On April 30, 2024, I watched nearly 1,000 armed officers barge into the building that student protestors reclaimed as Hind’s Hall.
Moments before the siege, the police had pushed all students into the surrounding dorms. As my panicked peers banged on zip-tied doors and chanted at the top of our lungs, I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of the students arrested 56 years ago for occupying the very same building in protesting Vietnam.
How is it possible that, nearly sixty years later, the university has again waged war against its very students?
Like many institutions in the United States, Columbia University has cultivated an illusion of progress in recent decades, a self-proclaimed willingness to “engage in respectful dialogue”with its student body. While these efforts of equity and inclusion may have created a more left-leaning campus image, the university’s commitment to the American war machine has not changed.
Over the past year, Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student organizations employed a series of escalation techniques to place pressure on the administration to divest from the genocidal state of “Israel.” However, the intense student mobilization in the final weeks of school was unprecedented. On April 17, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members launched the first Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
On April 30, students occupied Hamilton Hall and renamed it after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl slaughtered alongside her family while attempting to flee Tel al-Hawa. These escalations pushed the administration into fight-or-flight mode. The university could no longer keep its mask of “compromise” from slipping. Instead, it resorted to state power, with President Shafik sending in squadrons of armed police officers to quash its peaceful protesters. The world watched as the university revealed — with its every decision — how it cared more about maintaining amicable relationships with donors than listening to its own students.
This uncovering of the institution’s true motives, albeit horrifying, is a win. Having grown up in the Bay Area, it is unbelievably inspiring to see colleges including UCSC launch their own solidarity encampments. Seeing the ripples of the student intifada so close to home gives me hope for the resilience and empathy of this generation.
In the short time that I’ve been a student at Columbia, SJP and Jewish Voices for Peace have taught me so many lessons on collective resistance. Most importantly, escalation is key. As we near the end of the spring quarter, we must push the movement’s momentum into the summer and the next school year. Administration may be unbudging now, but when it is placed under enough pressure by the student body, it will bend and break.
Therefore, I urge every student, staff member, local resident, and reader who stands against ethnic cleansing to continue organizing. Contribute to the encampment, join the workers’ strike, attend protests, serve in mutual aid — do whatever you can to protest the infinite atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian men, women, and children. If there is one thing that the Palestinian people have taught us, it’s that resistance is key. And the more backlash we face, the harder we must resist.
