“The conflict over Palestine is unusual in many different ways, principally of course because Palestine is not an ordinary place.”

–Edward Said, “Introduction,” Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, p. 1.

“Direct action,” in activist parlance, is a form of public protest to induce some party to meet one’s demands–a demonstration, a sit-in, a disruption. Some direct actions (not all, obviously) involve trespass of some kind. What counts as trespass in any given context, particularly a university campus, can often be a confused and confusing affair. So I’m restricting attention in this post to the cases in which it’s clear that a given action commits trespass (is “trespassory”). Given all that, I want to make a case that pro-Palestine activists should stop engaging in direct actions that involve trespass. But first, a few clarifications.

For one thing, in opposing trespass right now, I’m making a strategic claim, not passing adverse moral judgment. As a purely moral matter, setting aside any strategic issue, trespass by pro-Palestine activists is perfectly justified–indeed, more than justified. A university that’s invested in US or Israeli military institutions, and has indicated no willingness to divest from them (or disclose its investments in them), is complicit in or collectively responsible for what those institutions are currently doing in Palestine. Since those institutions are currently engaged in aggression, conquest, ethnic cleansing, and/or genocide in Palestine, trespass is the least of what the universities (particularly their administrations and trustees) deserve. They deserve far worse.

It can’t be stressed enough that an institution that knowingly participates in genocide etc., even by way of mere investment in it, has, by its own actions, made itself a legitimate military target for the victims of that genocide, or their defenders. Not only can it not legitimately complain when people trespass on its property, but it can’t legitimately complain if someone drops a bomb directly on the main administrative building, shoots up the ROTC center, or assassinates the president. I’m not directing anyone to do that, by the way, I’m just saying: universities can’t claim non-combatant immunity if they are knowingly making a substantive causal contribution to a war of annihilation.

In short: If you don’t want to be blown up, don’t play a role in other peoples’ being blown up. But if you insist on playing such a role, don’t complain when the war comes home to you. There’s no reason it shouldn’t. If the universities of Gaza can be blown up on supposedly military grounds, so can the universities of the West.

In opposing trespassory actions right now, I also don’t mean to be condemning or arguing against past actions that involved trespass. I have (for instance) no objection to the Gaza Solidarity Encampments of last year, whether the encampments counted as “trespass” or not. I was at Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring just about every day, for hours a day, and was both glad and grateful to be there. In general, I agree with the assessment offered by “The Encampments,” the documentary film focused on Columbia’s version of the solidarity encampments. The Gaza solidarity encampments were a rare expression of nobility on American college campuses, in drastic contrast to the moral mediocrity that generally reigns there.

Finally, my claim here is specific to the pro-Palestine movement. It’s not intended to apply to other movements, like the movement in favor of migrant rights, abortion rights, or against fossil fuels. There are complex reasons why trespass works better in the one set of cases than in the other, which I can’t fully explain in a single blog post.

For present purposes, I’ll just say that I’m delimiting the scope of my claim in this post rather than giving a full explanation for the delimitation. I acknowledge that readers will be right to wonder why I’m less opposed to trespass in the non-Palestine cases, and clearly opposed in the case of Palestine–especially since I’ve just finished saying that I regard the places being trespassed on in the Palestine case as legitimate military targets. I know that sounds paradoxical. For now, all I can say is, I’m at least skeptical of trespass in these other cases (though not literally opposed), but more fundamentally, I regard the two sets of cases as relevantly different. For now, I’ll leave it there. 

What I want to say is that in my view, the pro-Palestine movement has at this point maxxed out on trespass. You max out on trespass when engaging in it, whatever its previous success, now tends to bring diminishing returns and becomes self-defeating. Consider two narrowly practical reasons why this is the case.

A first reason has become plain from recent events at Columbia, Yale, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. If you engage in direct action, it’s practically a certainty that you’ll suffer seriously adverse consequences. You’ll be suspended, expelled, deported, terminated, arrested, and/or beaten up. You’ll then be forced to deal with the consequences of one or more of these things. To the extent that you are, you are hors d’combat as far as activism is concerned–out of commission.

The pro-Palestine movement is small. It has very little support as a movement in this country, and very few hard-core participants. It can’t afford further decimation. We can’t afford to have some significant proportion of our members diverting their energies to side battles waged for sheer individual survival. For one thing, most of these battles will be lost. For another, they’re enormously expensive in time, labor, duress, and money.

And it’s not a matter of having a “safety net.” No safety net will stop the fall for most people on the receiving end of some concerted legal or administrative action. A defense lawyer is not a magic potion out of Hogwarts. Once you’re charged with trespass, the prosecution holds most of the cards. Lawyer or not, chances are, you’ll lose your case. Once you lose, the loss could well follow you forever. If that happens, the losses are not just losses for you, but for the movement as such. In limiting yourself, you’ve limited the good you can do for the movement. It’s not fair, but it’s the way the world is structured, and we have no choice but to acknowledge this fact and act accordingly. Trespassory direct action is a kind of one-and-done. Once an activist engages in it, they’re done.

A second problem is that the cost-benefit calculus of trespassory direct action is right now not a favorable one. Maybe it was a year ago, but it isn’t now. Maybe it is if you’re Ras Baraka protesting ICE’s presence at Delaney Hall in Newark,* but not if you’re a student activist protesting complicity in genocide at Brooklyn, Yale, or Columbia. Advocates of trespassory direct action seem to think that because it gets press coverage, it’s a good thing. The underlying assumption seems to be that any coverage is better than none.

