Life is Already Serious: A Report from the Madrid Student Encampment
A scene from the early days of the student encampment on the UCM campus in Madrid. (Photo: John Collins/Weave News)
High on the wall just inside the entrance to the Ciudad Universitaria subway station in Madrid, Spain, there is an excerpt from a poem by Jaime Gil de Biedma, one of the “Generation of ‘50’” poets who integrated social and political themes into their work following the Spanish Civil War. The excerpt reads:
Que la vida iba en serio
uno lo empieza a comprender más tarde
-como todos los jóvenes, yo vine
a llevarme la vida por delante.(The stuff about taking life seriously
is something you start to learn years later
-like any young person, I ended up
bearing my life toward what was ahead.)
The poem’s placement in the Metro station where thousands of students arrive each day to go to class at Spain’s largest university, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), comes across as a classic “seize the day” (carpe diem) message to today’s youth.
When you walk up the stairs of the station and cross the street, it becomes abundantly clear that university students in Madrid are doing exactly that. Their growing encampment for Palestine is part of a global tidal wave of student-led actions launched in response to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The students already know that life is serious, and they are ready to defend Palestinian lives against a colonial machinery of death that is fueled by the complicity of institutions in Spain and beyond. As of this writing, the students are in the midst of a negotiation process with university officials - a process that could have far-reaching implications for Spain’s role in the larger struggle to hold Israel accountable for the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.
The power of occupying public space
An asamblea held at the UCM encampment. (Photo: Derek Sherrange/Weave News)
When the students representing six Madrid universities, including the UCM, launched their encampment on May 7, they were following the lead of Spain’s first encampment at the University of Valencia (UV). In an interview with Weave News, UV professor and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) organizer Jorge Ramos Tolosa noted that “the experience of the 15M movement in Spain (whose New York version was Occupy Wall Street) reminds us of the great social and political potential of encampments in public spaces.”
The Madrid encampment, located in front of the UCM student center, has a large area where students have pitched their tents, surrounded by solidarity banners. Nearby is an information table where volunteers assist with media and other inquiries and receive donations of food, water, and other supplies. The open plaza between the building and the street is being used for asambleas (open meetings where issues related to the encampment are discussed and debated) and a variety of educational activities such as lectures by local teachers, researchers, and activists. The students have also hosted nightly dinners where they use donated food to feed the members of the encampment.
A disappointing official response
The student activists at the UCM and their comrades at other Spanish universities quickly won at least a small concession from university leaders. The students, however, are eager to point out that this concession was symbolic at best, cynical at worst, and subject to ongoing struggle.
Manifesto from the encampment, posted on Twitter/X on May 9.
Their initial manifesto, released on May 9 in the midst of Israel’s ongoing assault on Rafah, called out Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government as well as the country’s universities for aiding the genocide directly and indirectly through economic and military relations, research agreements, educational exchanges, and other forms of collaboration with Israel. Identifying these actions as part of an “imperialist logic” driven by the needs of transnational capital, the students called for a “total rupture of relations with Israel” at both the State and university level.
Notably, unlike their counterparts at many US and other European universities, the Spanish university leaders have not (yet) attempted to clear the encampments. (However, as La Marea’s Dani Dominguez reported this week, there is an active right-wing campaign to defame and criminalize the student activists by linking them with antisemitism.) Instead, they responded to the various encampments throughout the country with a collective statement from the Junta Rectora de la Conferencia de Rectores y Rectoras de las Universidades Españolas (CRUE), representing the rectors of 50 public and 26 private universities, about “the situation in the Gaza Strip.”
The statement’s key passage promised to “review and, if necessary, suspend agreements with Israeli universities and research centers that have not expressed a firm commitment to peace and compliance with international humanitarian law.” It did not indicate how they would determine whether such a “firm commitment” has been demonstrated, nor did it address the obvious issue of the gap between universities’ rhetoric and the actions through which they provide active support to the structures of state repression.
