On a hot day last week, the pavements outside Columbia University were heaving. About 200 protesters were gathered, making a noise that was bigger than their numbers, raising pro-Palestine chants and signs. It was a disparate crowd, diverse across ethnicities and generations. “I’ve lived in this neighbourhood all my life,” said one of them when I asked him why he was there. One smiling elderly lady walked through the crowd offering small bottles of water. A helicopter circled overhead. The police who encircled the crowd were jittery, yelling at passersby to keep moving, and raising the temperature of what was a loud but perfectly orderly and amiable crowd.
Once inside the campus, I made my way to the reason for protesters, the police and the high security at the university gates: an encampment of students on a patch of lawn at the heart of campus. It had been up for about two weeks at this point, after a series of demands to university administrators, including divestment from “companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid”, were not met.
The media swarmed. Reporters from local and foreign news outlets spoke breathlessly into cameras; others livestreamed on their phones. Near the encampment, a cluster of reporters gathered around one Jewish student standing on a raised platform, waving a large Israeli flag as he repeated to the interviewers that the Jews on campus were not going to be intimidated and were “not going anywhere”. On the lawn right next to the one housing the encampment, there was a garden of small Israeli flags planted in neat rows.
The encampment itself was jarringly small and peaceful, almost festive: a handful of tents with a few students milling around, occasionally breaking into song or chanting, as students outside the short fence around the grass joined in. From one side of the encampment, a student urged others to stay hydrated. He stood in what looked like the administrative centre of the protest, housing a supply tent and what I was told was the media liaison office. In black marker on a hoisted, torn piece of cardboard was written the word “Electrolytes”.
What stood out to me was an obvious but striking fact, considering how organised the encampment rules were and how much the students had already experienced in the way of arrests, suspension and global attention. They were kids. “Nineteen-year-olds,” one student replied when I remarked on the rules and ecosystem of the place. “It was all organised by 19-year-olds.”
A sort of uncertain anticipation filled the air. The president of the university had given the students a deadline of 2pm to disband the sit-in, prompting several students to walk around in circles that encompassed almost the entire campus, chanting in solidarity with those camping. Almost all the students I approached declined to speak. Politely, and a little nervously, they said they were not media trained, or would rather just not speak. But I was directed to a young man called Aidan who leaned over the fence of the encampment and began to chat. I recognised him as one of the students leading the chanting inside. His voice was hoarse as he started to rattle off the reasons for their defiance.
The encampment already had its own history and hagiography. It was a place that had grown in resolve after university administrators called in the New York police department on 18 April, leading to more than 100 students being arrested for trespassing. The encampment then regrouped, but with a renewed sense of distrust and anger. “Negotiations were halted,” Aidan told me, because of the “bad faith” of university administrators. Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, had repeatedly referenced concerns over antisemitism and the safety of Jewish students on campus as a reason for disbanding the encampment. She and other university presidents had been hauled in front of federal lawmakers to answer questions about antisemitism during campus protests.
I asked him about that, and about one chant that stood out to me. “We don’t want two states,” some of the encampment students said, “we want it all.” It was the first time Aidan floundered. “We just want a free Palestine,” he said. What does that look like? It wasn’t up to them, he replied, to “work that out”. It wasn’t the whole story of the encampment, which Jewish groups joined and which hosted a Seder dinner among and in support of pro-Palestine protesters, but I could see why some Jewish and Israeli students would feel uncomfortable.
Whether that raises the bar high enough for banning or forcibly clearing protest sites goes to the heart of larger concerns: concerns with a longer history about who gets to define the limits of free speech on US campuses, and how those limits can be redrawn along partisan lines to justify a crackdown.
There have also been reports of aggression on campus, and it will be necessary to address them, with those who have experienced aggression given a full hearing. It is also important, and requires an equal commitment to the truth, that this process does not void or define an entire movement, onethat has spread over more than 100 campuses in the US and all over the world, and which cannot be reduced to its worst manifestations or bad sloganeering.
The next night, the NYPD entered the campus. Some students had taken over a building in an escalation after the negotiations with administrators failed. The scenes outside campus would not have looked out of place in a war zone. Hundreds of police in riot gear lined up, then erected a ladder and entered, guns drawn, according to those inside, violently arresting students and throwing them down stairs. Within hours, more than 100 were arrested and the campus was cleared.
The overwhelming impression was that of wild overreaction and disproportionality. The contrast between the language of university administrators, parts of the press and reality was so vast that even after spending hours on campus on the day that tensions were peaking, I could not reconcile the two. That very morning, Minouche sent an email citing “harassment and discrimination” and the urgency of keeping everyone “physically safe on campus” as reasons for demanding an end to the protest. The morning after the police raid, a CNN show referenced “violence, destruction and hate” on US college campuses, “harkening back to 1930s Europe”.
At Columbia and other campuses I visited in New York and Washington, where smaller protests were held, what I saw and heard were young people burdened with an impossible moral load – the feeling that, as students in the universities of Israel’s most powerful ally, the responsibility for forcing a reassessment of the nation’s stance on Gaza now rested on their shoulders. And with that they carried the fear of all that could befall them as a result of tilting against powerful corporate, media and political interests.
I spelled out the risks to Aidan: suspension, loss of housing and medical care, reputational harm, damage to career prospects. “The students in Gaza don’t have schools to protest in; they don’t have medical care to be taken away from them,” he replied. “This is nothing compared to what they’re experiencing.” It was a familiar sentiment on the part of students I had met by now, this throwing it back to Gaza as a sort of compass to maintain direction and remember the stakes. And it came with the heartbreaking, terrifying resolution that only young people are capable of, still unbroken by compromise or experience of how flooring the toll is when it arrives. In them, there is a compass too.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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