“They had converted the entire lecture hall into a jail cell.” – Student Intifada I

• Elisabeth Koch
• 1. November 2026

For three years students all over the world have been fighting their universities to divest from the genocide in Palestine. On the 3rd of October, Elisabeth Koch interviewed Galo Lopez, a PhD candidate in History and graduate student worker at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) about the Student Intifada, the repression he and his colleagues are experiencing in the US, and their lessons of resistance against genocide and capitalism. In Part 1, Galo describes the beginning of the student movement in 2023 until his arrest. In the Part 2, he describes his trial and broader strategic considerations.

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etos: Good morning, Galo, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

Galo: My name is Amed Galo Lopez. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, where I am currently a PhD doctoral candidate for History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but I am also now a master’s student of social work at Columbia in New York. Living in New York City is in some way a big change, but actually not too much, because I have come here mainly to learn about organizing from a student perspective — not as in “me as a student“ , but as in “the students of the Intifada“. I am mainly here for that organizing-educational aspect and hope to later use that experience not only in Los Angeles but internationally, since my research is on racial capitalism and the abolition of the prison-industrial complex.

etos: You and I met for the first time in 2022 as striking graduate student workers at UCLA. So I personally know you only as a comrade in struggle. Can you explain, how you experienced the situation at UCLA right after the news of the Al-Aqsa-Flood operation broke on the 7th of October 2023?

Galo: Before we can talk about the timeline and my involvement in what we now call the Student Intifada, we must first speak about my identity as a student and a worker simultaneously. As you said, back in 2022 I got really heavily involved in union organizing mainly focusing on the worker side of my identity. However, in fighting for better wages, better protections, housing, childcare, healthcare and all that, I recognized that the worker can’t be separated from the student. This would become the thread that runs through my experience as a graduate student worker in the Student Intifada.

In October 2023, social media played an important role in bringing the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians to the forefront of the world’s attention. Through that and the subsequent student movement, students at UCLA have become increasingly aware that their tuition is used to fund genocides and imperialist wars around the world, which resulted in students and workers protesting on campus.

etos: What tactics and strategies did students employ in late 2023 to fight for Palestinian liberation? Which avenues did they try to pursue in the beginning?

Galo: The first round of major protest on campus started with the walkout on October 12th 2023. At first we tried to exhaust all the so-called „civil“ tactics: we held teach-ins, started petitions and tried to start conversations with the university administration through marches and vigils, but any attempt at having a cordial conversation with the administration was left unanswered. This created a lot of consciousness among the students about how their tuition finances the US imperialist wars, for example, in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, the Congo…instead of our tuition being reinvested in our education. For institutions like UCLA and Columbia, however, the concern is making more money and therefore investing in the military-industrial complex, warfare and genocide. This is where the cause becomes important for workers as well, because parts of our salaries and our work are equally reallocated to the military-industrial complex.

UCLA’s lack of response to these concerns created the conditions to raise the consciousness in us students and union workers because it established itself as our common enemy using our money and our labor without our consent.

etos: How did Zionists on and off campus react to this nascent mass movement?

Galo: They were not happy. And to understand how this all played out, we have to understand where UCLA is located. UCLA is in the middle of various Jewish communities living in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica, which means that also many Zionists live in these communities. This proximity gives them access to the spaces that the students use. UCLA is a public university, so the Zionists from the surrounding neighborhoods come onto campus, viedotape us, and harrass us at our protests. And even celebrities got involved! With UCLA being in the center of Hollywood, many of the Zionists in Hollywood live close by. When they heard that their Zionist friends were outnumbered and ridiculed at protests, they started social media campaigns and mobilized to UCLA. It was similar at Columbia actually.

etos: In April 2024, students all over the US escalated their protest and set up encampments at their campuses. Can you give us an overview of what happened at UCLA at the time of the student encampments?

Galo: In total there were three encampments. The first and largest started in April and extended into early May. The other two were smaller in scale—after the brutal police raid.

At that first encampment, first we were camping, protesting, holding teach-ins and cultural events in the central square. That quickly attracted the attention of pro-Israel protesters, which did not come as a surprise. However, what they did was very unexpected.

The Zionists staged a concert that functioned as a rallying point for them. They rented a space on campus from the university to blast music and show pictures of crying children to psychlogically wear down especially the Arab students in the encampment. The Hollywood Zionists I mentioned earlier, chiefly among them Jerry Seinfeld, donated to and staged a benefit concert at UCLA on the 28th of April 2024 (etos: find more information about the 5000 dollar donation by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife here), for which they rallied on social media. And permits for using UCLA premises are extremely expensive, so they invested a lot of money into this stunt.

While we were symbolically imitating the refugee camps of Gaza, the Zionists paid thousands of dollars to use the public land of the university for their propaganda. Our camp was funded by us, while the Zionists received resources from other people. It really maps perfectly onto the involvement of the US in Palestine.

This concert was the prelude to the violent mob attacking our first encampment. During the concert, the Zionists came up to the plywood walls of our encampment, threatening us: “Just you wait for tonight, you’re gonna fucking get it!” And two nights later their mob tried to break into the encampment—with masks, protective gear, and improvised weapons. Some of the attackers were completely unknown to us, but some of them we recognized as students from our classes! And we were like: “What the hell? XYZ just hit me with a fucking pipe!” They also threw fireworks and even a scooter over the barricades! That was fucking crazy! Honestly, I see this concert as our equivalent of the January 6th march on the Capitol—our Capitol was the encampment.

