I entered the student movement in 2014 when Palestinians in Gaza were facing a series of crises in the form of Israeli aggression that has led to this genocidal situation today. A crisis of my own soul simultaneously coincided. Ever since then, because of Israeli occupation and mistreatment, conflict continually boils to the surface in Palestine, and more people like me join the solidarity movement here in the United States.
Seeing the recent upswing in pro-Palestine activism has inspired me and also made me think about my own decade-long journey in the Palestine Solidarity movement, from my initial infantile politics to becoming a student of the Black Radical Tradition. I want to offer my reflections on these experiences in the student movement, as a young person who has journeyed toward revolutionary politics that can change this country—as opposed to the faux-radicalism of petit-bourgeois students. Martin Luther King Jr.’s metaphor of a Single Garment of Destiny remains true today, and I see myself in today’s students who recognize the moral bind we are in when our government aids Israel in genociding the Palestinian people.
After Hamas launched its operation, Al-Aqsa Flood, in response to Israeli aggression on October 7th, 2023, I see people, whom I never considered political before, flood into the movement, moved by the injustice and callousness of their own politicians. The crisis that tormented me and torments all of us is caused by this garment of destiny. King’s work and ideas are transforming them whether they know it or not. To become a vanguard that emulates the heroic youth who led the Civil Rights Movement, the students who are leading these protests, disruptions, and boycotts must become conscious of the American history that King made because they are living the consequences of that history. Hundreds of students and thousands of young people are beginning to awaken to the question that King put on the table before his life was ended.
When King was alive, he visited Palestine, and spoke about the dangerous Jericho road in his sermon “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Relaying the parable of the Good Samaritan, King first described the Levite and the priest who rushed past a beaten man on the road because they were scared: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” All of us who have participated in the movement to free Palestine are currently faced with this question. If we do nothing in the face of a genocide against the Palestinian people, what will happen to them? What will happen to us?
Entering Student Activism
I am the child of an Indian mother and a Pakistani father, who immigrated to this country for the opportunity to build a prosperous life. I was raised in post-9/11 America. My mother told me how the FBI visited my father’s biochemistry laboratory to baselessly investigate him after the Anthrax scare of 2001. I can remember vividly the shift in my identity when boys in my school stopped calling me Indian and started calling me Muslim, despite the fact that I am both. I cared about civil rights, and about the Holy Land 5, Palestinians who ran the largest Islamic charity in North America. They were charged with supporting terrorism and had their rights violated during their trial when an anonymous witness, claiming to be Israeli intelligence, testified against them. With an early understanding that being called a terrorist was nothing more than an ad hominem attack, I saw myself in the Palestinian people, who suffered and faced the violence of the Israeli state. As a Pakistani-Indian American, the British partition of the Indian subcontinent had affected me and my family. I grew up attending films screened by the local Pakistani and Muslim community about Palestine, and in liberal, suburban Philadelphia I would also attend sessions on Palestine organized by the Quaker community.
Palestine has been under Israeli occupation for 75 years, but 2006 was the crisis that made me aware of the deep injustice in the region. I was 15 years old and developed thoughts on the Israel-Hezbollah war that I realized were nonconformist in public. I knew I should be uncomfortable expressing my sympathies with the resistance forces in Lebanon and Palestine, knowing that in the U.S., Hezbollah is viewed as a terrorist organization. That was the kind of student I was when I entered the student movement searching for solidarity with Palestine.
In 2014, while I was a STEM undergraduate at Temple University, I joined Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). This was my first venture into student politics and when I became an “activist” in the city of Philadelphia. It has been a decade since then, and I want to reflect on my time in student activism for the benefit of the next generation of students. For the longest time, I was a student of Palestine, absorbing lectures and literature by scholars like Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein. I read online publications like Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and +972 Magazine. When I joined the student Palestinian solidarity movement, we were disorganized, but it was exciting to be around politicized youth who wanted to talk about the critical issues of our time.