But this is doubly wrong. First of all, it’s not true that direct action (trespassory or not) always gets press coverage. Most direct action is ignored: the press is not on our side, and generally has no incentive to cover what we do unless it thinks it can use our actions against us. Beyond that, even when direct action gets press coverage, it’s not true that the coverage it gets is a good thing simply because it’s coverage. Bad coverage can be worse than none.

Right now, every direct action in favor of Palestine (trespassory or not) gets re-described as anti-Semitism. There is a concerted, systematic, institutionalized campaign in the United States to destroy the pro-Palestine movement through repeated acts of defamation, distraction, and repression (termination, litigation, suspension, expulsion, arrest, deportation, violence). This is not a “conspiracy theory.” It’s an obvious, documented reality. And the sad fact is, it’s worked. This is why (for instance) a workmate of mine can say, out loud, that he thinks that all Palestinians are terrorists and should be killed. This is a widespread view in the United States. Until we fix that, direct action will do little work for us, and trespassory direct action will work against us. It’ll simply work to reinforce the belief that we’re a bunch of terrorists and neo-Nazis. It doesn’t matter how insane that belief is. What matters is how widespread it is.

Cecilia Culver, George Washington University, May 17, 2025

When you take direct action, you do so by putting yourself in the public spotlight. But unless you’ve prepared the public to draw the right inferences from your action, there’s a good chance that they’ll draw all the wrong ones. If the only or dominant inferences they’re set up to draw are negative, every direct action you engage in will become self-defeating. In that case, every time you take action, you’ll be described a certain way by those who control the narrative. Every time you’re described that way, an impression will be reinforced that you are that way. The stronger the impression, and the more negative it is, the more you’ve defeated yourself in the very domain where you need to prevail–mass public opinion.

The fundamental variable here is not who wins the militancy competition, or whose direct action is most risky and daring, but whose narrative prevails with respect to mass public opinion. A movement has to win at the mass narrative level before it can win at direct action. It can’t use direct action to re-structure the mass narrative. Direct action is direct action. It’s not a direct lever by which to re-structure a fucked up narrative.

If you haven’t won at the mass narrative level, but your adversary has, then your direct action feeds into your adversary’s narrative. It simply confirms that you’re the kind of people who violate rules, norms, and the sanctity of law without having properly explained why. To do this is to put your efforts into the hands of your adversaries. It permits them to explain why, and permits them to get away with propaganda and lies by way of explanation. That’s what’s currently happening.

I understand that many advocates of the Palestinian cause would be offended by the preceding way of putting things. What could be more obvious, they might say, than that genocide is evil and must be stopped? I get that. I agree with it. But I’m not the target audience. The target audience consists of the people who neither get it nor agree with it. And you can’t reach or convince such people simply by trespassing, or creating an encampment, or disrupting a speech, and hoping that you’ll convince them through the moral ardor and sincerity of your actions. You won’t. They’ll ignore or condemn you, then call the police and have you arrested.

You also can’t convince them by the sheer accumulation of atrocity stories. Thousands upon thousands of such stories have now been accumulated by assiduous compilers. They certainly have moved public opinion to some degree, but not to the expected degree. The underlying question is why. Why is American mass opinion not moved to the expected degree by revelations about the atrocities being committed by Israel in Palestine, with American help? Until we have an answer to this question, and it becomes widespread, direct action will fail. 

One reason we’ve not been able to move mass opinion is that we haven’t been allowed to reach it. We’ve been shut down and censored. I get this, but that’s why we should seize the free speech mantle from both the Right and confused, hypocritical liberals and centrists, and claim it as a guiding principle of our own movement. To borrow a phrase of Norman Finkelstein’s, a Free Palestine Requires Free Speech. Saying so, and meaning it, will go a longer way than any particular act of trespass.  

So there’s my plea. Graduation is around the corner, and the temptation will be there to engage in direct action on campus. In and of itself, that’s fine. Do it, by all means.

The temptation will also be there to trespass. I can’t literally condemn that. Part of me thinks that trespass and disruption fall too far short of what really needs doing. But the more pragmatic part of me thinks: The fight for Palestine is the fight of our lives. It’s not simply a fight for Gaza or for Palestine, or even for the Middle East. It’s a fight over what it means to be human, and what it means to live in a civilization that respects the claims of humanity as such–without exception clauses, or equivocations, or attenuated forms of religious dogma, or excuses driven by millennia of guilt and millennia of special pleading, and millennia of accumulated civilizational neuroses.

Zionism is just the tip of the iceberg of a form of sociopathy that haunts the whole of Western Civilization from its beginnings. It’s there in the Bible, it’s there in the Alexandrian conquests, it’s there in the history of Western monotheism through the Crusades, it’s there in the Renaissance, it’s there in the Age of Exploration, it’s there in the founding of our venerated republics, and in the imperialism on which they’ve flourished for centuries. It’s not just Zionism but the deeper Western dogmas underlying it that must be challenged, uprooted, and neutralized. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It can’t be torn down that quickly, either. 

That’s the real significance of the battle for Palestine. It means that we have to be in this for the longest of long hauls. A thirty-something friend of mine expressed chagrin the other day that there were eighty-year-olds in our movement “still at it.” “It makes me sad,” she said. “How is that progress?” It isn’t. There’s no chance that we’ll win any of the short-term battles before us. That’s not what “winning” means. We have to outlast our opponents in a war of attrition on the only battlefield that ever matters, the battlefield of moral endurance. We can’t sustain ourselves on that battlefield, much less win the war, if we defeat ourselves. Trespass, right now, has become a means of self-defeat. We have to try something else.

*I don’t mean to imply that Baraka actually was guilty of trespass. I don’t think he was.