Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer鈥檚 interpretation of facts and data.
Analysis Based on factual reporting, although it incorporates the expertise of the author/producer and may offer interpretations and conclusions.
Most media coverage of the spring 2024 student protests for a free Palestine misses the most important element: hope.
Students hope to bring greater attention to Israel鈥檚 war on Gaza. They hope to highlight their universities鈥� complicity with Israeli colonialism. And, in spite of the brutal police responses, they hope to inspire their fellow students.
They have succeeded wildly by capturing the world鈥檚 attention and sparking a youth movement that has gone . Their calls for universities to divest from Israel have revived the movement modeled on the campaign that helped topple South African apartheid. And, as student protests swelled, President Joe Biden for the first time sending 3,500 bombs to Israel after authorizing separate weapons shipments in the first five months after Oct. 7, 2023.
For more than a week I bicycled up and down Manhattan, visiting five universities where protest camps had sprouted. Conversations with dozens of students and supporters indicate a large swath of youth have been horrified and radicalized by the Israeli war and found hope in the protest camps they created, however brief.
On April 22, in front of the New York University (NYU) Stern School of Business, I watched as the New York Police Department (NYPD) riot police evicted a peaceful protest camp just hours old and more than 130 people, including students and faculty. Ryna Workman, 24, who is in their third year at the NYU School of Law, provided legal and logistical support for the protests and negotiated with university officials. They say, 鈥淭hese encampments are places of dreaming, of building better community. We see how we can be better and we hope for a future where that kind of community spreads everywhere.鈥�
At Columbia University, on April 29, the day before the NYPD stormed the campus and evicted a student encampment for the second time in as many weeks, Jamil Mohamad, 32, spoke next to a camp of some 130 tents on the south lawn. A Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern history at Columbia, Mohamad says, 鈥淭he encampment was really inspiring and created a community like I have never seen. It was a very beautiful expression of solidarity. Before that I was watching the genocide happening on my own, not knowing how to carry on with my life.鈥�
At City College of New York, in the northeast reaches of Manhattan, hundreds of police outfitted with zip ties, batons, and ballistic helmets fenced off the campus on April 30. Before cops the encampment that night, arresting at least 173 people, a student at the five-day-old protest said, 鈥淪ome people are singing 鈥楾he Internationale.鈥� Others are praying to Allah.鈥�
Having covered social movements and increasingly violent police response for decades, I knew the camps would be steamrollered sooner rather than later. That was the fate of hundreds of Occupy Wall Street encampments that popped up in 2011, in 2018, and Seattle鈥檚 during the George Floyd movement.
Many students have been undeterred by universities siccing police on them. After being ejected from Stern, NYU students resettled two blocks away for before the police raided their new camp as well. At the New School, located a half mile north of NYU, teachers initiated the first encampment on May 8 after police quashed a student protest on Fifth Avenue. At the Fashion Institute of Technology, located near the Garment District in Manhattan, the pro-Palestine camp sprung up after a student was suspended, thrown out of housing, and fired from her campus job for posting a flier about the Gaza war in an area approved for political speech, according to other student protesters.
This followed a pattern seen at campuses nationwide. , students tore down fencing to retake their camp despite threats of suspension. At Harvard University, the suspension of a student group a takeover of the historic Harvard Yard. at the University of Texas at Austin kept protesting after police attacked a peaceful gathering with chemical spray, beatings, and stun grenades that can .
Today鈥檚 student movement follows in the footsteps of Occupy Wall Street. In 2011, police repression of the camp a stone鈥檚 throw from the New York Stock Exchange caused the movement to spread around the world. As of May 6, pro-Palestine protests and camps at almost 140 universities in 45 of 50 states and in 29 countries from Argentina to Yemen.
