Historian Rachel Ida Buff talks with Frann Michel about connections between attacks on encampments in support of Palestine and encampments of houseless people, as well as attacks on other forms of collective solidarity and the commons, including migrant caravans and water protectors, and on histories of resistance and Indigenous sovereignty. Professor Buff discusses these issues in her essay "The War to End All Encampments: Criminalizing Solidarity" in the January/February issue of Against the Current.
Rachel Ida Buff is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she is also affiliated faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Jewish Studies. Professor Buff is the author of A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: Palabras para Persona en Movimiento (2020), Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century (2017) and other works, including essays in Boston Review, Truthout, Jacobin, Jewish Currents, and other venues.
Also mentioned in the conversation are an article by Winona LaDuke about Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, The Powell Memo, and the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born.
Image credit: "Day 3 UPenn Encampment for Gaza" by joepiette2 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Image description: Outdoors, a lawn full of tents, a crowd of people in the distance, a few people in middle distance with respirator masks and keffiyehs, and, in foreground, signs leaning against a tree: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free" and "Generation after generation until total liberation"