Earlier this week, in response to calls for escalation from our besieged comrades in Gaza, a small crew of NYU students, faculty, and staff disabled several vehicles belomg to the Office of “Campus Safety,” which worked hand-in hand with NYPD pigs to arrest, harass, and suspend students for their participation in the Gaza solidarity encampments. Punctures were quickly and quietly made in each vehicle’s tires using an awl; from start to finish, this took no longer than one minute. These simple and easily replicable acts of sabotage serve as reminders to our genocidally complicit university administration: the student intifada did not end with the Spring semester, and will only intensify until Palestinian liberation is conclusively won.
We encourage our fellow NYU affiliates, and the Gaza solidarity movements on campuse across the country, to make divestment our bare minimum demand–we must continue our struggle until reparations for the violence already inflicted have been issued, and the university structure that awards governing poer to an unaccountable Board of Trustees (or Governors, or Regents, etc.) in the first place is completely overturned. We know that senior university administrators, as the morally deadened foot soldiers of whatever capitalist-dominated Board they report to, will never agree to fully divest from Zionist genocide and apartheid. Doing so would subject university investments to some semblance of democratic control, which the governing Boards, as a matter of pure self-preservation, will quite simply never allow. To win any of our demands that matter, then, we must first abolish the current structure of the university itself, and build in its place systems of higher education that reject the endowment/donor model altogether. In this vein, the movement of many of the encampments towards “People’s Universities” is one that should be closely studied and built upon.
Until this world is won, our resistance will escalate. If you want to take direct action but aren’t sure how, find friends who feel the same way, and study the basics of action planning and operational security together:
What/how many roles will this require?
How do we all communicate securely?
Is jail support in place? What kind of scouting will be necessary?
Which tools will we need, and how do we use them?
Start with low-risk mischief–tagging, wheatpasting, smashing, and slashing–to build the skills, confidence, and trust necessary for higher-impact actions. Study tactics from other movements, zines, communiques, and other sources both on- and off-line. Act bravely and carefully, and keep acting until the Zionist entity and Amerikan empire protecting it finally fall.
In rage and solidarity,
Xx
Found on Social Media [Twitter link: https://x.com/taliaotg/status/1797361503659602245]