The catalyst for protests began when the University of Southern California announced on April 15 it was the commencement speech of student valedictorian Asna Tabassum over 鈥渟afety鈥� concerns. The real reason seems to be that she was by Zionists as antisemitic for being pro-Palestine. Then on April 17, Columbia University and Minouche Shafik at Congressional hearings on antisemitism by the co-chairs of the board of trustees. Before the hearing, 23 Jewish faculty that she would be joining in the 鈥減olitical theater of a new McCarthyism鈥� seeking to destroy intellectual inquiry. Critics said Shafik 鈥� academic freedom under the bus鈥� and revealed investigations of prominent professors who were unaware of the crosshairs trained on them. Hours before the hearing, Columbia students erected a on campus. Once back on campus, Shafik authorized a 鈥溾�� NYPD force on April 18 to more than 100 students. Perhaps Shafik thought she was putting a lid on the simmering anger. It blew up in her face.
Sebastian Gomez, a Columbia senior, said police 鈥渟wooped in from every side鈥� as they arrested . Watching from his lab where he researches plasma physics, Gomez said it was 鈥渁 terrifying experience.鈥� But Columbia students poured out in support of the activists, reviving the camp within 24 hours. That day Gomez went from supporting the camp to joining it, saying before the April 30 crackdown, 鈥淭his is a beautiful place with students from every walk of life supporting each other. We have seminars, teach-ins, and I am learning about so many things. People are bringing us wonderful food every day. I鈥檝e eaten better than I have in months.鈥�
Gomez showed me a that students created that was far more sophisticated than the 鈥渁dministration versus students鈥� media narrative. Students portrayed the university as a controlled by wealthy trustees who oversee a $13.6 billion endowment fund that invests in 鈥渨ar profiteers鈥� such as Lockheed Martin and Google. Students claim at least are tied to military contractors, the NYPD, and Zionist organizations that, in the words of the chart, 鈥渕anufacture consent鈥� for Israel. Shafik is just a hatchet man 鈥渋ntimidating鈥� faculty and staff, calling in the NYPD to 鈥減unish鈥� students, and doing the bidding of far-right politicians.
Columbia is so entangled in the web of maintaining Israeli power that the day after mass arrests at Columbia and City College, New York City Mayor Eric Adams , 鈥淚 really want to thank鈥� , the NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, for 鈥渕onitoring the situation.鈥� Weiner also at at Columbia鈥檚 School of International and Public Affairs, and at the press conference with Adams, she Columbia students of the 鈥渘ormalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with terrorism that has now become pretty common on college campuses.鈥�
Other heavyweights trying to strangle student dissent at Columbia include sports mogul, Trump financier, and Columbia University 鈥溾�� who has bashed students with full-page ads in New York media while millions of dollars into projects.
Despite facing such powerful opponents, Jamil Mohamed says, 鈥淪tudents were very optimistic about divestment happening. They really believe all the things they are demanding are possible.鈥�
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who graduated from Columbia University in 2016, is also optimistic. A regular at the camp, she says Columbia is known as the 鈥渁ctivist Ivy, where students can engage in demonstrations and speech.鈥� The demands, says Avila Chevalier, 鈥渁re incredibly reasonable, and the university has met them before.鈥� That includes from South Africa in 1985, private prison corporations in 2015, and fossil fuel companies a few years later.
Ryna Workman calls the 1968 protests at Columbia 鈥渢he compass鈥� for students today. That movement culminated in a police riot with over 700 arrests. Faculty and students went on strike in response, forcing Columbia to its with a military-research outfit, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and scrap an athletic facility, dubbed 鈥淕ym Crow,鈥� that would have displaced many Black residents near the university.
Today鈥檚 student activists rattle off influences from previous social struggles and are eager to learn from the past (unlike many Occupy Wall Street protesters who were allergic to history based on what I saw across the country). Workman says, 鈥淎 lot of people were radicalized by the George Floyd movement,鈥� and mention the anti-apartheid divestment movement as a model.聽
I cut my activist teeth helping build and occupy a shanty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the late 1980s. By that point divestment from South Africa was inevitable. But when the economic campaign against apartheid first began it seemed impossible, much as the campaign to end Zionist colonialism may seem today.
