The lessons from the Gaza student encampments, two years on

 

Two years ago today, activists at Columbia University occupied a campus building, renaming it ‘Hind’s Hall.' While campus protests for Palestine have mostly receded from view, they continue to offer vital lessons for the movement they inspired.

On April 17, 2024, Columbia University students hoisted tents onto the grass of the East Butler Lawn, initiating an international reckoning with the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The initial encampment was met immediately with a police sweep and the mass arrest of student participants, but this did not deter activists and only prompted a second mass entry into the adjacent lawns mere moments later.

I was at the second encampment as an admitted student attending spring orientation. The dynamism of that moment feels surreal now – hundreds of people waving hand-painted banners and flags, cheering to song and chant, and the almost comical, stiff communication from the university as it attempted to maintain a veneer of business as usual, all a portent of the institutional reprisal to come. I remember standing on the cobblestone that divided the Butler lawns, my eyes glued to the border that delineated the beginning of the grass, resolutely convinced that if I stepped over, I would risk the revocation of my admission.

The dissonance of the spectacle – students in their thousands, reprising the movements of the 1968 student occupations against the Vietnam War, refusing to surrender physical space in pursuit of a total divorce between their university and the genocide – resonated deeply across and beyond American society.

Within days, encampments sprang up at hundreds of other schools. The movement’s rallying cry – “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” – embedded itself deeply into the American consciousness.

On April 30, following the occupation of a Columbia academic building renamed ‘Hind’s Hall’ in honor of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl martyred by the occupation forces, a second police sweep and mass arrest concluded the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University.  (more...)

The lessons from the Gaza student encampments, two years on