On Sunday, June 9, at about 7 a.m., dozens of Rutgers police raided and then evicted a peaceable assembly – an encampment – established by Newark residents and Rutgers University students at the institution’s Newark campus. The raid occurred without warning. Four Public Square Amplified community reporters — Marcellis Counts, Munirah El Bomani, Victor Galvines and Sameerah Rhodes — witnessed the raid at various points during the day. Their on-the-ground eyewitness accounts form the bulk of this report, which is complemented by additional PSA staff reporting.

Organizers of the encampment at Rutgers University’s Newark campus knew this day would come - in a little over an hour, on June 9, Rutgers University police ended the longest encampment in the country, in a surprise raid that began early on a Sunday morning, the residents evicted and forced to leave the campus. 

Over the course of several weeks, the encampment, which included several tents and about 20-40 people (numbers fluctuated by day) had raised awareness of the genocide occurring in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government. 

Since the war started, almost 40,000 Palestinians, by the latest count, have been killed, most of them innocent civilians. Virtually every building in Gaza has been damaged, many completely destroyed. More than a million people have been displaced and many are now starving. Israel is using bombs made and provided by the American people to engage in a war that has outraged people around the world — and sparked protests on college campuses across the country.

The demands

The encampment at Rutgers-Newark began May 1, and organizers quickly issued a set of demands — the first eight of which were successfully negotiated:

1. Work with a committee of students, faculty, and staff to accept at least 10 displaced Gazan students on scholarships. 

2. Provide resources for Palestinian and Arab students in the form of an Arab cultural center by the start of fall 2024 semester.

3. Establish an educational partnership with Birzeit University in Ramallah, Palestine, in accordance with the precedent set by William Paterson University. 

4. Continue to name Palestine, Palestinians, and Gaza in future communications (as opposed to “Middle East,” “Gaza region,” etc.)

5. Work to develop training sessions on anti-Palestinian, antiArab, and anti-Muslim racism for all RU administrators & staff. Also, commit to the hiring of a senior administrator who has cultural competency in and with Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities in the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community. 

6. Hire additional professors specializing in Palestine studies and Middle East studies and establish a path to departmentalization for Middle East studies. 

7. Display the flags of occupied countries – including but not limited to Palestinians, Kurds, and Kashmiris – in all areas displaying international flags.

8. Provide amnesty for all students, student groups, faculty, and staff penalized for exercising their First Amendment right to protest Rutgers University’s support for Israeli human rights violations, and voice support for faculty and staff who have been publicly targeted for exercising their academic freedom

However, the university rebuffed efforts on two central demands:

1. Divestment from any businesses working in Israel: The university indicated that the president and the chair of the Joint Committee on Investments would meet with no more than five student representatives to discuss the divestment request provided the end of encampment. It was unclear whether the eviction of the protesters from the encampment would lead to these negotiations occurring.

2. Terminate the partnership with Tel Aviv University: The university indicated that it would not terminate its partnership with Tel Aviv University, indicating “Agreements with global partners are a matter of scholarly inquiry.” 

Advocates also used the encampment as a platform to highlight other conflicts and oppression in the Congo, Kashmir and Haiti, and injustices and outrages closer to home, particularly regarding housing, access to legal services and other social services. Teach-ins organized at the encampment had fomented further activity on diverse issues, too, with lectures on socialism and communism, among other topics.

The raid

But at some point — perhaps a few days or weeks before the raid took place — the university decided that the encampment had to be ended, and that police force justified the eviction of peaceful protesters. Rutgers-Newark administration and its campus police justified the raid and eviction in a letter published on the university’s website shortly after the raid took place.

"You're being asked to remove yourself and your belongings in 30 minutes,” a police officer announced via a bullhorn. Sirens and other loud noises roused the encampment residents, many of whom were woken up by it all. A barricade of police pushed through the encampment. No one was hurt by the police action but at least one person was roughed up; children were upset at the violence.

In its letter, the university said the encampment’s dismantling was “orderly and peaceful,” but video of the incident clearly showed otherwise. Police did not arrest any of the residents.

Within about two hours, the entire encampment had been “dismantled”; it was as if it had never been there. The university used cleaning equipment to scour it.

Although the university’s decision came without warning, it was not totally unexpected; the university had sent an email about a week earlier announcing that the encampment would be dismantled. But nothing came of it at that time.

Organizers had discussed that if forced to leave the campus, they would decamp to Harriet Tubman Park, about a five-minute walk away. But that park, unlike the campus, falls under the jurisdiction of the City of Newark — which prohibits pitching tents in its public spaces. 

“I told people to just lay tarps and use your sleeping bags,” Munirah El Bomani said.

The War in Gaza inspired and galvanized students and community activists to set up the encampment; by the time it was raided, it had lasted 40 days, the longest-lasting of the encampments that sprang up on campuses across the country. 

-And what lessons did those 40 days offer activists? The answers are not entirely clear - and probably mixed. Some activists said egos and personalities got in the way of the development of a clear, effective and common strategy; others said activists would have been more successful with more effective tactics. The raid and eviction from campus inspired a sense of solidarity and a deeper commitment to collective action, one activist said.

At a press conference on June 12, three days after the raid of the encampment, the city pledged to award 10 housing vouchers to residents of the encampment who were unhoused. But some activists were disappointed by this action; “we’re facing a tsunami of evictions, we’re not settling for 10 vouchers,” they said.  The city gave out referrals to a shelter, indicating that those unhoused who had been at the encampment would have to enter shelters before they could receive vouchers.

The war remains a driving force of protest

The war continues to outrage people even if most of the encampments have been raided or otherwise dismantled. Uncommitted votes in presidential primaries have also illustrated that outrage. Almost a million people have cast uncommitted votes in Democratic Party presidential primaries in numerous states. On June 4, more than 40,000 people voted uncommitted in New Jersey’s Democratic presidential primary - four times the number advocates had targeted and after little more than a month of raising awareness on the issue in the state.

“It came together pretty quickly, after what happened in Michigan,” explained Brad Helias, a member of the Central New Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Everyone was so inspired by that, across the country.”

In a matter of weeks, activists obtained the hundreds of signatures necessary to put an “uncommitted” line on the presidential primary — but the 40,000 votes can hardly be taken as misguided or somehow unclear: the actual line on ballots read, “Justice for Palestine — Permanent Ceasefire Now.” 

Is the Biden Administration getting the message, though?

“I do think so,” Helias said. “Sometimes it can be disillusioning on the national stage — is the message really getting through? (But) it’s working. It's slow progress and at times it feels like it’s not enough when you see the tragedies unfolding. But we have to keep going – it's starting to make a difference.”

For Sami Shaban, a Palestinian American small business owner and lawyer in Franklin, N.J., the ceasefire cannot come soon enough. By early June, he had already lost almost 40 family members in the conflict.

“Gaza has been the largest open air prison behind a 50-foot wall for many years,” Shaban said. “The world has ignored this for many many years. It's only now that people are becoming aware.

“It's horrific,” he continued. “I had two cousins blown up two weeks ago. It’s tragic and senseless – and we're the country sponsoring all this. Most of America wants a ceasefire.”