Lucy Gellman, Editor, The Arts Paper newhavenarts.org
This is a developing story. It was last updated around 8:35 a.m. Monday April 22, after arrests began in Beinecke Plaza.
Janyce Murphy dipped her brush into a cup of black paint, running it slowly across a length of canvas. Around her, the sound of gentle footfalls mixed with a cappella harmonies and half a dozen conversations. Murphy paused for a moment to study her handiwork, brushstrokes filling in the thick curve of an S. End The Siege On Gaza, read the banner as it sprawled out to her left.
Sunday afternoon, Murphy joined two dozen artists in Yale’s Beinecke Plaza, where hundreds of pro-Palestine student activists began to gather last Monday, and camped out from Friday to Sunday night, in an effort to get Yale to divest from weapons manufacturers. Amidst a teach-in and musical performances, people grabbed paintbrushes and started in on several banners, all of them intended for an April 28 rally on the New Haven Green.
The banners will include a list of demands that Yale students, including 12 hunger strikers, presented as the university’s Board of Trustees met this weekend to select a new Yale president. Among them is a demand that Yale divest from weapons manufacturers, to which the Yale Corporation is allegedly tied through its investment in index funds.
The hunger strike ended Sunday night. On Monday, police arrived to clear the encampment around 7 a.m. As of 6:30 a.m., they had begun to arrest students still in the space. As of 8:30 a.m., 49 Yale students had been arrested.
“I think it’s important to show up,” said Allison Hornak who has hosted artmaking nights for Palestine at their Erector Square studio for weeks, and worked with FOAN Arts, CT for Palestine and Occupy Beinecke to move the banner event downtown. “It’s a chance for makers to meet and come together and see where the points of solidarity and coalition building happen..”
The banners join a creative outpouring of work that has already included signs, kites, and at least one puppet, as well as weekly meetups at Erector Square and a Palestine reading group at Possible Futures. Sunday, attendees fanned out across the slate gray plaza, many catching up with each other as they knelt on the cool, hard ground and got to work.
They included artist-activists like Murphy, a lifelong New Havener who was there to add her voice to calls for a ceasefire. Growing up Irish American, Murphy learned from her mother about the toll of British occupation and colonialism on Ireland’s people, including a seismic loss of life during the Great Hunger of the 1840s and the Troubles in Northern Ireland over a century later.
Generations after her great, great grandparents immigrated, she let that history inform her own understanding of oppression not just in the U.S., but across the globe. She stressed that the story of Gaza doesn’t start or end in October 2023, but is centuries in the making.
Murphy: “The question of Palestine is a question of humanity.”
“The question of Palestine is a question of humanity,” she said. Across the plaza, an a cappella group appeared, and a sweet harmony floated over the space. “I think all people have the right to liberation and dignity.”
Since October 7, when Hamas’ violent and sudden attacks left 1,200 Israelis dead, over 34,000 Palestenians have been killed. That number includes over 12,000 children, some as young as a few weeks old. Meanwhile, Israeli settler violence has continued to escalate in the West Bank.
It was that same sense of unrest that pulled friends Hallie and Karolina (they asked that only their first names be used) to the plaza, where they worked methodically on a banner that read Jews For A Free Palestine in powder-blue chalk. Dressed in a thick keffiyeh, sweatshirt and raincoat, Karolina leaned over the word Free, seeming to study it for a moment before she returned to painting.
Since learning about the encampment last week, she has stopped by several times, she said. “I keep telling myself that I’m gonna rest or take some days, but it’s really hard to rest when this is happening,” she said.
A graduate student at Yale, Hallie added that they have been stopping by every day to support the protesters, even if it’s just a brief visit to the plaza (for a week, daily activities have included a teach-in, musical performances, evening prayers and on Saturday, a Havdalah service to close out Shabbat). Sunday, they painted pink triangles beneath the words Free Palestine, in what would become slices of watermelon rendered in acrylic paint.
As a young Jewish American, “I feel a sense of obligation to counter the narratives that are weaponizing us as American Jews,” they said. Particularly as they go into Passover, which begins at sundown on Monday night and commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the toll of the Israel-Hamas War is weighing heavy on them.
Nearby, 15-year-old Charlotte Luekens filled in the words End U.S. Financing with thick, black lines of paint that glistened as they dried. At home, she said, her family doesn’t shy away from topics like the constant bombardment of Gaza, or the violence that both Israelis and Palestinians have endured since October 7.
While it’s been hard to take in, it has also felt like a defining moment in her life, she said.
“What’s happening in Gaza is not okay and I don’t want to stand by and watch it happen,” she said.
As #OccupyBeinecke has unfolded so close to Passover, Jewish voices at Yale and in the city have spoken in both support of and objection to the action.
Over the weekend, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, the Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain at Yale, and the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven decried the encampment, the latter calling it a “hostile antisemitic environment at Yale University.”
Sunday night, Yale Jews for Ceasefire both acknowledged and pushed back against those statements.
“While we object to and are deeply saddened by the accusation that this protest is anti-Jewish, we also recognize that members of our Jewish community have felt unsafe or uncomfortable because of the demonstrations,” the group wrote in a release Sunday night (read it in full here).
“Part of what collective liberation means to our organization is radical empathy—holding space for those feelings and responding to those who feel that way with compassion.”
