Description
With the beginning of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestine solidarity is emerging as a distinctively internationalist endeavour, connecting the struggle against local forms of oppression such as racialized police brutality, occupation and neocolonialism globally – as in the case of the wave of student encampments and the broader movement that activists have embraced under the denominator of global student intifada. That being the case, activists are subject to divide-and-conquer strategies that pit supposedly naïve, good-willing white students against racialized figures of international or non-students and/as ‘outside agitators’. In the Netherlands, municipalities and the police routinely ban demonstrations and implement security checks under the pretext of such violent agitators allegedly trying to ‘hijack’ peaceful protest.
In this paper, I offer an analysis of this division through Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s notion of ‘unchilding’, which I contrast with what I call the ‘unadulting’ of students. Departing from participatory and autoethnographic research, I then address the queer-feminist imaginaries of anticolonial resistance, mutual aid and care as practiced in the encampments, and how they embrace the figure of the ‘outside agitator’ in a gesture against the whitewashing, pacification, and depoliticization of resistance and Palestine solidarity. In a last step, I reflect on the implications of this deliberate, queered positionality of the outside agitator for migrant, non-white, non-Western political subjectivity in the Global North as the genocide continues to unfold.
