Three hundred San Francisco State University (SFSU) students and their eight elected bargaining reps faced one campus president and two aides out on the student center plaza, a hundred feet from the campus’s Palestine encampment. This was open bargaining on a scale that matched the best of the labor movement, and it took an exceptionally democratic student Palestine movement to make it happen.

In the wake of a decade of mass protests and public occupations, the Palestine campus encampments that have spread across the country in the last few weeks have unique potential for the kind of democracy that grows lifelong organizers. More than Occupy Wall Street, the campus movements have united on focused demands at direct targets: disclosure and divestment of college profiteering off apartheid, and an institutional defense of free political speech. And more than the Bernie Sanders campaigns or even the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) post-2016 boom, the campers at each school are all in one place, able to workshop politics and strategy together from dawn to dusk. They have forced national attention on Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and built support from unions that are now promising to defend free speech for Palestinian freedom with picket lines.

Beyond what they are able to win from university brass, student movements have an immense power to help thousands of young people develop political organizing chops for the long haul. Despite cruel repression from administrators and police, the current student uprisings for Palestine have the potential to swell the ranks of labor and left organizers for decades to come — helping build the working-class movements that might ultimately force an end to Israeli occupation and apartheid.