‘We are family now’
An overnight visit inside MIT’s student-led, pro-Palestinian camp — two days before police arrived
after the first pounding of rain at the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment at MIT soaked the camp’s food and bedding one night, the students built a gutter system by wrapping tarps around cardboard and hung the apparatus using rope.
“we’re engineers,” said Jessica Metzger, a 25-year-old graduate student and one of the dozens who allege MIT has research ties to the Israeli military and wants the university to cut them. “In general, everything is MacGyvered on the spot,” said Quinn Perian, 20, a computer science major and one of the encampment’s core leaders.
Last Saturday, Metzger, Perian, and other MIT students who assembled the camp had no idea that in only two days some of what they built would become undone.
first established on april 21, between kresge auditorium and the Stratton Student Center, the encampment, about the size of a baseball field, had grown to some 30 tents. On Monday afternoon, the university ordered students to evacuate the area within the hour. Shortly after, police arrived, prompting students to tear down the metal fencing the university had placed around the camp.
as of Tuesday afternoon, the encampment was teeming with students. Protesters hung colorful signs along the outside of the reinstalled metal barriers, encasing the area in art. as counterprotesters encroached on the camp to plant Israeli flags into the kresge lawn, students inside remained quiet and peaceful. No tents had been taken down, and protesters had no plans to go home.
In recent weeks, images on cable news and across front pages have shown screaming students and near-riot conditions as the debate over the war in the Middle East has played out on campuses nationwide. But at MIT, the pro-Palestinian encampment had been operating more like a sprawling, well-organized campsite, its residents assigned everyday duties from food acquisition to who stays awake for overnight watch.