The Student Movement Turns to Hunger Striking to Call for Justice in Palestine

Today’s episode is a pointed reminder that this climate of intense fear and repression is not achieving its primary goal of forcing people to retreat, hide and silence themselves. On campuses around the country, people continue to stand up, fight back and speak out. At the University of Oregon, students initiated a hunger strike this week. Now as we speak, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have somehow managed to survive Israel’s scorched earth siege and bombing are being deliberately starved to death.

On Wednesday night, May 21, I spoke with four hunger strikers at the University of Oregon, including Cole, Sadie and Efron, all undergraduate students at the University of Oregon and members of Jewish Voice for Peace UO and Phia, a Palestinian American undergraduate student at the University of Oregon who was organized with JVP on the hunger strike and is currently on hunger strike herself. Cole, Sadie and Efron had just completed a two day solidarity hunger strike before we recorded our episode. Here’s my conversation with Phia, Cole, Sadie and Efron, recorded on May 21.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

MA: The United Nations has warned that nearly 500,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger right now. I wanted to kind of connect that to what y’all are feeling right this second. Could you just tell listeners a bit more about what it feels like, the hunger? What does your body go through? 

Phia: It’s been interesting because I’m only three days in, which is the average amount of time that people in Gaza go between meals. So what I’m experiencing, I’ve been putting it in the context of this has been people’s everyday for months. And, it’s really unimaginable in the West. We don’t really have to contend with this type of hunger and starvation, especially when used as a weapon. In a lot of cases, we have the privilege to not have to experience that. But that doesn’t mean that the symptoms of hunger don’t exist. And I think that that’s what the purpose of this type of action is. I feel it in my body. I wake up and I’m tired. Every single meal time, because it’s drilled into us since we’re young, that morning is breakfast, afternoon is lunch, and nighttime is dinner. And something feels immensely off when, when there’s not that consistency. On top of that, culture has a very specific connection to food as it relates to hospitality. And I think that Israel’s starvation of Gaza is not only harming them physically, but it’s starving their souls in a way that is cultural erasure. 

Cole: I had an experience last night that I’ve been thinking about, where I was just moving a trash can, and I hit my ankle on it, not particularly hard, and it hurt so badly. Not eating changed how I felt the physical sensation… I cannot imagine being in an actual war zone with bombs flying and buildings crumbling and bullets flying. It’s genuinely unimaginable. So that’s been something I was thinking about. And then, just functioning gets difficult. Thinking about things in detail, making plans, is hard. The brain fog sets in. Headaches were probably the most common thing, like all day, a headache and your muscles ache like walking around, your muscles hurt as if you had worked them out, even though you’re just walking and I mean, imagining running from something like that is just unbearable.

MA: Could you say a little more about the demands, the hope of what you can get the university to do by taking this drastic action, and what you see happening here with hunger strikes occurring not just on your campus, but on campuses, increasingly, around the country? 

Phia: Seeing other students go on hunger strike across the country has been absolutely inspiring, especially as it relates to food as a human right, and Palestine specifically, has a long history of hunger striking. Prisoners in Israeli prisons used to be called ​“salt” and ​“water” in Arabic, because that’s what they would sustain on. So, it’s been incredible to see this tactic specifically just take off among the student movement. And I think it also is for the reason of like, tactically, like logistically, it is a good move, because it allows us not only to talk to admin and negotiate with them on some of the things, at least on our campus…it also allows us to leverage this power to connect our struggle and our movement and this action to our state representatives. One of our biggest demands is that we really, really want to meet with all state of Oregon representatives who do have the political power to put pressure in the right places, to get an arms embargo and to get the blockade ended. 

Cole: I think sometimes it comes off as an emotional appeal. This is not an emotional appeal to administrators. They do not care if their students are hungry. They do not care if they call the police in riot gear on their students. What they care about is their bottom line, and the publicity that the hunger strikes bring is what’s so essential to hurting that bottom line. And so that’s why this tactic now, we hope will work. 