This time around, the stakes are higher, repression more vicious, and politics more Orweillian than in earlier social movements. The free Palestine movement at Columbia was pummeled by pro-Zionist forces the moment it got off the ground after the Oct. 7 attacks. 鈥溾�� circled Harvard University on Oct. 11 and Columbia on Oct. 25. The trucks displayed electronic images of students with their names. Accuracy in Media, a right-wing outfit known for disinformation, was behind the trucks and published websites labeled 鈥淐olumbia Hates Jews,鈥� naming dozens of students.
Many students who were named were with online harassment and death threats. One Columbia student, who didn鈥檛 identify themselves, said the administration amplified the hostility as it 鈥渟uppressed and harassed students who voiced their support for the Palestinian people since October.鈥� On Nov. 10, Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace on thin procedural grounds.
The attacks they face echo what Palestinian civilians are facing from Israel. On Jan. 19, Columbia students holding a divestment rally they were attacked with a noxious chemical sprayed by who also called protesters 鈥淛ew killers鈥� and 鈥渟elf-hating Jews.鈥� Palestinian students say they recognized the odor, a combination of sewage and rotting flesh, as 鈥�,鈥� a chemical weapon used in the West Bank by Israeli forces. The university initially blamed the students for holding an 鈥溾�� rally. On April 3, Columbia four students and gave them 24 hours to clear out of their housing for holding a webinar entitled 鈥淩esistance 101鈥� with a Palestinian activist whom Zionists of being a terrorist.
The repression of student protests is happening in a post-Trump world of surveillance, far-right mayhem, and disinformation. At Northeastern University in Boston, the administration listed 鈥渞eprehensible antisemitic statements鈥� as a to use police force to rout a student protest camp there, arresting nearly 100 people. However, found evidence that the incident involved a pro-Israel student demonstrator yelling 鈥淜ill the Jews,鈥� apparently trying to provoke a large pro-Palestine gathering.
University administrators across the country have invoked technicalities on where, when, and how students are protesting to declare them in violation of codes of conducts. Many strict codes, however, were recently to prevent pro-Trump extremists from bringing violence to college campuses. The codes, however, did not stop a pro-Israel mob at UCLA in part by Jessica Seinfeld, wife to tedious comedian Jerry Seinfeld, from a pro-Palestine camp with fireworks, tear gas, pepper spray, and that sent 25 students to the hospital. Various police forces watched for hours without intervening. But the university used the far-right violence as a justification to send in police the next day to student protesters, arresting more than 200 of them.
The melding of state and mob violence is a microcosm of Israel-Palestine, in which guarded by military units have been on the rampage since Oct. 7 in the West Bank, killing, ethnically cleansing, and seizing the land and property of the indigenous inhabitants.
Police violence is not inevitable. Authorities choose to allow peaceful dissent or crush it. At least six university administrations have agreed to some demands of student protesters without going from zero to police batons in an instant. The president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut in The New Republic why he wasn鈥檛 sending in police. Brown University students in Rhode Island tents after the university corporation agreed to a process and vote in October on whether or not to divest from Israel. Students at Rutgers University their camp after the administration agreed to , although not divesting from Israel nor canceling plans to open a of Tel Aviv University in Rutgers tech hub in New Jersey. In Philadelphia, progressive district attorney and right-wing bane Larry Krasner helped keep police at bay from the University of Pennsylvania for more than two weeks. Krasner the then week-old protest camp on May 3. While talking of upholding the Constitution, Krasner said, 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have to do stupid like they did at Columbia.鈥�
The pro-Palestine student movement has displayed an admirable resilience, even in the face of violence and misinformation. The passion, discipline, and sophistication by students against all odds show they represent the best of humanity. Their opponents represent the worst of America.聽
CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:50 a.m. on May 20, 2024, to properly reflect Ryna Workman鈥檚 preferred pronouns.聽Read our corrections policy here.
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Arun Gupta
is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute and has written for the Washington Post, the Nation, The Daily Beast, The Raw Story, The Guardian, and other publications. He is the author of the upcoming Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A Junk-Food-Loving Chef鈥檚 Inquiry into Taste聽(The New Press).
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