One year ago today, it was warm and windy with a potential for storms. Local meteorologists advised postponing outdoor plans. That morning, protestors would set up a two week encampment on the University of Milwaukee’s campus.
“I'm emotional just looking around and seeing this grass empty… not seeing any tents… not seeing any people here,” says UWM senior Ameen Atta. “There were people here that said, ‘I haven't felt like I lived on a college campus until this very moment.’”
Ameen Atta is set to graduate in a few weeks. But last year, he was organizing a coalition of student groups protesting what he calls, the university’s silence in an ongoing genocide. He also says that encampment was never a sure thing.
“Do we have a purpose for this encampment?” Atta says. “Because we don't just want to do something just because other people are doing it. So let's look at UWM.”
Organizers asked themselves questions like, "Do we have demands from the school? Has the schools shown a lack of support for the students? Has the school shown bias and support for Zionist groups?"
Atta says his group, UWM Popular University for Palestine, and other groups unanimously said yes. And that action was necessary. But if they were going to do this, they would need to be quiet about it.
“So what we did was we organized a protest on Monday morning and nobody knew that that protest would turn into the encampment,” Atta says.
The protest started outside of the University's library named after one of their most famous alumni, Golda Meir, Israel's 4th Prime Minister. The march led down Downer Avenue, hanging a right on Kenwood Boulevard before stopping in front of Mitchell Hall.
“When everybody was gathered, we were chanting and I took the mic and I said, ‘Welcome to Falasteen Lawn,'” Atta says. “This is the beginning of our encampment for Palestine.”
Over the past year, there have been a lot of changes for UWM, for student groups like Ameen Atta’s and for our country. But what hasn’t changed is that student’s are still organizing what they, and international human rights groups call an ongoing genocide in Gaza. So what can be learned over the past year? And where are things now?
Atta said he expected the encampment to last a day, maybe two. He even had plans to leave town a few days later. One reason why is because they didn’t know how UWM police or Milwaukee’s police department would react. Kelly Meyerhofer from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says that's one thing that set the UWM encampment apart.
“There was at one point more than 40 tents on their campus and they stayed there for two weeks without police intervention,” says Meyerhofer.
She covered the encampments and noted how things differed at UWM compared to other schools.
“At Madison and at a lot of other universities across the country, there were these very visceral images of police tearing down the tents, clashing with protesters,” she says.
Atta says protestors kept an eye, and ears, on both departments tracking their movements. Once they got word they wouldn’t be bothered, it was a turning point for the culture of the encampment.
Organizers started incorporating educational teach-ins, arts builds, local Palestinian restaurants brought food, there was music and dancing. They started building a community — one that included a Jewish Shabbat.
“That goes in the top three of my favorite experiences at the encampment,” Atta says. “I still go back and I look at that video on social media. I see Muslim, Christian, Jew, atheist, people of other backgrounds — just standing next to each other all participating in this Shabbat service.”
The Shabbat Shirah was led by multiple local Jewish organizations: Jewish Voices for Peace and Chavurat Tziporah. Jewish organizations were not just attendees of the encampment, they were also organizers.
“Unfortunately, the news was misrepresenting the encampments [as] spaces of chaos,” Jodi Melamed says. “In fact, [students] were delighted to see that there were Jews there, that there was respect for Jewish presence, that there was a real separation between Judaism and Zionism.”
Melamed lives around the corner from where the encampment took place. She’s also a Marquette professor and co-coordinator for Jewish Voices for Peace. One of the highlights for her during the encampment was teaching about the differences between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
“So anti-Semitism is real and it is deadly,” Melamed says. “It is the hatred of Jews because we are Jews. It is the killing of congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Zionism is a political ideology. It is not a religion or an ethnicity.”
She says that opposing a political ideology, like Zionism, that oppresses Palestinians is very different from anti-Semitism. And that it’s not anti-Semitic to care for Palestinian human and civil rights.
While she was teaching that day, a group of Shorewood High School students performed a walk out in solidarity with Palestinians and entered UWM’s encampment and sat in on her teaching.
Terra Johnson is a UWM Geoscience Master’s student and was involved in the encampment. They said it's upsetting when other Jews try to justify the goings on in Israel, and the genocide in Gaza, because it's antithetical to the Jewish faith.
“We’re called to love everyone,” they say.
For Johnson, meeting Ameen Atta during the encampment was incredible. But leading a prayer service during the Gaza vigil was the most unforgettable moment during that time.
“I got to lead the mourner's Kaddish, which is the Jewish prayer for mourning for all the people murdered in Gaza,” Johnson says.
Johnson says it was also their first time around Milwaukee’s Palestinian and Arab-American community.
“That was really cool because it's big and… it's a very young community,” they say. “So at night it was so cool to see a bunch of kids running around laughing, having a good time, but also still sharing like that solemness of the reason we're there.”