We would discuss everything from Bernie Sanders to the Kurdish question, and its relationship to Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. SJP was very active in solidarity with the Ferguson movement, with the Ferguson uprising—the birth of Black Lives Matter—and Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Palestine both happening in 2014. At the same time, I met people participating in Occupy Wall Street. Temple SJP joined a coalition called Stadium Stompers, composed of students, faculty, and community members who opposed Temple’s plan to build a multi-million dollar stadium in a residential neighborhood. The same year, students and community members built a movement to reinstate Dr. Anthony Monteiro, a professor in Temple’s African American Studies Department, an activist, and a respected mentor for students, who was unjustly let go. Through all of this, I came to know local activists from the Black community in North Philly who were fighting hard against Temple’s gentrification and attacks on the Black community.
I began to see contradictions in student activism that limited our activism and also eventually kept students away from ordinary people, preventing a unity which could be key to changing our cities. The first big contradiction I experienced was how ultraleftist tendencies such as anarchism and “horizontalism” led to divisions and dissolutions of student groups, rather than unity based on principles. The question of the Syrian Civil War sparked large political battles in SJP and other student Palestine solidarity activist networks. During a time of cancel culture, many of these debates led to the collapse of unity in our student organizations. When Temple SJP organized an event in opposition to the anti-Syrian, pro-war State Department narrative in the mainstream media, other SJP chapters and NGO activists investigated us for being “Assadists.” These were the same activists in the movement who were opposed to having national leadership, yet who now wanted to police our politics. This underlined how I began to view the internal opposition forces in the movement as obstructionists, hiding behind democratic language. Ironically, it was too often the same people who invoked anti-hierarchical language that served as the biggest impediment to a truly democratic movement against U.S. policy in West Asia from forming.
I noticed that the student activists who were focused on being “Left” of the Democratic Party and proving their radicalism were also the people who ended up making careers as paid organizers in NGOs or professors and researchers at universities that gentrify the community. Their career interest was essentially in opposition to the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. In the end, many impressionable student activists seemed to be more fixated on performing radicalism rather than committing to a lifetime of solidarity and struggle that would require them to be closer to the political struggle of ordinary people in Philadelphia. As part of the coalition against Temple University’s football stadium, I observed the clash between condescending students and professional organizers versus the more ideologically advanced community members organically fighting for their own neighborhood. I had learned this in the Church of the Advocate during the struggle against Temple’s stadium, and my experience seeing gentrification up close led me to different conclusions than my peers in the Palestine Solidarity Movement in Philadelphia. I recognized the importance of the struggle of ordinary community members and how the university taught students to replace the community instead of joining with them.
Though I realized the contradictions in anarchist ideology, I still identified with some version of it and my political practice was informed by anarchist strategy. Not all of my choices were positive as a student activist, and after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, many student activists talked about using Trump to the ultraleft’s advantage in order to take insurrectionary action and recruit people dissatisfied with the political system. A massive protest was organized for the Trump inauguration on January 20th, 2017, and I was able to hitch a ride to Washington D.C., where I attended the black bloc protest. In theory, a black bloc is a tactic used by anarchists to destroy property and where attendees wear entirely black with masks, so that everyone can blend in together. In practice, January 20th was an expensive game of tag between police departments with pepper spray chasing anarchist kids. I ended up getting caught up in a mass arrest with around 200 other anarchists, ultraleftists, and the occasional journalist. I was held for around 40 hours in jail with many others. There was plenty of time to reflect, and I remember many people agreed that the cops had had just as much fun chasing anarchists as the anarchists had fun smashing windows and pavement. My cellmate asked me if it was my first black bloc, and I responded, “Yes.” Obviously it hadn’t been his first. “It’s a rush isn’t it?” “Yeah…yeah,” I half heartedly agreed as I laid down in my steel cot. What had it all been for? With all our masks off, I realized all of the participants were generally white, Asian, or Latino young men.
Anarchism is a political philosophy unique to Europe and rarely makes an appearance outside the West. Its main strategy is to provoke a spontaneous insurrection using tactics like black blocs and “Propaganda of the Deed.” Anarchism prioritizes individual choice over accountability to a collective. It leads to a romantic adventure—one that had attracted all those young men locked up with me, as they hoped to escape from their lives into that adventure. It’s easier to laugh looking back, but at the time there were no smiles for me. I was charged with a couple felonies and had to regularly visit D.C. from Philly for court hearings, while the police were paid overtime.
