In the Palestine Protest Camps

On the first night of Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, April 17, the students pitching tents took a vote. School administrators had informed them via letter that they would be suspended if they did not clear the south lawn before 9:00 PM. Ten minutes before the hour, they knelt in a semicircle on the damp grass, eyes closed, heads bowed. 

“There is no judgment; no pressure. We are together no matter what,” the student organizer counting the vote assured her peers. “If you want to stay in the encampment for another 24 hours, raise your hand.” Dozens of arms shot up in the dim light: the decision was unanimous. The students leapt up and embraced and turned to the hundreds of others picketing around the perimeter of the lawn. “Join us! Join us! Join us!” they shouted. Some did. 

The next day, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik would invite the NYPD onto campus to haul those students to jail and hundreds more would take their place in solidarity, installing a new set of tents on the adjacent lawn. Encampments would begin to pop up at schools across the country, from UCLA to UT Austin to Emory, with students calling on university administrations to end investments that support the Israeli occupation. An anthem would come to bind the protest camps together: “Disclose, Divest; We will not stop; We will not rest.”

I began reporting on the movement at New York City schools last October when reports emerged of students being disciplined for infractions like writing “free Palestine” on a chalkboard or attending “unauthorized” pro-Palestine events. Campus protest culture was different then, with students covering their faces with kuffiyehs and refusing to speak with the press. A current of fear pulsed through their organizing spaces. 

Visiting the protest camps at Columbia, NYU, and City College, I realized how much has changed. Here were students ready to put it all on the line — their careers, their elite educations — and be doxxed, suspended, arrested, and subjected to police brutality, in service of Palestinian liberation. They seem to be drawing strength from the wider movement for Palestine taking shape across the globe, which has expanded and evolved during the genocide in Gaza. University administrators and mainstream news outlets have attempted to use students’ connections to the broader movement to discredit protest camps, arguing that they are run by so-called “outside agitators.” Anyone who has actually spent time in these spaces, however, will find that the students are the ones in charge. (They’re also paying the highest price for this dissent: Shafik cannot suspend a random New Yorker from school.)

Ask a student protester about the reasons for their escalatory actions and risk-taking, and they will point to the ongoing war on Gaza, where over the past seven months, the Israeli military has used U.S. weaponry in its killing of more than 40,000 Palestinians. The encampments in particular come at a critical moment in Israel’s war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced the imminent invasion of Rafah, a place of refuge for more than one million Gazans displaced from their homes in other parts of the Strip. The students have tried repeatedly to center this reality when speaking with the broadcast journalists swarming their protest camps. As Nick Wilson, an undergraduate student suspended from Cornell for participating in the encampment there, wrote:

“In defending himself against charges of disloyalty under the Espionage Act for giving an anti-war speech, [Eugene] Debs says ‘While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.’ Here, Debs espouses the fundamental principle of solidarity, that an injury to one is an injury to all — and that when people are hurting, it becomes a moral imperative for us all to contribute what we can to their liberation.

Earlier this week, Columbia students occupied a campus administrative building and renamed it after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl from Gaza City who was killed by the Israeli military in January. A national spectacle ensued, with the NYPD shutting down West Harlem and brutalizing dozens of protesters before busting through one of the building’s windows, guns drawn, and arresting everyone inside. While news channels like ABC News adopted the administration’s line that the people inside were dangerous criminals unaffiliated with the Ivy League, the student-run radio station WKCR reported a different story while live on the scene. “These are our classmates,” one student reporter noted as they observed the individuals being led away in handcuffs.

The NYPD, for its part, has resorted to its 2020 protest playbook of kettling, tear-gassing, and beating protesters, all with the consent of university administrators. “If you’re thinking about setting up tents any place else in the city, think again,” warned an official in a bizarre video that the department posted on X (formerly Twitter) after clearing out the building. “Colleges will reach out to us and we’ll come there and extract you and take you to jail.” 

It’s hard to imagine any of this brute force working. Just as university administrators have normalized police violence on college campuses over the past several weeks, students have adopted a new form of resistance: linking arms, standing their ground, declaring that they will not stop until their demands are met. They want to know the names of the arms manufacturers their institutions are invested in; they want to cut those ties; they want their schools to boycott Israeli academia; they want Palestine to be free.

Lylla Younes is an investigative reporter and writer based in Brooklyn.