Forging Anticolonial Solidarity in the Hour of Genocide: Haki/Pláticas on Complicity, Dissent and Protest in a Belgian University

Drawing on our recent experiences and involvement with mobilisations in campus, this chapter considers the meaning and implications of being university students and workers in this hour of genocide. We address these concerns in the form of a conversation. As university students and workers, we have all participated in the movement, in different ways and with different degrees of involvement. We come from different cultural and class backgrounds, and we are at different stages of our lives and careers, but we all share a commitment to justice for Palestine and against imperialism, colonialism and racism in all its forms. We feel that the conversation format is fitting to both initiate a critical dialogue that helps us to reassess campus protests over the past fifteen months and to contribute to the book's aim of building and sharing undisciplined knowledge in the face of ideological and material constraints in these dark times. To use the format of a conversation is also to pay tribute to the horizontal and democratic spirit and processes we have witnessed and experienced during student occupations across the globe-in contrast with our institutions' lack of transparency, censorship and unwillingness to dialogue. As such this contribution hopes to convey a story that highlights the disparity between the silence and repression imposed by academic authorities and the everyday radical praxis of students and university workers. * On may 7, 2024, as part of a broad international movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people, dozens of students and activists occupied the B building of the université libre de Bruxelles (ulB) in Belgium. The action was a response to the untenable institutional silence and bothsidesism on Israel's genocide in Gaza and was the result of years of mobilisations in campus and across the country to support the Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural Boycott of Israel (PacBI)-with students and faculty advocating for severing relations with Israeli institutions and companies involved in the military occupation of Palestine. during the first general assembly, students renamed the occupied building Walid daqqah in tribute to the Palestinian novelist and longest-serving prisoner in Israeli