guard to protect the mock apartheid wall from being removed. The action, which is still ongoing as of publication, harkens back to similar sleep-ins organized by students during the South African apartheid.
Events began at 11 a.m. with guest speaker Mx. Yaffa’s discussion “Art as Resistance.”
Yaffa wasted no time, convening a circle of approximately 20 organizers and attendees, all shouting at the top of their voices.
“I like doing a moment of screaming instead of one of silence, because moments of silence are really nice for the dead,” Yaffa explained. “But for the living, the living are demanding that we’re loud.”
Yaffa, a self-described disabled, autistic, trans, queer, Muslim and indigenous Palestinian individual, serves as the executive director of the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD).
As Yaffa spoke, student organizers handed out informative brochures and flyers to all attendees about the wall’s purpose and its background.
“Pomona won’t recognize that Israel is an apartheid state, so we will put up a mock apartheid wall and force them to look — we will disrupt the visuals of Pomona’s beautiful campus and make their complicity so glaringly obvious they can’t look away,” one brochure read.
Yaffa described disruption as a crucial element of organized resistance. They applauded the event organizers’ continuous efforts to disrupt passing tour groups and Pomona administrators, emphasizing the importance of warning prospective families about “Pomona’s institutional complicity in genocide.”
However, Pomona President Gabrielle Starr released an email Wednesday, April 3 condemning this behavior and threatening judicial action against any students participating.
“This harassment targeting visitors to our campus is unacceptable under our longstanding Student Code, and it is subject to disciplinary action,” she wrote. “Protestors must refrain from disrupting campus tours, events, lectures and other gatherings, and they must refrain from persistently following or harassing participants in those activities.”
The organized disruptions were, however, successful. As they spoke, more people began gathering on the lawn to listen, including visiting students and their families.
“This is not what I expected coming to tour Pomona,” Thomas Whitticker, a visiting high school student, said. “It definitely threw me for a second, but at the same time, it’s interesting to see how political activism and these big-picture issues are handled by students and admin at this school.”
Following their discussion of disruption, Yaffa read selections from their newly released poetry collection “Blood Orange” and broke down the importance of literature as a form of resistance.
“To me, literature is actually what builds the word, instead of the world being what builds literature,” Yaffa said. “Every system of oppression, every form of violence, was in literature before it became a reality.”
In 2014, Yaffa established Irrelevant Press, their own publishing house, in reaction to what they termed as the global publishing industry’s “exclusionary” and “marginalizing” practices.
“Who else is going to publish trans-Muslim writing in public?” Yaffa said. “I wanted the stories of our people. I wanted the stories that [the mainstream publishing industry] didn’t want to be telling people.”
As the event drew to a close, Yaffa concluded by urging attendees to continue organizing, disrupting and resisting. They extended an open invitation of collaboration to the crowd, urging attendees to find ways to “stand up and to scream out” against dominant narratives.
The crowd went quiet as Yaffa read their last poem. After the final line, applause erupted amongst attendees.
“We know it ends in flames because those with power were never taught to relinquish,” they read.
The next event, a moderated talk entitled “Long-term Strategy & Revolutionary Optimism” began at 2 p.m. At the talk, Dylan Rodriguez, professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Black Studies at UC Riverside, discussed organizing efforts in support of Palestine.
Rodriguez emphasized the discussion-based nature of his talk, consistently opening up the floor for group comments and taking notes on people’s statements.
Many students who opted to engage in his discussion talked about the need for sustained organizing including on days off such as Cesar Chavez Day on Friday, March 29.
“Admin gets to go home tomorrow for a three-day weekend, but there is no break or home in this genocide,” one student said.
Similarly, Rodriguez emphasized the need for sustained organized efforts. He pointed to the importance of what he called “political theatre,” noting the sleep-in outside of the SCC, directly across from Pomona’s administrative building.
“Admin doesn’t like it when the political theatre happens in their front yard,” Rodriguez said.
While Rodriguez advocated for challenging and interrupting administrations, he also displayed a sense of pessimism for its effectiveness, citing his own encounters with university systems that resisted transformation.
“The notion of holding an administration accountable is magical thinking,” he said.
At 4 p.m., National Students for Justice in Palestine led an event titled “Overview of California Divestment Wins & Tactics.”
This was followed by the last event of the day at 5:30 p.m., a poetry reading hosted by Claremont Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
Approximately three dozen students and community members gathered to listen to the poetry reading.
Nine faculty members took turns reading poems into the microphone. One selected “I See As If I Am: Ten Maqams” by award-winning Gaza-born poet and physician Fady Joudah.
“I’m an old war / that your world isn’t in love with anymore,” Joudah’s words rang out across SCC and the surrounding lawn. “The players are well known. No one agrees / on what constitutes them: / justice, ineffable suffering, the right to defend / the right to eradicate. I refuse / what the war wants: that the path I seek in peace be sought through war.”
Another faculty member read Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan’s poem “When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say,” which grapples with dual identity.
“It is every year and my country is taken,” Alyan wrote. “I mean my country is stolen land / I mean all my countries are stolen land / I mean sometimes I am on the wrong side of the stealing / … my country is a teacher / I mean do you want to see my passport / I mean do you like my accent / I mean I stole them / I mean I stole them / I mean where do you think I learned that from?”
Between poems, the readers paused for a vigil to honor the Palestinian writers killed in Gaza since October 2023. Referencing an article on Literary Hub, one faculty organizer spoke specifically about the 13 poets who have been killed by the Israeli military, as well as at least 95 journalists.
“Those numbers can’t account for the poetry that goes unwritten or the novels that are never set down in words because the children who would have grown up to create them are murdered or displaced or traumatized or unable to go study literature because their schools and universities have been destroyed and their teachers murdered,” the faculty organizer said. “For each Palestinian writer we know for sure we’ve lost, there are likely many more who we will never get the chance to learn about.”
One such Palestinian writer was Hiba Abu Nada. An organizer read her poem “Refuge,” written 10 days before she died in an Israeli airstrike.
“I grant you refuge / from hurt and suffering,” one stanza reads. “With words of sacred scripture / I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorus / and the shades of cloud from the smog. / I grant you refuge in knowing that the dust will clear, / and they who fell in love and died together / will one day laugh.”
As the sun disappeared behind the clouds and a cold breeze picked up, the student protestors huddled together under blankets and sleeping bags. A faculty organizer addressed the shivering attendees.
“Because of the nature of this event, you may have missed a corner of Palestinian poetry,” they said. “There are many, many poems out there … that are full of humor and laughter and joy and are not about rubble or bombs or bodies. Poems can keep you warm. Every reading of Palestinian and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) writing I’ve ever been at has been warm and I know you are all spending a lot of time out here and it’s chilly. My suggestion to you is to find the poems that keep you warm.”
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