The consequences for the Trump inauguration were the opposite of the intended insurrectionary attempt. Project Veritas, a right-wing smear group, had filmed the ultraleftists organizing the DisruptJ20 protest and the black bloc, and I recognized the anarchist leaders in court documents and the undercover videos from the post-arrest organizing efforts. Anarchist media would claim the black bloc was a success, but from the court documents, it was clear that the organizing effort had been infiltrated by Project Veritas and undercover police from the start, who gave the black bloc room to operate for nearly 30 to 45 minutes before responding. I came to the conclusion that the organizers had no positive vision of the future, and their strategy was to aid the Democrats in taking control of the White House. It is easy for young men to view the world nihilistically, and it relieves all of us of any responsibility to think about ways to transform the conditions of our country. In a way, I discovered that ultraleftist rhetoric was redirecting me back to the center that I was trying to leave.
While dealing with the felony charges, I was in deep trouble with my parents, whom I had not told anything about my politics. While in jail, I later learned I had been interviewed with an FBI agent present. He and a police detective asked me about my relationship with my father. I had my father’s and my passports on me when I was arrested. The FBI called my father to ask him to come in and “talk to retrieve the passport,” and when he refused the agent sent the passport to a facility in Virginia where it was destroyed. My parents did not even know that I was regularly attending protests. They were as confused concerning my life’s direction as I was.
In an attempt to bridge the gap, I invited my family to Saturday Free School events, and my mother met its founder Dr. Monteiro and invited him over for dinner. He assured her he would keep me out of trouble, and he assured me he would show me real revolutionary politics. Months later, the Saturday Free School had a “festival,” as described by the Philadelphia Inquirer, to celebrate James Baldwin. The event was different from the student protest movement because it included a documentary, discussion panels, song, and dance, but most importantly the spirit of Baldwin was invoked in the Church of the Advocate. I was moved when I learned that Baldwin said, “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist.” I became reinvigorated and committed to a new politics that made me seek understanding about where my parents were coming from, rather than stoking constant conflict with them. Baldwin’s life works delivered me to a new politics.
In the following year, my charges were dropped and I was in my last year of college. The Saturday Free School was studying and celebrating “The Year of Gandhi.” When studying Gandhi many of us were asked hard questions like, “Isn’t Gandhi a racist? A casteist? A pedophile?” With all the slander from so-called “progressives,” you would have thought everyone had forgotten that Gandhi had won the people and liberated India from colonialism without firing a single shot. To this day I defend Gandhi and, despite popular claims, I say that he never touched his nieces inappropriately and they were at his side when he died. The anti-Black statements he made in South Africa were not the complete story of his life, and no one on the Left talks about his prophetic statement to Howard Thurman, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” It would have been unimaginable for the freedom fighters of the Indian or Black Freedom Movements that Gandhi’s legacy is considered obsolete today. His love ethic translated seamlessly into the Afro-American love ethic expressed by Baldwin and by the steward of Gandhi’s ideas in the West, Martin Luther King Jr. Like all great revolutionaries Gandhi identified himself with the most oppressed.
The demonization of Gandhi is tied to the fact that the Civil Rights Movement has become a persistent blindspot of the U.S. Left, resulting in an inability to engage with the democratic struggle in the U.S. or to see what Martin Luther King called “the World House.” Though many of my peers sought to identify themselves with Palestinians, they could not go beyond adopting superficial cultural features, or organizing cultural events still trapped in identity politics. They could not accomplish more than this without engaging the central question of what it means to be an American inheriting the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Even when it came to discussing the struggle of African American, activists sought to tokenize or diminish King, while lifting up more marginal but supposedly radical figures. The American Left, which misled me into nihilistic direct action with no guiding vision, will adopt effigies of the Black struggle, but will never adopt their leaders. Thus we are disconnected with our history of revolutionary struggle here in America.
