Above photo: Palestinians break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan near the rubble of buildings in the southern Gaza Strip, on March 1, 2025. Doaa el-Baz / APA Images.
And We Won’t Be Deterred.
They can deport every last one of us, but they cannot erase the spirit of Palestinian resistance. That is what they fear.
Note: The following Op-Ed was written by a group of international graduate student organizers studying at universities in the United States. They have requested anonymity due to the current targeting of Palestine activists on student visas (and now, it seems, green cards) for deportation.
We are international students who have organized in solidarity with the Palestine liberation struggle over the past 16 months. We write anonymously because the moment demands, strategically, that we do so. However, we will not be silenced. You may censure and suspend us, you may send ICE to knock down our doors, you may deport us back to our home countries, but we are only one drop in a vast ocean, and the tide of support for Palestine is rising everywhere.
Israel’s ongoing genocide has shaken the outrage of the free people of the world. While the so-called international community appears largely content to censure the zionist state and continue with business as usual, we cannot unsee images of nineteen year old student Shaban Ahmed Al-Dalou burning to death in his tent attached to an IV drip after Israeli forces bombed families sheltering in Deir al-Balah. We cannot unsee Wael Dahdouh’s tears as he looked upon the body of his martyred son. We cannot forget Dr. Refaat Alareer’s voice breaking as he sat in the semi-darkness of his apartment, flinching as bombs exploded around him ‘It is very bleak, it’s very dark…there’s no way out…what should we do, drown? We are not going to do that’. We cannot forget Medo Halimy’s daily updates, bringing humor and laughter to ‘tent life.’ We will never forget how they murdered him in his tent.
At the same time, we will never forget the scenes of jubilation as Palestinian prisoners poured into their beloveds’ arms, released at knifepoint by the resistance (the resistance, one ex-prisoner said, are ‘masters of Palestinian joy’). We will never unsee Zakaria Zubeidi’s smile, swept forward on the shoulders of a crowd thundering his name. We will never forget the rivers of people flooding back into North Gaza and Southern Lebanon on the first day of the ceasefire, determined to return. We will never forget the impossibly valiant final moments of Yahya Sinwar’s life, immortalized forever as he hurled a stick at an Israeli drone.
We cannot–and will not–unsee what we have seen. Through Palestinians who have risked everything to share their reality with the world, we have taken on the role of witness, and we now carry a responsibility to act. This is true for millions of people all over the world, who, through Palestine, have witnessed the real face of the US empire. A steady stream of bunker buster bombs for Israel’s project of extermination. The burning body of Aaron Bushnell. Prisoners driven mad by torture. Premature babies left to rot in their cribs. A profound, sickening desecration of the sacred. A profound, sickening absence of the sacred.
Whether the US government’s threat to deport international student organizers en masse comes to pass is ultimately inconsequential. In the end, it is not us they are afraid of. They can deport every last one of us, but what they fear will remain. What they fear is the spirit of Palestinian steadfastness and resistance. If this has at times spoken through our actions, we are glad. But it is those resisting in Palestine who they truly fear. It is the willingness to embrace martyrdom in the name of liberation, in the name of the sacred, that they cannot comprehend or defeat.
We, like so many, have been unspeakably moved by the commitment to the sacred we have witnessed in Gaza over the past sixteen months. The fighter who was martyred on October 7 with his finger raised in Tawhīd. Those lined up for Jummah prayer beside the ruins of Al-Farooq mosque on the first day of Ramadan, March 2024. The long row of tables celebrating Iftar as the sun sets amidst the apocalyptic destruction of Rafah one year later.
In his letter Parallel Time, Walid Daqqa wrote of the ways in which the zionist state aimed to undermine this collective steadfastness by targeting first and foremost the ‘social being’ of the prisoner. In Searing Consciousness, he explained how through the material, temporal and geographic fragmentation of Palestine Israel worked to break down the possibility of collective consciousness and thus collective resistance. Like many Palestinian prisoners, he recognized that this effort often undermined itself. Today, we see that despite the effects of decades of geographic isolation, settler colonial genocide and forced displacement, the collective consciousness that fuels Palestinian resistance remains strong.
We do not need to romanticize resistance in Palestine to marvel at this steadfastness, to want to learn from it. In his poem ‘Silence for Gaza‘ Mahmoud Darwish wrote ‘we do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.’ ‘But its secret is not a mystery,’ he continued, ‘its resistance is popular and firmly joined together and knows what it wants (it wants to expel the enemy out of its clothes). The relationship of resistance to the people is that of skin to bones and not a teacher to students. Resistance in Gaza did not turn into a profession or an institution.’
We have much to learn from those practicing the kind of resistance that refuses appropriation, that sacrifices self-interest in the name of collective liberation, but we cannot learn this in the classrooms of our universities. The past 16 months have reinforced beyond a doubt that US universities are profoundly complicit in imperialist violence, politically and economically beholden to Zionism and invested in appropriating resistance as an aesthetics stripped of any cause. For those of us organizing long before October 7, this was already clear. What is now obvious is that we must learn through our practices of solidarity, and through what these reveal. Every time the US state–in the guise of Democratic or Republican Party–deports or arrests or imprisons or otherwise attempts to silence us, we learn. And when we embrace these lessons for what they are we inch closer to the kind of psychic liberation that enables genuine, collective resistance: resistance that is ready to sacrifice, resistance that is anchored in the sacred. We will remain open to these lessons and use them to strengthen our solidarity with those resisting in Palestine and around the world. We are, after all, students.