UCLA Student Organizers Publish Militant Zine Calling for Escalation, One Year After Campus Clashes
Executive Summary
A newly released zine by UCLA organizers marks the one-year anniversary of the 2024 Palestine solidarity encampment with an unapologetically militant retrospective. The publication praises violent resistance, denounces liberal pacifism, and outlines a confrontational strategy for future protest, just as tensions flare again on campus following fresh arrests and administrative crackdowns.
Analysis
The zine, Advancing the Line: Reflections on the One-Year Anniversary of the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment, is an incendiary document authored by a self-described militant who participated in the 2024 encampment. Published under the name “Unity of Fields,” it sharply criticizes both liberal and institutional narratives that portrayed protesters as passive victims. Instead, it frames the encampment as a warzone, celebrating violent clashes with pro-Israel counter-protesters and law enforcement as transformative moments of “militant discipline.”
The zine explicitly rejects nonviolence as a moral or strategic principle. It calls for escalation, offensive tactics, and mass confrontation against the “university, the Zionist entity, and global imperialism.” The author also derides peaceful organizing efforts and consensus-driven activism, casting horizontalism as a liberal hindrance that weakens revolutionary movements. The text repeatedly celebrates injuries sustained and inflicted during battles, equating physical risk with ideological commitment.
This publication comes at a moment of renewed friction on the UCLA campus. On May 1, 2025—exactly one year after the original encampment—pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempted to screen a film about the previous year’s events. Police dispersed the crowd and made several arrests, underscoring the administration’s now more proactive stance against potential encampments. UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Campus Safety declared that future camps would not be tolerated.
Meanwhile, two pro-Palestinian student groups were suspended in February 2025 after allegedly vandalizing the home of UC Regent Jay Sures. Despite these actions, most students arrested during the 2024 protests avoided criminal charges, suggesting a discrepancy between legal accountability and the university’s internal disciplinary posture.
The zine also condemns the framing of the encampment in terms of mutual aid, joy, or symbolic resistance. It argues that romanticizing solidarity obscures the true lesson of the protests: that militant confrontation is the only meaningful response to what the authors label as genocide and imperialist war. The document demands a renewed student movement rooted in confrontation, strategic escalation, and anti-police ideology—urging a departure from the “toothless” liberalism it claims has overtaken the Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S.
The publication’s tone, content, and timing appear designed to provoke—not merely to commemorate. It is a calculated call to arms that will likely deepen polarization on campus, and it will almost certainly be weaponized by critics who argue that student activism has crossed into extremism. For university administrators and law enforcement, the zine presents both a challenge and a justification: a public declaration that further escalation is not just likely, but intended.