The administration was not on our side: despite UCLA paying multimillions of dollars on surveillance, the university still claims that they could not identify the attackers. The next day the Vice Chancellor, Darnell Hunt, came into the encampment with another representative ostensibly to “negotiate” and “express empathy” with us for suffering this attack, but in reality, he threatened us all to leave the premises.

After Darnell Hunt had left we were honestly scared, because now not only did we have outside agitators against us, but the university made their position known as well. In the end, both the psychological and the physical attacks paved the way for the police raiding the encampment on the 2nd of May.

These Zionist attacks, however, rallied a lot of support for our encampment. We even had people coming in who taught us self defense in case there was another attack. And in the end, that is exactly what happened: police officers of multiple California police departments raided the encampment at night. We knew we would be arrested, but we thought the more people we gathered—especially with the union calling for a rallye just outside the encampment—the university would tell the cops to leave. We had a lot of different people, students, union workers, faculty, staff—but the police did not leave. Multiple different police departments were involved, the most brutal among them is CHP (California Highway Police), because they have barely any restrictions on weapons that they are allowed to use. UCPD, LAPD, the Sherriff’s Department from San Diego?! They came from all counties to participate in… beating and arresting students; it was just another club meeting.

One of my disabled friends got shot with a rubber bullett and we had to leave the encampment and watched from the sideline. We were defeated. We only had helmets and kneepads, while they had snipers on the roof of Royce Hall (etos: the main representative building) pointed at our students. Over 200 students, faculty and staff were arrested that night. So many good people. They were kettled into Powell (etos: the undergraduate library building), so that nobody could leave.

That night, I had to pick up students from jail, who didn’t have any family in LA. My friend Bryan said something to me that changed my perspective on that night. He said, “I have to go back!” And I asked him, “Why?” “Because they are my students and I can’t let them get arrested without me.”

etos: And you went back. You were involved in other UCLA campus protests that were violently broken up by police forces. You too were arrested at some point. Can you briefly explain what happened when you went back?

Galo: Yes, there were two smaller encampments after the main one and many additional protests. As I said I had to pick up my students from jail after the first one. They made me drive them to campus the next day, because they had to take a test. That mindset of having to do your work even when you just got beaten up and arrested is so engrained in us. It made me even more furious at the system. And I channelled that anger into organizing: at the second encampment we called for the strike, which was successful!

About 80% of the 20,000 workers, who voted in the strike authorization, voted to strike. The campuses went on strike on a rotating schedule, modeled after the stand-up strikes of 2023 (etos: examples include auto workers in UAW as well as other unions, such as hospitality staff of UNITE HERE), and UCLA was called to stand up on the 28th of May. Our rank and file organizing that emerged from the union’s betrayal in the 2022 strike became particularly important after the police raid. The university initially stalling on deinvestment and actively repressing dissent had rallied up especially us rank and file union workers again. Through this involvement with the encampment from the beginning, organizing for a workers strike for Palestine became a Rank and File project. And after the police raided the first encampment, the union actually authorized a strike vote and then a strike. In this way the deinvestment demand could be connected to labor organizing, something that hadn’t happened at that scale before.

I got arrested at the third encampment, which was a response to a restraining order that the student protestors received from Orange County. Why Orange County? The university attempted twice to get a restraining order from L.A. courts, because we were so disruptive, but both times they failed because it was a legal strike. Apparently UCLA also holds property in Orange County, which is known to be more conservative, so they finally petitioned the court there—and obtained a restraining order against their own students.

Therefore, we protested by setting up a third encampment, whose main focus was a vigil for all the identified martyrs. We wanted to read all their names and assumed it would take roughly the entire workday. We started in Royce Hall, then the cops started kettling us, so we moved to Moore Hall, still continuing to read the names. And again: they came in, they kettled us, moved us, this time to Dodd Hall. At that point it was dinner time, the union kitchen (etos: a mutual aid project emerging from the rank and file workers organizing in the 2022 strike) came in, it was awesome! At one point, I went outside when suddenly the running started: „they’re coming, they’re coming!“ and we ran back inside the building. I grabbed my shield [he gestures with one arm as if holding a shield], and the cops were getting ready. I think it was still UCPD (etos: the university’s own police department), CHP only came in later when everything was over to kick shit around. So UCPD surrounded the hall, blocked all the openings, all the exits, and held their their rubber bullet rifles to intimidate us, and told us to leave. We tried to leave, but where do we go, you know? They pushed us to the other line of cops. They had kettled us.

I was holding an improvised shield to protect my students from the rubber bullets that they started to shoot at us. One even ricocheted and hit my leg. I wanted to throw away my shield then. It was useless against ricochet. But that was when a cop grabbed my shield and another student grabbed my arm and I was pulled in every direction at once. They later charged me with holding a weapon. Another student got booked for “amplified sound”. She had been rushed by a whole mob of cops, when she had tried to leave.

So we were arrested and booked. They had converted the entire lecture hall into a jail cell. We were there for hours, just in a classroom. I remember one of the students being like: “Goddammit, I have to teach here tomorrow!”

Elisabeth Koch

Alle Menschen haben ein Recht auf freien Zugang zu unabhängiger, machtkritischer Berichterstattung. Das wurde mir besonders deutlich, während ich in Ägypten und den USA gelebt und gearbeitet habe und bei Streiks und Protesten, aber auch im Alltag immer wieder mit Polizeigewalt und staatlicher Willkür konfrontiert wurde. Um mich zurück in Deutschland, das zunehmend repressiver wird, an der Bildung einer kritischen Öffentlichkeit aktiv zu beteiligen, schreibe ich seit 2026 bei etos.