I am fortunate because I bloomed as an activist in a student organization that was not afraid to link different struggles together. However, I know my journey as an activist has been influenced most crucially by the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and the work of Martin Luther King Jr. In reflecting on my time as a student activist, I insist that students today need to understand the Civil Rights Movement because our movements, should they be successful, are based on the past success of the students who were in the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement. Whether we realize it or not, we are trying to fill their shoes, and walk their path. Even the language we use when calling ourselves “activists” is rooted in the past generation of student activists who fought for racial equality and thus radical democracy. My journey into student activism began with the question of Palestine and the anti-colonial struggle that continues to take place there, but I have arrived at the inevitable destination of the question: how do we bring about revolutionary change in America? It doesn’t matter where you start though. The Civil Rights Movement began as a struggle for racial equality in the Jim Crow South, and transformed into an internationalist, radical, pro-democracy, pro-peace movement culminating in Dr. King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
One figure key to my political development has been W.E.B. Du Bois, the ideological anchor of the Saturday Free School. Through him I learned about his concept of white supremacy repressing the civilizations of the Darker nations of the world as key to imperialism and capitalism. These civilizations were based on generational values that could form the basis for freedom struggles. My political development advanced toward something less dependent on college campus, and toward political relationships in the Philadelphia community. My political opposition in activist spaces was based on searching for the principled unity of what Du Bois called “the Darker nations,” the nations oppressed by the ideology of white supremacy. Their unity was required to free humanity as a whole. The people of Palestine have survived a decades-long genocide by rooting themselves in civilizational values such as Summud, intergenerational steadfastness, and Thawabet, strict redlines against the occupation and normalization of relations with Israel, as well as an overall ethic of resistance. Similarly, Du Bois laid out Black America as a nascent civilization, within an oppressive white society, which held the key to true freedom and democracy in America. Both of these peoples have survived by holding on to their humanity, and the evidence of their humanity lies in their ability to become reborn as a people in the next generation, through their inter-generational traditions; something that can free them as well as their oppressors.
The average “leftist” in Philadelphia does not respect the values of either people’s civilizations. These leftists’ version of human liberation is a vapid, cosmopolitan worldview imbued with whiteness. Their idea of freedom is totally detached from the ordinary people of the city who have everything to teach them, based on the ways they survived poverty and racism over generations. This is why leftists host their events in the university, an anti-community setting, whereas I have become accustomed to going to Black Churches and other institutions that carry on the values of the people. Studying Du Bois and other Black revolutionaries like James Baldwin with the Saturday Free School has given me a new world view that changed how I saw my orientation to the Left in Philadelphia: it is a disagreement that goes beyond political opinions, but rather is rooted in different life principles. As I grew more mature, I realized I didn’t want to live my life as a white man with brown skin, so I was forced to question my own internal thoughts and preferences and standards.
Palestine Today
I graduated from Temple and began my transition from SJP into the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement in Philadelphia to remain involved in the solidarity movement. I continued my political education as a member of the Saturday Free School. After thorough study of the Civil Rights Movement, including the study of Gandhi and King, I came to realize that the philosophy of nonviolence is central to the revolutionary struggle in America. Just like in the early period of the Civil Rights Movement, students are playing a key role in the struggle for peace today through protest against genocide in Gaza. However, the only way to become an effective vanguard will require the students to engage with the inheritance of King and the Civil Rights Movement.
Students are leading protests, disrupting elected officials, writing, painting, and drawing in defense of Palestinian life, and condemning their own government. The astonishing reality is that young people, especially students who have the time and opportunity to think, are breaking from a predesigned ideological paradigm. For this reason, young people cannot afford to squander their time distracted from the “fierce urgency of now,” as King put it. Now is the time to study and practice the methods of the Civil Rights Movement because we owe a debt to their struggle. My journey has taught me that revolutionaries must be rooted in our own people, but few young activists take the time today to ask: to which people do I belong?
The Civil Rights generation created the foundation for a new nation—one that I could join, one made for you and me, even though they did not know us. They inspire us to fight for a “World House” with freedom and equality for all people. What we, who want to establish King’s “World House,” must do is answer King’s question about the person on Jericho road. What do we owe the Palestinian people? What will happen if we do not risk everything in the fight to honor their struggle and free our own nation from its deadly path of war?
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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