Dear Community –
We write this statement to share key updates and reflections we have been undergoing the last several months. This format and brevity are not enough to capture the experiences and lessons we want to communicate. We are at the start of another school year and are picking up collective work so we offer these words to acknowledge our hiatus and as a start to speaking more openly about the, at times challenging, dynamics of coalition organizing. Following in our use of zines as political education tools, we are turning to that medium to delve deeper into these circumstances and hope to finalize it for sharing sometime this quarter.
In early June, Rank & File formally withdrew from the UCI Divest Coalition. Our withdrawal was a painful realization to sit with, one we are still feeling our way through. We developed close co-conspirator relationships with coalition members, working alongside one another to embody our commitment to Palestinian liberation through study and struggle on our campus—and in some cases experiencing the growth of beautiful friendships from our organizing work together. The UCIntifada Gaza Solidarity Encampment was the culmination of months of escalatory actions with the intention of severing the academic and financial relationship between UCI and the Zionist entity. As awe striking as the space was with its political message, the overwhelming support from off-campus community, and its positioning in other student solidarity struggles across the world, it also made clear different understandings of decolonial praxis among the coalition.
We questioned the strategy of negotiating for divestment with a neoliberal university cut from the same settler colonial cloth that permits the genocide of Palestinians and oppression of colonized people across the world. We felt the limitations of identity politics as our attempts to address anti-Blackness, peace policing, and class privilege were mischaracterized as deviating from Palestinian solidarity commitments. We learned how the “liberated zone” we created was unequipped with the tools to de-escalate and prevent the cyclical repetition of carceral logics. We realized we were being harmed by our co-conspirators and we were also harming them; we did not engage with concerns others brought forward regarding our navigation of conflict with tenderness, openness, and patience. Instead, we were ignorant of our positionality as doctoral students when we communicated with undergraduates and community members. For this, we are regretful and take seriously that we must be accountable for our actions. Our departure from the UCI Divest Coalition extends an opportunity for us to reflect on our conduct and practice an embodied accountability.
Our disagreements cannot be reduced to a binary of Rank & File graduate students against the other UCI Divest organizations; it included everyone who participated in the action—students, faculty, and outside community members. To have these conflicts arise at a time of an overwhelmingly stressful direct action when everyday we were dealing with harassment from our school administration and sleeping with the fear of police raiding our encampment was not fair for anyone involved. It was not the condition to give the intricacies of coalition organizing the attention it deserved nor embrace the generative discussions it would have prompted. We were not showing up as our best selves and we could no longer see a path to achieving our political goals in these circumstances.
All Rank & File members had withdrawn from the encampment prior to the Nakba Day escalation and subsequent raid of the encampment that resulted in the arrests of 48 of our community members. Rank & File worked with outside community organizations to provide jail support for everyone arrested. We knew that, despite our state of conflict, our commitment to abolition demands we show up in these moments. After taking time to process and reflect on how we wanted to move forward, we collectively decided to withdraw from this particular student movement. Conflict is a natural dynamic of human connection constantly painted as a state of negativity and aggression. We view conflict as an opportunity for clarity and growth. We have spent the months since engaging in formal and informal transformative justice processes within our own collective as this experience also made clear group dynamics that needed to be addressed. Some Rank & File members have chosen to step away from the collective and we have also welcomed new people. As individuals, we’ve had our own series of conversations with remaining members of UCI Divest. We are still figuring out what accountability looks like on both ends, but we are proud of the tenderness and compassion we are navigating this with—something we didn’t do before.
We do not question the sincere desire for Palestinian liberation among remaining UCI Divest organizers. Rather, we have centered questions of what standing our ideological ground looks like, especially in moments of misalignment with those alongside us in struggle. We hope this informs us how to move forward best when the slaughter of Palestinian life has only gotten more callous and we witness the expansion of Zionist terrorism in Lebanon along with the continued martydom of resistance fighters. We are no longer organizers for UCI Divest actions, but as individuals, we continue to show up to events as we see fit for ourselves and know that our political commitments also extend beyond the university to the other communities that make us whole.
Moving forward, you can expect a more detailed zine about this experience. In the process of putting the zine together, we want to stay away from vague anecdotes while also uphold respect for our UCI Divest co-conspirators and embrace multiple truths. We hope this serves as a resource for institutional memory and other groups across schools as we know our situation isn’t unique. We are also organizing a reading group for the fall quarter to delve into study so we can show up better equipped with the tools necessary to destroy this cruel world and build a better one. In the meantime, we are hosting a screening of The Gaza Ghetto Uprising this Friday 10/4 in SBSG 1321 at 5pm. We invite you to join and share space with us.
We thank everyone who has met us with compassion during this process; we hold ourselves to reciprocating that. We also understand causing harm can mean there are folks who are no longer interested in repair. We extend an invitation to everyone reading this to take up the introspective work we have been in the ways that fit your lives. We hope that more of these raw and vulnerable moments only serve to make us healthier, more militant, and strengthen our global revolution.
Always in unwavering solidarity,
Rank & File Irvine Collective
Rank and File Irvine 
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