Surfing on a Bush

What I learned on the front lines at the UCLA encampment

In a moment where I felt shakiest, I also felt the strongest. 

It was well past midnight on May 2, 2024, and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) began to push and pull plywood, attempting to tear down the barricades we had erected around the encampment on UCLA’s campus. Someone began chanting, “Hold the line, hold the line!” My friend R and I noticed that a nearby bush was vulnerable. There was no strong barricade in front of it. That’s where they will enter, I quickly realize. We ran over. I swiftly took out my phone with my work gloves from my back pocket and peered at it through my safety goggles to make sure my FaceID was still disabled. Carefully, we climbed this bush, feeling the shrubbery move and flow under our shoes. If any branches cracked, we couldn’t hear them from the chanting and yelling. The first few seconds were devoted to stabilizing myself, getting into a flow with the bush, feeling out the spots that felt most supportive. I have never been surfing, but I imagine this is what it must feel like. Someone passed us some shields made of plywood. R and I locked our free arms, and someone else put pressure on my lower backs to keep us from falling backwards. A swarm of people flocked to the left and right of us for reinforcement. I look back on this moment and remember how well supported I felt. We were holding each other tightly, both physically and psychically, intensely focused on the task at hand: keep the police out. What came next was a blur — some tugging and pulling, more yelling, more Hold the line for Palestine!, more reinforcements, more flashbangs, more stabilizing myself on this bush. 

I glanced around and briefly took in the scene. The world woke up a few hours later to pictures depicting chaos, but what I took in was immense coordination, strength, and agility. This moment had not appeared out of nowhere — for days on end, we had internally built stamina and tactics to offset a number of threats, including a massive mob of Zionists who had attacked us viciously the night before. A few hours earlier, we had successfully pushed out about 30 LAPD officers who briefly broke into the encampment. That moment alone bolstered me immensely. Standing tall with a plywood shield at the front line, I looked into the eyes of every office right in front of me. Just a few feet in front of me was not a throng of armed, uniformed officers. What I saw instead were individuals standing small, cowering with immense fear in their eyes. Those eyes alone did it for me. I kept staring into their eyes — the more I stared, the stronger I felt. Like an orchestra weaving notes together, we pushed, pushed, and pushed until they retreated, humiliated down the steps of the encampment. The cheer that erupted afterwards still makes my heart beat out of my chest.

Back on the bush, the beginning of the end came. I was under no illusion that our encampment would last forever, but I was not thinking about that. I was just trying to surf on a bush and stand tall. My task was yet again simple: stay present, stay strong.

I constantly readjusted my weight, leaning forward, backwards, side to side, moving my hips to prevent a harsh fall. The barricade in front of us was ripped away finally, after several long minutes of strenuous effort by the California Highway Patrol. I noticed the flashbangs again—they must have been going on for 30 minutes. The plywood flew, and an officer’s face appeared in front of me. “Woohoo!” he exclaimed. I didn't have a minute to take in the absurdity of it all—the “woohoo”, the fact that we were facing off with hundreds of cowardly cops, a live-streamed genocide. 

I braced for the inevitable, tucking in my abdomen and drawing a deep breath and exhaling. Before the officer grabbed me, a quiet calm rushed over me. It is hard to put into words the rush of incredible peace and strength I felt. I felt no fear at all. A lifelong asthmatic, my lungs often feel constricted and painful when I feel fear. In this instance, I felt my lungs expanded, relaxed, at ease — yet another indication that I was invigorated, not afraid. It all happened so quickly — as an officer tackled me into the ground, I felt strong. They tightened the handcuffs, I felt tall. To this day, I contend this was one of the top three spiritual moments of my life. 

I ended up in a bus and then a police station with hundreds of other students, faculty, and staff for several hours. I returned home to a nourishing shower and a soft bed. This is light work compared to the thousands of Palestinian detainees in Zionist prisons. A day later, I wondered why my waist felt tender in the shower. As I was toweling off, I glanced at my stomach. Oh, the batons. I suddenly remembered. I chuckled at yet another absurdity — I don’t even remember the batons.

Several weeks later, I passed by the bush on my way to the library and smiled. I took a picture for R: “Nature is (kinda) healing,” I captioned my text to him. 

Over a year later, there is still a fascination and fixation on how the cops beat us up, how our university administration did nothing to protect us, and how violent the Zionist mobs were towards us. While this all is true, I would rather look back on this moment of our movement as a testament of how our collective strength and tactical brilliance applied a new level of pressure on the American empire. This is not just a narrative shift of what happened at UCLA but an urge for us to embody some core assumptions about our movement. We should not be naive: Of course the cops will beat us, of course the university won’t protect us, of course those ideologically aligned with genocide will attack us. Anything that pleads for protection or grace as we face off with the largest imperial power bankrolling and politically backing a genocide is deeply misguided.

I write this narrative to be incredibly clear about one thing that was in abundance at our encampment: strength. We were not victims, we were focused and strong. We were not subjected to violence, we stood tall in the face of it. We were not in the midst of a chaotic scene, we were moving quickly and skillfully to respond to ongoing threats. We were not even “camping out”, we had a physical stand for divestment that the university had to respond to. Our movement for a free Palestine must fight at both the physical and rhetorical level any sense of weakness, helplessness, or passivity. The psychic battle is an important front — arguably the most important front that will sustain militant action. 

My teachers of this psychic battle are many and long preceded the encampment, notably both sets of my grandparents. When I hear stories of the Nakba from my maternal grandparents — who were in Palestine at that time — I do not hear despair or defeat. I hear grief and pain, yes, but I also hear in their voice and see in their actions a resolve to continue life itself. From my paternal grandparents — may they rest in peace — I hear of the many stands they took in south Lebanon protecting life fiercely from Zionist occupation for years. Even after the most recent assault on Lebanon in Fall 2024, their house still stands just miles from the border despite heavy bombing that effectively destroyed 80% of their village. I also remember from many visits the simplicity and beauty of life itself: having lunch together in the garden, collecting eggs and milk, the first sip of coffee after a soft afternoon nap. 

Our fight is a fight for life. Life chose us, and we choose life. I do not mean this in an abstractly poetic way. In Haifa, Nazareth, Lebanon, and Michigan, my grandparents continued to choose life, continued to create life, and continue to stand tall as I write this. Their eyes have seen much, but they choose to continue looking at the past, present, and future with a fervor for living anyway. We are all distressed by this genocide — the body parts and fires and wailing fathers that our eyes have witnessed are beyond comprehension. But what we have also witnessed are our siblings in Gaza choosing life again and again despite it all.

In the moments during which I felt my strength faltering — when I feel the fear constricting my lungs — I look to Gaza to remind me life is possible and worth fighting for. That moving our limbs and mouths and pens and voices and hands is important work. Life is possible until it is not. In between this breath and my dying breath, I attempt life because I see others attempt life too. Somehow, someway, we will move together and build together. Bushes will regrow. Life always finds a way.

We’ll surf a bush if we need to. We’ll stand tall because we have to.