Three Wednesdays ago, on April 17, I reached the Columbia University campus hours before my scheduled class at the journalism school. The sky was overcast, but the sun shone through, and a spectacle had emerged on the campus lawn. Students had set up dozens of tents in front of Butler Library, a landmark in the university’s urban campus. They labeled the installation the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and gathered together among the tents, singing and chanting.
The students were armed with clear demands and a plan: They were going to camp out on the lawn and refuse to leave until the university divested from companies and institutions that profit from Israel’s actions in Palestine, which human rights organizations have termed as apartheid and genocide.
Since October last year, as the death toll in Gaza reached tens of thousands, Columbia University’s students have seen a familiar pattern of policing and arbitrary restrictions in response to protests on campus. These restrictions came to a head on April 30, when hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear entered the campus and arrested 109 students. The previous night, students had broken into and occupied an academic building, christening it “Hind’s Hall” after a six-year-old girl whose body was found riddled with Israeli bullets 12 days after she had made a distress call to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
This marked the second time Columbia President Minouche Shafik had authorized the NYPD to enter campus and arrest her own students within a span of two weeks.
Harrowing visuals emerged from Columbia and made international headlines during the first round of arrests on April 19. Far from ignoring the student protests, Columbia suspended every single student participating in the encampment, rendering them trespassers. Over 110 students were arrested and escorted away from campus. Most of these students were undergraduates. Many of them are teenagers.
In a rare display of restraint, the NYPD clarified that the students arrested were “peaceful, and offered no resistance whatsoever.”
Everyone saw the photos. Concerned friends and relatives around the world messaged my classmates asking about the arrests. Even a Gazan journalist I’ve been in touch with sent me videos — from my own university campus — over WhatsApp.
I don’t think Shafik realized, in that moment, what she had done for the Palestinian cause.
After the first round of arrests, the protests took on a life of their own. Hundreds of protestors showed up to Columbia, every day, outside its gates. Students across the city and country set up encampments of their own on their college campuses. South Asian student groups performed raas, bhangra, and bharatanatyam at the encampment, wearing keffiyehs in solidarity.
The protests took a life of their own in other ways, too, causing a chaotic media frenzy. The American media has been hyper focused on “antisemitism” on campus protests. But what I witnessed was quite the opposite. I watched as dozens of students — many of them Jewish — gathered together to observe a Seder for Passover. The food served at the encampment even had the option of kosher meals.
Jewish students were protesting the war on Gaza with a clear message: not in our name.
But soon after, I read the Wall Street Journal refer to the movement as “Israel-Hamas” protests, completely discrediting the students’ clear and nuanced demands. I read, aghast, as the White House condemned “blatant antisemitism” on college campuses.
This was a familiar pattern. I had seen it during the student protests that rocked India in 2019, against a discriminatory citizenship law that would grant fast-track citizenship to refugees from India’s neighboring countries, except Muslims.
It seems impossible for the establishment to imagine that the thinking youth could be fighting a battle on moral grounds. Students who participate are labeled mobs, fringe groups, even terrorists. Instead of ignoring them, the media works overtime to delegitimize them, and enables the police to violently crack down on the protests.
This is possibly the most momentum the pro-Palestine movement in the United States has gained in decades, and the movement is being led by teenagers who cared not about suspension or arrest, but a cause larger than them.
Israel has now begun its ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost tip of the Gaza strip into which over a million Palestinians have been pushed, with nowhere else to go. Nearly 35,000 Gazans have been killed in less than seven months. More than 75,000 have been wounded. Many of them are children.
The students have not forgotten what they were fighting for.
On May 1, the night after the second round of arrests, protestors projected light and text from the street onto the outside of Hamilton Hall, the building that had been occupied by students. “No rest till Columbia divests,” the text said. “Hind’s Hall Forever.”
On May 6, Columbia and Barnard students painstakingly stitched a quilt together with the handwritten names of thousands of people who have been killed in Gaza. The undergraduate students who still had access to Columbia’s locked-down campus silently laid this quilt in front of the iconic alma mater statue.
“We will honor all our martyrs,” the quilt spelled out.
Having cleansed its campus of protestors, Columbia has now canceled its commencement ceremony, too. But it has failed to cleanse its campus of protest.
