Inside a Free Gaza Campus Hub
Southern California has been a hub of student-led protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. As activists at the and the were reeling after their Free Gaza encampments were violently dismantled, students at California State University of Los Angeles (Cal State LA) were busy on May 2.
YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar visited the new encampment to speak with its organizers, who had erected dozens of tents across from the student union, surrounded by a barricade of benches and tables. Young people wearing masks and keffiyehs sat and prayed, studied, quietly conversed, participated in group activities, and staffed tents dedicated to food and medical aid.
Members of the community who were not enrolled at the school also showed up to offer support. One of the student activists, who chose not to reveal their name, and a community activist named Susana Parra, spoke with Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the encampment. Special thanks to Anna Buss for production assistance.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Ƶ Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 of the same name.
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