College gives students a chance to figure themselves out and find their purpose. For the past two years, Palestinian-American students have been doing those things while bearing witness to ongoing violence against their community in Gaza. One DePaul University senior says the experience has tired her to the bone, but she says it has helped her find her voice.
Henna Ayesh shared her story with WBEZ’s Lisa Kurian Philip.
When Henna Ayesh arrived at DePaul University, she was anxious about speaking in front of a classroom. Growing up in a mostly white Chicago suburb, she had gotten used to hiding her Palestinian identity.
But at DePaul, Ayesh found an entire community of Palestinian-American students. With their help, she said, she learned to embrace her identity and celebrate her culture. She learned it’s a way of telling her campus and the world, “We’re still here.”
“I honestly don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t Palestinian, because … I make it my entire personality,” says Ayesh, now 22.
As a freshman, she decided to major in political science in part because she noticed a dearth of Palestinian voices in the field. She also joined DePaul’s chapter of the Palestinian advocacy group, Students for Justice in Palestine. She said at that point the group mostly organized cultural events.
But during her sophomore year, Ayesh said, the group shifted gears. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage, Israeli authorities say.
Israel responded by bombing Gaza and launching a campaign to eliminate Hamas and bring back the hostages. With support from the United States, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in less than two years, according to the Gaza health ministry. The United Nations recently declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Israel denies the accusation.
“As a Palestinian living in diaspora … you feel the guilt of, ‘How am I letting my people go through that?’” Ayesh says. “‘How am I living in America and my tax dollars are going and funding this occupation?’”
Ayesh said she and her fellow Palestinian-American students struggle every day knowing their country is sending bombs to Israel that are being dropped on their fellow Palestinians in Gaza.
“That guilt also came with more motivation,” Ayesh says. “‘I have the privilege of being in America … so what am I going to do about it?’”
Organizing on campus and for the encampment
In the fall of 2023, Ayesh and members of Students for Justice in Palestine began tabling and protesting nearly every week on campus. Ayesh said their goal was to inform their classmates about the history of Palestine and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Those efforts led up to May 2024, Ayesh said, when she helped organize one of the longest-standing pro-Palestinian encampments in the country on DePaul’s quad. Different student groups from across campus came together to demand their university divest from educational institutions and companies supporting Israel. DePaul officials refused the demands and, after 17 days, sent Chicago police to dismantle the demonstration.
Still, Ayesh considers the encampment a turning point in her education. She was tasked with speaking with journalists and holding press conferences.
“The same person who could barely speak in front of … the classroom, [who] had anxiety even with presentations … was able to speak in front of other people and mics and do press conferences,” Ayesh says. “The organizer that I became after the encampment was an entirely brand new person.”
But speaking up has come at a cost. The conservative website Canary Mission doxxed Ayesh and falsely accused her of supporting terrorists. Another DePaul student posted videos of her on Instagram and YouTube blaming her for alleged antisemitism on campus. In the spring, DePaul’s president accused the group she now leads, Students for Justice in Palestine, of the same while testifying before Congress.
“There’s a difference between criticizing an actual state and criticizing certain students or specific people,” Ayesh says in response. “We made the argument that although [students] might feel uncomfortable, that’s very different than feeling threatened and unsafe. Obviously that didn’t go well.”
DePaul officials banned Students for Justice in Palestine from campus and from using the university’s social media handles last year. Depaul officials said an Instagram post by the group criticizing Israel constituted harassment and discrimination.
‘We have to step up even more’
The ban continues this year. Ayesh said the limitations make engaging with her classmates difficult.
She said that’s tough when so many international students who have supported the group in the past no longer feel safe doing so publicly. The Trump administration has targeted foreign students who support Palestine for detention and deportation.
“Those of us who are in the position to be able to still … be within these activism spaces, I think that we [have] to step up even more,” Ayesh said.
Going into her senior year, Ayesh said, she is drawing inspiration from the resilience of Palestinians she met during a recent trip to the West Bank — her first to visit her parents’ hometown near Ramallah.
Israeli settlers have killed Palestinians there. Everywhere she went, Ayesh said, she met people grieving loved ones.
“We met a random mechanic, and he’s like, ‘Look across the street. My brother just died in that building,’” said Ayesh, who noticed there were still bullet holes in its outer walls. “They would be telling these very crazy and traumatic stories but they were saying it as if it was normal, because that’s become their new normal.”
Ayesh said people often ask if she’s scared about being expelled or even detained, given the increasingly restrictive environment for pro-Palestinian speech.
“Nothing scares me more than the ways in which I saw my administration react to my people in Palestine … dying and going through an ongoing genocide, and them working even harder to suppress us,” Ayesh said. “No degree is worth the blood of my people.”
Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @LAPhilip.