On a bright Tuesday afternoon, a masked young woman calling herself W stood beside the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in the centre of Columbia University’s campus and decried the genocide being committed in Gaza by “the violent, Zionist settler entity”.
“Today, in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, we are in high spirits. We are united in our cause. We are building community. We are eating together. We are keeping each other safe and warm. We are putting our principles into action,” W declared before a small gathering of journalists.
The protest would continue until Columbia had divested from companies that profit from Israel, including Microsoft, Boeing and GE, W vowed.
“We will continue to occupy the west lawn until our demands are met,” a comrade, Kyhmani James, warned.
Hours later, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, issued a midnight deadline to the protesters to clear the camp, and New York police officers made preparations to move in. On Wednesday morning, the two sides agreed to another 48 hours of dialogue.
The week-old “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” has had an eventful life, reconnecting a new generation of Columbia student activists to predecessors who made the university a centre of protest against the Vietnam war when they occupied buildings in 1968. It has also energised similar anti-Israel protests at other US campuses, from New York University to the University of California, Berkeley.
It has also plunged Columbia into a crisis over the bounds of free speech and harassment and tarnished the school in the eyes of many Jewish alumni as a hotbed of antisemitism. “To have our students protesting in favour of Hamas and the Houthis and Iran — it’s not a great look for the university,” one said.
From his criminal trial in lower Manhattan, former president Donald Trump sought to tie President Joe Biden to the “mess” on campuses across the country. “What’s going 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 due to visit Columbia on Wednesday afternoon to meet Jewish students and presumably to assail a Democratic party in thrall to the radical Left. Rudy Giuliani, New York’s former law-and-order mayor-turned Trump lawyer, passed by the campus in a limousine on Tuesday evening.
At the centre of it all was an encampment roughly the size of a football field, strewn with signs and banners, whose young inhabitants were not easily characterised. Depending on one’s orientation, they were either sincere or silly, admirable campaigners or useful idiots.
“Think what you want about the cause, [but] it’s nice to see people care about something and have a cause they feel is worth sacrificing for,” said one law student, as she looked over the camp while smoking a cigarette.
Inside, a few hundred students had gathered around dozens of tents as Arabic music played. A banner read: “Demilitarize Education”. Someone was banging a drum. Every so often, someone else would seize a bullhorn and the cry and responses would commence, including chants that many people interpret as calls for Israel’s elimination: “Intifada revolution . . . From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free . . . Glory, glory for our martyrs!”
An older woman who was a continuing education student at Columbia described the young chanters as “creepy, cultish”.
An Israeli student asked why fellow learners calling for free and open debate were “hiding their faces” with medical masks, or the ubiquitous keffiyeh scarves that have come to symbolise Palestinian nationalism.
James, the group’s media liaison, insisted this was to ensure the students’ safety. But a short walk away, students were snuggling on manicured lawns and posing beneath cherry blossoms in graduation gowns.
James demurred when asked about the group’s stance on Hamas, which killed about 1,200 Israelis on October 7 — including hundreds of young people at a music festival. Other protesters dismissed complaints of antisemitism 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 encampment has posed a dire threat to Shafik just nine months into her term as president. It sprang up a week ago while she was in Washington testifying before a Republican-controlled Congressional committee about campus antisemitism — and attempting to avoid the fate of her peers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania who resigned after their own grilling in December.
Shafik has also come under pressure from prominent donors, including Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots American football team, who described his alma mater as unrecognisable.
Last Thursday, after the second day of protests, she relented and asked New York’s police to clear the camp, resulting in the arrests of more than 100 students.
The crackdown may have backfired: students defied the president by simply hopping a fence and building a new camp on the grounds beside the original one and so setting the stage for the current stand-off.
Calling the police was also regarded as an unpardonable sin to those who still cherish Columbia’s tradition of activism. Hundreds of professors staged a walkout in response. The sentiment was captured by a message scrawled on the back of a protester’s jean jacket: “Mi-nouche Sha-fuck you!”
Meanwhile, tensions worsened over the weekend. In one example of antisemitism, a protester held a sign with an arrow pointing towards 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 it from outside its gates.
Many students displayed a suspicion of journalists and the mainstream media. And many are new to the movement. One student described herself as a champion of queer rights who had joined the Palestinian cause only after learning about it at Columbia from other activists. She stood watching over the encampment as other students arrived to pass sacks of food and supplies over the barricade.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing,” a Jewish student, draped in a keffiyeh and wearing a Star of David charm, said of the camp. She had been arrested days earlier and, like many others, refused to provide her name.
A young man, his head wrapped in a keffiyeh, described the encampment as a communist idyll, where labour was divided, everyone’s needs were met and “the federal government is trying to destroy you”.
There was a sense of kibbutznik exhilaration at building a community in the real — and not online — world. The encampment has its own medical teams, as well as students who process food deliveries and date them for freshness. “De-escalators” in high-visibility vests are on-hand to defuse tensions with pro-Israel students who occasionally enter the grounds. (To forcibly remove them would violate the encampment’s non-violence principles).
There has been lessons in Palestinian dance. In one corner, on a tarp, school-age children were on Monday afternoon painting Palestinian flags under the instruction of older protesters. For relief, the nearby Lerner Hall student centre, named for a Jewish graduate and philanthropist, offered toilets, boxes of sushi and mobile phone charging.
Meanwhile, a daily plea for supplies published by the camp on Tuesday requested, among other items, coffee, portable chargers, tank tops and shorts, and keffiyehs.
As they paused outside the barricade to observe the scene, two juniors from the US south appeared exhausted by it all. It is exam period and bleachers have already been erected in the quad for a graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 15. A week earlier they had been sunbathing on the same lawns.
“I knew Columbia was the social justice Ivy,” one said. “But not this much social justice.”