I got my acceptance letter to study at Columbia University a month before its suppression of pro-Palestine activism accidentally gave birth to a global student uprising.
Between 17 and 30 April, more than a hundred students pitched their tents on the South Lawn of Columbia University’s New York City campus, establishing the first “Gaza solidarity encampment.”
Students demanded that the university divest from companies selling weapons to Israel and sever all academic ties with Israeli universities. Among other demands, protesters wanted Columbia to be transparent about its investments and to publicly call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The encampment felt to me like a glimmer of hope after I had spent six months doom scrolling the slaughter of my people from the safety of my home.
By April 2024, the reported death toll in Gaza had surpassed 34,000 – an incomplete tally given that it did not account for those killed in Israeli attacks but whose bodies could not be recovered from the rubble. Nor did it account for those killed by starvation, or those who died because they were unable to access medical care due to Israel’s siege.
By then, I had been trapped for six months in a perpetual state of mourning for people I had never met, feeling ashamed by the knowledge that there was nothing I could do to help them. The weight of their deaths was so heavy that I grew numb just to get through the days without breaking down.
Meanwhile, the students at Columbia were mobilized and fearless. They were willing to risk an Ivy League degree and even the careers that might have been opened to them by an elitist education to stand against the administration’s complicity in genocide.
When I arrived on campus for orientation in August 2024, the first thing I did was walk up to a security guard. “Excuse me, could you tell which of these lawns was the one where students set up the encampment?” I asked.
I found the spot, sat on the grass, staring in awe at Hamilton Hall. (more...)
Fighting for Palestine despite Columbia’s crackdown
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