On a bright Tuesday afternoon, a masked young woman named W stood next to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the center of Columbia University’s campus and condemned the genocide being committed in Gaza by “the violent Zionist settler force.”
“Today we are in great spirits at the Gaza Solidarity Camp. We are united in our cause. We build community. We eat together. We keep each other safe and warm. “We put our principles into action,” W explained to a small gathering of journalists.
The protest would continue until Columbia divested itself of companies that benefit from Israel, including Microsoft, Boeing and GE, W promised.
“We will continue to occupy the West Lawn until our demands are met,” warned a comrade, Kyhmani James.
Hours later, Colombia’s President Minouche Shafik gave protesters a midnight deadline to clear the camp, and New York police officers made preparations to move in. On Wednesday morning, both sides agreed to another 48-hour dialogue.
The week-long “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” had an eventful life, reuniting a new generation of Colombian student activists with their predecessors who made the university a center of protest against the Vietnam War when they occupied buildings in 1968. Israel protests on other U.S. campuses , from New York University to the University of California, Berkeley.
It also plunged Columbia into a crisis over the boundaries of free speech and harassment, and damaged the school as a hotbed of anti-Semitism in the eyes of many Jewish alumni. “Our students protesting for Hamas, the Houthis and Iran – that’s not a great look for the university,” one said.
Emerging from his criminal trial in Lower Manhattan, former President Donald Trump sought to link President Joe Biden to the “chaos” on campuses across the country. “What’s happening is a disgrace to our country, and it’s all Biden’s fault,” he said.
Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, was scheduled to visit Colombia on Wednesday afternoon to meet Jewish students and presumably attack a Democratic Party beholden to the radical left. Rudy Giuliani, New York’s former law-and-order mayor and later Trump lawyer, drove past campus in a limousine on Tuesday evening.
At the center of it all was an encampment about the size of a football field, littered with signs and banners whose young residents were not easy to characterize. Depending on their orientation, they were either sincere or silly, admirable activists or useful idiots.
“Think about what you want out of this, [but] “It’s nice to see that people care about something and have a cause that they think is worth sacrificing for,” said a law student as she smoked a cigarette and looked out over the camp.
Inside, a few hundred students had gathered around dozens of tents as Arabic music played. One banner read: “Demilitarize Education.” Someone beat a drum. Every now and then someone else would pick up a megaphone and the screams and reactions would begin, including chants that many people interpreted as calls for Israel’s destruction: “Intifada revolution.” . From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. . . Honor, honor to our martyrs!”
An older woman studying at Columbia described the young singers as “creepy, cultish.”
An Israeli student questioned why classmates calling for free and open debate “hid their faces” with medical masks or the ubiquitous keffiyeh scarves that have become a symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
James, the group’s media representative, insisted it was to ensure student safety. But just a short walk away, students snuggled up on manicured lawns and posed in graduation gowns under cherry blossoms.
James demurred when asked about the group’s stance on Hamas, which killed about 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7 – including hundreds of young people at a music festival. Other protesters dismissed complaints of anti-Semitism as a “Zionist” tactic to distract from the war in Gaza, where Israel’s offensive against Hamas has killed more than 33,000 people, according to Palestinian authorities.
The camp posed a major threat to Shafik just nine months into her term as president. It emerged a week ago as she testified in Washington before a Republican-controlled congressional committee about campus anti-Semitism – and tried to determine the fate of her fellow students Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, which resigned in December following their own suspicions.
Shafik has also faced pressure from prominent donors, including Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the American football team New England Patriots, who described his alma mater as unrecognizable.
Last Thursday, after the second day of protests, she relented and called on the New York Police Department to clear the camp, leading to the arrest of more than 100 students.
The move may have backfired: Students defied the president by simply jumping over a fence and setting up a new camp on the site next to the original one, setting the stage for the current standoff.
Even for those who still maintain the Colombian tradition of activism, calling the police was seen as an unforgivable sin. In response, hundreds of professors staged a strike. The sentiment was expressed by a message on the back of a protester’s denim jacket: “Mi-nouche Sha-fuck you!”
Meanwhile, tensions worsened over the weekend. In an example of anti-Semitism, a protester held a sign with an arrow pointing at students waving an Israeli flag that read “Al-Qasam’s next targets,” referring to Hamas’s military wing. Other groups of protesters unaffiliated with the university besieged the university from outside its gates.
Many students showed distrust of journalists and the mainstream media. And many are new to the movement. One student described herself as a gay rights advocate who joined the Palestinian cause only after learning about it from other activists at Columbia. She stood and watched the camp as other students arrived to pass bags of food and supplies over the barricade.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing,” one Jewish student, wrapped in a keffiyeh and wearing a Star of David pendant, said of the camp. She had been arrested days earlier and, like many others, refused to give her name.
A young man, his head wrapped in a keffiyeh, described the camp as a communist idyll where work is shared, everyone’s needs are met and “the federal government is trying to destroy you.”
There was a kibbutz exhilaration about building a community in the real world – rather than online. The warehouse has its own medical teams and students who process food deliveries and check them for freshness. “De-escalators” in high-visibility vests are on hand to defuse tensions with pro-Israel students who occasionally enter the site. (Forcibly removing them would violate the camp’s nonviolence principles.)
There were lessons in Palestinian dance. In one corner on Monday afternoon, school-aged children were painting Palestinian flags on a tarpaulin under the guidance of older demonstrators. To make things easier, the nearby Lerner Hall student center, named after a Jewish alumnus and philanthropist, offered restrooms, sushi boxes and cell phone charging.
Meanwhile, the camp called for coffee, portable chargers, tank tops and shorts, and keffiyehs, among other things, in a daily appeal for relief supplies on Tuesday.
As they stood in front of the barricade to observe the scene, two teenagers from the southern United States appeared exhausted by it all. It’s exam time and bleachers have already been set up in the courtyard for the graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 15th. A week earlier they had sunbathed on the same lawns.
“I knew Columbia was the Ivy of social justice,” one said. “But not as much social justice.”