Sadie: I think it’s really, it’s very telling how they’re responding to this and in what ways they truly care about their students…they often respond and say that they’re only in disagreement [with student action] because they support students right to free speech, but in the name of Jewish safety, this shouldn’t be something that we should allow on campus. And I feel like by using this tactic, it’s a good way to kind of show them that this isn’t about Jewish safety. This is about them investing in the genocide of so many Palestinians.

MA: As three Jewish undergraduates, members of Jewish Voice for Peace, who just engaged in a solidarity hunger strike for Gaza, what would you want folks to know about what’s really happening on campus? 

Cole: I get unspeakably disgusted thinking about this and angry, because this administration that works with Elon Musk, who did a Nazi salute on TV, and they want to use antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on protests that are fighting to end an ongoing genocide. They want to use antisemitism as an excuse to deport immigrants, when Jewish Holocaust refugees were turned around at the US border. It’s disgusting. It has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It has everything to do with enshrining power and preventing protest and preventing free speech.

Sadie: Yeah, completely agreed. I also find it really disgusting, and it’s also not reflective of all Jewish students on campus. They don’t listen to all Jewish students on campus. They pick and choose. There are multiple Jewish organizations on campus…But they don’t consider the fact that there is an organization on campus that is an anti-Zionist Jewish organization, and they don’t listen to us or ask us, or consider the fact that, maybe not all Jewish people, think that protesting on campus in solidarity with Palestine is antisemitic. 

Efron: Trump just wants to inherit power. He’s more than okay to use Jews as a ploy, to use this to continue his fascism and white supremacy. This isn’t new. We saw this in his previous administration. He’s just using this as a way to continue. I wish I was surprised by what I’m seeing, but I’m not. They’re obviously showing who they are, we should respond back to show who we are as Jews. I will not stand for this. And if I have to put my body on the line like the rest of my fellow friends here, I will do that.

MA: Phia, I want to also give you a chance to hop in here as well. What do you want to say to folks out there who are pushing this, this narrative…what do you want people to take away from this, to counter that narrative that this movement represents a threat to Jewish safety and identity?

Phia: I think that there’s a real danger in the conflation that we see right now between Zionism and Judaism, and it’s important to remember that Judaism has always like been a part of Palestinian land, as much as Islam, as much as Christianity. Jerusalem has always been a hub for all three of the Abrahamic religions. That was never an issue until Zionism. Zionism was the thing that fractured the diversity of religion that was working for generations. And I think that isolating Zionism as the root cause and identifying the ways that we can criticize Zionism for its use, or its weaponization of Judaism as a shield and a weapon, the ways that we can criticize it for that are important for protecting our Jewish students, like sincerely.

MA: Do you have any final messages for folks out there, folks on your campus and beyond. What do you want to communicate to them about what they can do to help?

Efron: Honestly, when I think about the national student movement and how these hunger strikes have occurred, the amount of cross student solidarity that I’ve seen is insane, people are reaching out to us like I never expected this. But, then I thought, okay, the solidarity between us is amazing, but how can we create solidarity among people in the West? Because clearly, they’re not paying attention, and we need to bring it back to Palestine. I mean, as we’re speaking, the occupied West Bank is being annexed. It’s about Palestine and Gaza and like, we really need to bring that back to the people of the West. They need to listen, and they need to act.

Phia. I think I would finish with the reminder that we will never understand what it feels like to be under constant bombing, under constant threat of displacement and murder, but we can understand a fraction of what the hunger feels like, and we can echo the emptiness of their stomachs and use that as our power and our advocacy. And I’d also just encourage people not to look away it is really, really difficult to be completely conscious and aware of what we are responsible for as Americans, and what the United States of America is culpable for, especially in Gaza, but to look away is complicity point-blank, and yeah, it is our moral imperative to make sure that we are not abandoning our fellow humans while they are undergoing the crime of all crimes.