On May 2, 2024, in a joint press conference with the Portland Police Bureau and PSU President Ann Cudd, Mayor Ted Wheeler denounced the militant solidarity actions of the Student Intifada, claiming: “If you believe that damaging these businesses or trashing a library on a university campus will impact events in the Middle East, you are delusional.”
And so I begin by questioning what he and all enablers of the colonial-capitalist machine mean by reality. Since the encampment and occupation at PSU has begun, I have heard our enemies speak as if Palestine is not a reality, but an abstraction—a cause or mere symbol of an ideal we are passionate about, a matter of strong belief, an issue of “free speech.” Reality, on one level, is the conditions before you that you cannot ignore. And here in the U.S., we non-Palestinians are free to ignore the reality of Palestine all we want. We can turn off the news while their houses are being bombed. We can scroll past their GoFundMe campaigns for evacuation on social media while they remain in displacement camps offline. We are free to debate on about how to think about Palestine, at the leisure of our own timeframe, if at all. They have to think and live it at all times, inescapably and immediately.
Reality, on one level, is the conditions before you that you cannot ignore. Delusion is an accusation of failing to recognize reality. So what does it mean when you call us delusional for refusing and resisting the displacement of Palestinian people’s reality? What does it mean for the order of reality you and your collaborators wish to defend?
Reality, on one level, is the conditions before you that you cannot ignore. And this is why we escalate for Gaza. We are bringing the reality of war, the reality of Palestinian genocide that you are so eager to displace for the sake of protecting profit and property, back home to you, to these buildings and streets that you cannot ignore. And still we cannot force you to understand. Our actions have not been a wake-up call to you, but an excuse for you to displace us further from your minds as “delusional” people whose understandings of reality should be completely dismissed.
You do this so easily because we, like the Palestinians, mean absolutely nothing in your reality. You are free to ignore our demands all you want. That is your power. But we don’t need your understanding, and that is our strength. We know which side of reality we are on, and that is the Palestinian side. To you we are mad because we refuse to let you continue operating in accordance to the terms of your reality, which does not recognize Palestinian people’s terms of liberation or our terms of solidarity with their struggle at all. But what has been made abundantly clear, not just by what’s happened at PSU, but what has happened worldwide, is that people have been infected with this same madness. What reads to you as delusion and nothing but meaningless criminality has been read as clarity and meaningful resistance by others both here and in Palestine.
And so I end with my own reading of events. I refused to turn my back on Palestine and this solidarity encampment in the face of violent state repression because from the very first day I arrived at camp, my reality was broken. I saw proof that a better world was possible, and proof that my comrades and I had the power to make it stay. If you believe that crushing one encampment and brutalizing protesters will impact the truth of what we have done, which was to carry out what has so far been a week-long assault on the colonial-capitalist reality under your defense, then the failure of recognition falls on you. May the force of that fall shake your reality until it also shatters.
submitted anonymously