Student with Indian Roots Highlights Palestine at Her Wedding
By Naazish YarKhan
July/Aug 2024
Zahra Basha, a newly minted graduate of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, used her May wedding as a platform against the genocide in Palestine. It made perfect sense, considering she was one of 46 students arrested for protesting on campus. Every place setting at her wedding had the name and age of a martyr, and the program had a designated moment for guests to make dua for their assigned martyr. “Free Palestine” embossed wrappers adorned 650 chocolate coins. Her speech made sure that Palestine was on every single mind during the festivities.
Basha is still shocked at the police brutality she and her peers were subjected to at their school administrators’ behest. It began in response to a peaceful student sit-in on Nov. 17, 2023. “The Regents and UMich administration mobilized not only campus security and police, but also police departments in neighboring counties. They not only kept us from entering the school building, but the way the police handled the situation was inherently escalatory,” Basha recalls. “They were violently brutalizing, handcuffing, shoving students who were peacefully exercising their right to freedom of speech. Students were thrashed on the ground. It caused mass hysteria.”
Among the 200+ protesters, Basha and 45 others were arrested and criminally charged that day. A police officer yanked off her hijab. As PR director for Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE; www.facebook.com/SAFEUmich/), her role has been to record everything — and she has horrific footage of that day. What unfolded that first time has only been the beginning of extremely violent repression of its students.
The injustices against Palestinians have always struck a chord with Basha, particularly as a Muslim with Indian origins who saw the links and connections between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and India’s occupation of Kashmir. Having attended a “very Zionist high school that was always pushing a particular agenda about Palestinians and misconceptions about Muslims,” joining SAFE, once she was at college, was only natural.
When she was a sophomore, SAFE comprised seven board members. “Palestine, then, was an issue that only those in the Muslim community or those affected by it spoke up about,” she remarks. Raising awareness was SAFE’s first order of business. Though tiny in terms of scale, it held annual cultural events, a mock Apartheid Wall demonstration to display the on-going injustice, protests against the Birth-Right trip event on campus, as well as teach-ins about the history of the occupation, how Israel came into being and what the term Nakba means.
Michigan is familiar with large-scale protests and mass organizing in support of Palestine, given that Dearborn is home to a huge Palestinian population. That said, on campus “it was the same people, the same SAFE board members who were mobilizing and organizing. Few others cared to respond or show up.” As a result, the organization faced little backlash from school administrators during her first years on campus. Naturally, all that changed after October 7th. In addition, she had never anticipated the level of police brutality, how violently administrators would crack down on the student movement or how consistently they’d ignore student demands.
She believes the urgency is so much more potent today. The current board has grown to 20 members. SAFE is also at the forefront of a coalition of 69+ student organizations, mainly comprising minority student groups and those centered around civil rights. Beginning in early October 2023, the coalition issued a list of student demands asking the school to take accountability for the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments being encouraged on campus even by the administration. It also continued to call on the school to stop profiting from The Genocide in Palestine and to divest. “It’s our tuition that goes towards the school’s endowment that profits from war, and not just in Israel but across the globe. We continue to demand that the school stop funding the murder of some of our student’s family members in Palestine,” says Basha.
Even as students were being criminally prosecuted, brutalized by the police and doxed, the demand for dialogue was ignored. Even worse, the school responded with policies to repress freedom of speech. This became the spark for the encampments. “The encampments were a physical manifestation of the students’ refusal to be silenced and ignored,” Basha said. What began as a student-led effort burgeoned to include community members who’ve been willing to put their jobs and careers on the line.
On May 22, 30+ days into the encampments, the police used bulldozers and tables to plough through tents and destroy property, tear-gassed and pepper sprayed students. “Even after this next level of violence, our movement has not only grown but been strengthened by our refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. We must remember that the repression we are facing is part of a global hegemonic system to perpetuate colonial agendas and silence minorities,” Basha concluded.
At the time of writing, the UMich administration continues to ignore demands to engage in dialogue.
Naazish YarKhan is a writing tutor and college essay coach. To learn more, visit WritersStudio.us.
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