While all of this was happening, the students had a list of demands they were quietly negotiating with administrators. Ameen Atta was at the head of the table in those talks.
“In front of other student groups I said, ‘Look, you can arrest all of us in this room right now. You can expel all of us. You can go out in the encampment and try to do that. But we're not leaving,’” Atta said.
Organizers found the university started to take them seriously after this meeting. Protestors already knew they outnumbered the UWM police. And there’s no way the university would want this dragging on through graduation.
“Just a few days after UW-Madison struck an agreement with the protesters on its campus, UWM reached an agreement too,” Kelly Meyerhofer says. “But they differed in several ways. The deal called for a ceasefire in Gaza and some of the language, you know, really upset the Jewish community.”
Citing a UN expert, and the International Court of Justice, the university also called Israel’s actions a "plausible genocide." A few days after that, the UW System President, Jay Rothman, which is sort of UWM Chancellor Mark Mone’s boss, publicly said he was disappointed in the deal. Meyerhofer called that moment "stunning."
Public record requests of Mone’s emails showed that the chancellor was getting pulled in many different directions. UWM professors pleaded not to send in police. Local muslim leaders wrote in support of the students. Jewish leaders denounced the encampments and threatened to pull gifts and donations.
“Sheldon Lubar, who's a Milwaukee businessman and philanthropist [and also Jewish], emailed the UWM chancellor and told Mone: ‘It's obvious your seat is going to get very hot,’” Meyerhofer says.
Mone apologized for his initial statement, saying UWM should not have weighed in on such a complex issue. A few months later, on July 3rd, just before a holiday weekend and during summer break, Mone announced he was stepping down at the end of the next year.
“He had been a chancellor for about a decade… that is kind of a long time and maybe [he's] just ready to step down,” Meyerhofer suggests. “But announcing it on the day before a holiday struck me as sort of unusual.”
Where we are after one year
Rachel Buff is a UWM professor who teaches immigration history. She says she’s never had more engaged students than this past year. She was also the co-coordinator for Justice for Palestine and a member of Jewish Voices for Peace. She says the encampment was what University spaces are meant to be.
“Here are our students brilliantly understanding the ethics and history of the moment and they’re sharing what they know through education, arts and crafts,” Buff says. “That was an A+ experience [and] the first time the university felt like what I want a university to be.”
Not everyone felt that way. And the changes post-encampment prove it.
There are now guidelines that require chancellors to consult with the UW system before negotiation with protestors. There are student protest policies requiring them to be so far away from university buildings. Meyerhofer says free speech experts have told her it’ll be questionable to enforce, but will probably come down to a court case. Some students have faced expulsion, or have been unable to reenroll or put on academic probation. Atta and others say student groups have been targeted.
But there’s something else that’s been happening more recently. The targeting of universities by the current presidential administration, including the revocation of student visas.
“Some of [the students] were involved in protests on campuses across the country," Meyerhofer says. “But for the ones that we know of in Wisconsin, there's nearly 60 visa terminations affecting students, their visas were up for no apparent reason or for really like minor technical violations.”
UWM sent out a single email to students and staff regarding the students affected. The university did not respond to WUWM's request for comment for this story.
UWM student Terra Johnson says the visa revocations stokes more fear among students.
“Whether that's from the university or not, students are still impacted here,” Johnson says. “There's definitely more fear of… our free speech rights are being taken away. I feel greatly impassioned when I see people who are more at risk for facing greater repercussions, doing more than me.”
Since last year, Johnson started a group for Jewish students on campus to connect and have dialogue about things like anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. While Johnson says their politics lean more anti-Zionism, the group is an open space for Jewish students from the diaspora to have bigger conversations.
For Ameen Atta, he thinks more about what hasn’t changed over the past year. Family and friends who are still impacted by the bombing and denial of aid, now going on almost two months.
“Recently, I was one of the people who was managing one of the social media accounts where I was tasked with updating things that are coming out of Gaza,” Atta says. “I actually took a step back because… I just can't. I can't look at this every day and continue to post to the community and beg people to care.”
He says he does see change on campus — a big one being among the student body and a surge in pro-Palestinian culture. He says he’s often recognized now; people thank him for organizing, for being brave. Students who had never seen a kaffiyeh before this past year now tell Palestinian students how cool they are. The same Palestinian students who've said they’ve long felt invisible at UWM.
Professors Jodi Melamed and Rachel Buff say they’ve never experienced ant-Semitism on a college campus. Instead, at this encampment, they say they found profound levels of love and connection. But Buff says longterm change is unlikely — something she traces back to former Gov. Scott Walker and what she calls his assault on the UW System.
“Universities’ business model is no longer about ideas, it’s about corporate control,” Buff says. “And the people who lead them are about those things, too. They’re not about what our students demonstrated so brilliantly.”
Editor's note: WUWM is a service of UW-Milwaukee
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