Gary Fields: A Life of Activism

Gary Fields is a very politically outspoken Communications professor. One who is engaging and means every word he says. The first time I encountered Fields was in the afternoon of April 2 at an SJP led walkout in response to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil I was covering for The Triton. I stood in a crowd of protestors impressed by his 12-minute speech condemning Columbia’s inaction to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.

“Columbia’s indifference to the plight of Mahmoud Khalil is a metaphor of this broader assault to criminalize protest against the state of Israel and it’s genocide to Palestinians in Gaza,” Fields said.

What was most impactful was Fields’ argument that our own campus could be under a similar threat as Khalil’s, since UCSD has over 8,000 international students,  about 16% of the student body. Two weeks later, Fields’ concerns were justified when 35 UCSD students lost their F-1 visas.

One person I encountered in the crowd of protestors told me, “You should really take his class! He’s amazing.”

In my final quarter at UCSD, I knew that couldn’t happen but I, like the crowd, was drawn by his ability to articulate on-campus concerns to a national level. On that same afternoon, Fields referred to Khalil’s letter from the Louisiana detention center as the “modern version of Martin Luther King’s, Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

I was able to interview him over a morning Zoom meeting on April 18. The 71-year old faculty member is no stranger to speaking about the Israel-Palestine protests. At the beginning of our interview Fields openly said that “If you’re looking for something about me that reveals who I am it’s in the diverse background and experiences that I’ve had outside of academia.”This rings true. Long before coming to UCSD, Fields was a machinist in Chicago, a research director at the Labor Research Group, Inc. in Oakland, and the Executive Director of the Oakland Commerce Corporation.

Although Fields’ background is vast, his main focus has been Palestinian justice. Fields grew up in Chicago in a “Zionist” family. Fields admits he held Pro-Israel points of viewgrowing up. It wouldn’t be until he became a foreign exchange student at University of Kent in Canterbury, England that his worldview shifted.

It was right after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the university had invited an Israeli scholar to speak. But to the dismay of this scholar, Fields recalled a student body of Palestinian students interrogating the scholar.

“There were all of these Palestinian students there who asked the most searing questions. I watched them just absolutely take this individual apart intellectually.”

Fields recalled talking to the Palestinian students afterwards and being “impressed” with their points and the manner they were able to deliver them.

However, it wouldn’t be until 2003, after receiving tenure from UCSD for his publication of Territories of Profit, a novel delving into how communication revolutions have enabled better business practices, would his activist journey begin. Fields was ready for a trip to the sandy beaches of Hawai’i to celebrate, but his friends from UC Berkeley suggested another trip to Palestine under a group called the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (FFIPP). Fields, who had already gotten the tickets to Hawai’i was hesitant, but his Berkeley friends convinced him to switch destinations. It was on this trip in December 2003, that Fields’ whole direction would change.

In his third book, Enclosure, Fields describes his experience traveling to Palestine and seeing the Qalandia barrier. Qalandia is a barrier that was erected in 2001 by Israel that separates the West Bank and Jerusalem. It now serves as a checkpoint for those crossing between Israel and Palestine. 

In Enclosure, Fields writes: “Stationed along the southern perimeter of Qalandia was an elongated concrete wall, its grayish façade of vertically ribbed concrete panels sweeping aggressively across the landscape, partially concealing the building faces on the town’s southern edge. I was familiar with the barrier because it had become something of a news story, though few images of it—even to this day—appeared in the mainstream media. While I had been to the Berlin Wall when it was still standing, I had never encountered such unmitigated power conveyed so forcefully in the built environment.”

Photo of the Qalandia barrier in 2003 from Field’s Enclosure.

Experiencing Qalandia and Palestine as a whole was “mesmerizing and haunting at the same time” for Fields. As a historian and also a geographer, Fields felt he had no other option but to do something.

Since 2003, Fields has wasted no time in beginning to speak out for Palestinian justice. Fields has been a prolific writer on Palestine. He has written numerous articles for peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and reviews such as, Colonization and Dispossession: Zionism’s Imagined Geography, Lockdown: Gaza through a Camera Lens and Historical Mirror, and Ex-Communicated:  Historical Reflections on Enclosure Landscapes in Palestine. His writing on the subject has even appeared in  mainstream media stations like the Chicago Tribune and San Diego Tribune. What sets most of Fields’ written work apart (including Enclosure) is his knowledge of geography and how it relates to the injustice of Palestinians.

“People think [geography] is naming the capital cities and different countries. But really what lies at the center of geographical studies is land and landscape… The struggle between Zionism and the Palestinians is not a struggle over religion. It was a struggle over land, and the resistance of Palestinians to their dispossession of the land.”

Beyond being a geographer and a historian, Fields is also a photographer. Much of his work focuses on Palestine and its real-life environments – especially in zones of conflict.

Fields said that he took up photography because to describe what’s happening in Palestine without visual images would just be “so abstract.”

Because of Fields’ pro-Palestine writing, he has been and still is subjected to claims of “anti-semitism” for his work.

It was just now a year ago that the Pro-Palestine encampment gathered on the lawn right outside of the Student Health and Wellness Center was forcibly dismantled as early as 5 am. Over 64 people from the encampment were arrested on May 6. One of them being Fields.

Fields called the students in the encampment “heroic.” Fields expressed his frustrations over UCSD’s handling of the encampment, stating: “The university is supposed to be a space of free and open expression of ideas, and it should be the rights of assembly and the rights of protests should be respected.”

Since the encampments, Fields continues to teach his COMM courses such as his current course, “Representations of the Israeli / Palestinian Conflict” (COMM 158).

Even as Fields continues to teach COMM courses, his worries still arise with the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine activism. This is a very real concern in light of students like Mahmoud Khalil and the 35 UCSD students whose F-1 visas were revoked. Although it isn’t known if any of the 35 students were active in pro-Palestine protests, there is an eerie similarity to Khalil’s case. 

“The Trump Administration has taken the lead from the Biden administration and has taken it several steps further,” Fields stated in the interview in response to the crackdown. “The Trump administration is using its own anti-immigrant orientation to disrupt the scholarly and intellectual life on our campus… what they’re doing is horrendous!”

In the midst of such uncertainty and fear, Fields has been working on his new book called Imprisoned: Voices and Images from Confinement Landscapes in Palestine. The research in his book is based on Fields’ time in Palestine where he arrived October 6, 2023 – a day before Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups attacked Israel. Fields spent 10 weeks there and returned last year. However, Fields explained how it was difficult to navigate because of the increased security and the heightened tension. Fields named the novel Imprisoned because the state of Israel “has created prison-like conditions on the Palestinian landscape.”

Professor Gary Fields is no stranger to conflict and is a committed ally when it comes to advocating for Palestine. After 23 years teaching undergraduates at UCSD, Fields says he’ll finally be retiring from teaching undergraduate courses after this year and hopes to become a professor of the Graduate division. Fields’ tenacity for Palestinian justice, however, still continues here in San Diego. Being alive during the Civil RIghts era, the Vietnam War, and the South African Apartheid, Fields sees the similarities between previous generations of student activists and current pro-Palestine activists. 

“[College campuses] have been the venues where ideas about justice and injustice have been openly debated and looked at, and this should be no different for us now.”

You can purchase Field’s Enclosure at University of California Press and Territories of Profit at Stanford University Press.

Cydney Macon is Editor in Chief at The Triton.