Unmoved by a statement full of obvious loopholes and short on concrete measures, the students in Madrid held a press conference at the encampment and made it clear that they weren’t buying what the university leaders were selling. They read out a unified statement from all of the Spanish student encampments (see English translation below the video):
🔴 En directo | Rueda de prensa del Bloque Interuniversitario de Madrid, en la acampada por Palestina de la UCM, en contra del comunicado de la CRUE
— IzquierdaDiario.es (@iDiarioES) May 9, 2024
"No queremos que los rectores 'revisen' sus contratos, sino la ruptura total de las relaciones de todo tipo"#StudentsForGaza pic.twitter.com/q6N9N7SBsL
Faced with the statement from the CRUE, the encampments in solidarity with Palestine in Spain respond in a clear and united way: among these empty words, we don’t see a single response to our demands. We don’t want the rectors to “review” their contracts, but rather a complete severing of relations of all kinds. In addition to agreements with Israeli universities, our universities maintain relationships with companies that finance the genocide against Palestine. An empty “review” is not enough as long as the traffic of weapons used against the Palestinian people continues. We see how the rectors use the same discursive frameworks as the Zionist state of Israel in speaking of “antisemitic” reactions, which are not actually taking place, in order to cover up the genocide that we are seeing before our very eyes. We see the hypocrisy in their proclamations in favor of peace while not breaking relations entirely with the genocidal state of Israel, both in the academic and economic realms. The rupture that we demand also applies to the private companies with which our universities do business. All of these actions should lead the Spanish government to denounce, without reservation, the genocide of the Palestinian people and sever all ties with Israel. But up until now, its position has been one of flagrant complicity with the genocidal state of Israel. This move by the CRUE does not discourage our conviction to remain in the encampments, all the more so when this morning hundreds of Palestinians continue to die in Rafah at the hands of Israel. This is not the moment for mere promises. We are committed to continuing the fight. Therefore, we encourage the extension of solidarity with Palestine throughout the rest of the country and in the existing encampments, and we announce that we will respond accordingly and forcefully to the CRUE statement. Thank you. Long live the struggle for a free Palestine!
“Facing things as they really are”
As these protest encampments continue to proliferate from New York to Madrid to Tokyo, ruling elites everywhere are scrambling to catch up and, in many cases, trying to dilute the power of this global movement by portraying students as naive, misinformed, or worse. On May 9, in a widely panned appearance on MSNBC, former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tried to argue that students protesting a genocide “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
Such well-worn strategies echo the words of university administrators dating back to the social movements of the 1960s. For Ussama Makdisi, a professor of history at the University of California-Berkeley and co-host of the popular Makdisi Street podcast, critiques like Clinton’s are woefully out of step with reality. “There is a generational shift taking place across the West,” argues Makdisi. “Students, think, see, and hear. They are not blind to the genocide unfolding before their eyes in Palestine; and they are outraged by the double standard displayed by university administrations and Western governments, by their callousness, and by their betrayal of basic principles of academic freedom and basic decency.”
In this generational shift and the vast gap between the stale discourse of the power elite and the energetic defense of life waged by the students on university campuses today, Brooklyn College political theorist Corey Robin hears echoes of an earlier period:
In speaking loudly, clearly, and courageously about the genocide in Gaza, there is no question that the students are “facing things as they really are.” Perhaps this is because they understand - better than Hillary Clinton ever could - that their own future and the future of humanity is intimately linked with the struggle for justice and survival in Palestine.
“Here are the anti-Zionists!”
On the afternoon of May 10, the students at the UCM encampment learned that leaders of five of the six public universities represented at the encampment had agreed to negotiate. Only the Universidad Carlos III refused to participate. Once negotiations were underway in the UCM administration building, a huge crowd gathered outside to support their colleagues, chanting “¡Aquí están los antisionistas! (Here are the anti-Zionists!)”
As negotiations continue, the students are steadfast in their commitment to remain at the encampment until all their demands have been met by all six universities. Meanwhile, many of the students will undoubtedly participate in the nationwide May 11 protest march calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza (see poster below). The march also commemorates the 76th anniversary of the Nakba: the creation of the state of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian society and through the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the homes to which they remain entitled to return.
Poetry translation by Steven White. All other translations by the author.
