Number One Terrorist: U.S. Imperialists
Wafa Shawi shouted this chant, pressed against the barricades that stood between herself and the locked gates of Columbia University. It was April 21, 2024, days after Columbia students established an encampment on campus grounds. The crowd of supporters was as diverse as the city and typical of pro-Palestine protests, which bring people together across age, gender identity, sexuality, and race. Shawi’s light-pink hijab glistened in the afternoon sun.
“I’m here because I’m with justice, with fairness,” said Shawi, a 43-year-old Brooklyn resident from Morocco and one of the thousands of New Yorkers who trekked across the city to support the student encampments. “The people who don’t like justice support the Israelis, but the people who like justice, they are the majority.”
Columbia students had been organizing for Palestinian lives and liberation long before the encampments. For months, student groups were uniting to raise political awareness about the genocide and the occupation. These efforts paid off. For Soph Askanase and many other Columbia students who were raised as Zionists, the political education carried out by student groups prior to the encampment was integral to their understanding of the genocide in Gaza and the importance of the student movement that opposes it.
“Some of our organizers—in fact, some of the people who I got arrested with—were Zionists until November,” Askanase shared during a panel discussion on the encampments.
Despite the very real risk to their safety, liberty, and livelihood, these students announced their demands to the world on April 17 when they established the encampment on Columbia’s South Lawn. The very next day, police raided the encampment with the blessing of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and arrested more than 100 demonstrators. But the encampment lived on. On April 30, students took over a building on Columbia’s campus and renamed it Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old child in Gaza who was killed by Israeli forces alongside her family and the emergency response workers who tried to help them. Their activism was again met by police repression—that evening, the NYPD violently raided Hind’s Hall and arrested 109 protesters.
For her participation, Askanase was suspended by Barnard College (a Columbia affiliate) and arrested by the NYPD. The night after her arrest, she joined a virtual call of about 300 students from schools across the country to share advice on launching encampments and discuss the risks and potential sacrifices.
“I was so honored and surprised by the willingness of these hundreds of students to instantly say, ‘No, we’re ready to sacrifice. We are ready to fight for Gaza. We are ready to fight for Palestine. We see what is happening and we will not be complicit,’” Askanase said in a panel discussion on the Student Intifada.
The repression by local police departments only led the student movement to spread like wildfire.
The encampment at Columbia sparked a worldwide movement that galvanized students at other universities to escalate their organizing tactics and focus media attention on the unfolding genocide. As police departments attacked and violently destroyed encampments, students at other universities were inspired to organize their own. Before long, there were encampments in at least 90 universities around the world.
By and large, their goal is to persuade their universities to cut ties with Israel and to increase international pressure on Israel to end the genocide in Gaza. This global movement has been dubbed the Student Intifada, which means “uprising” or “revolution” in Arabic, and is a term used to describe Palestinian resistance to the occupation of their homelands by Israel.
The Student Intifada offers an alternative vision of the world, in which the fight against genocide strengthens all struggles for social justice and liberation. By connecting various struggles and resistance movements, Palestine frees us all. Each encampment draws connections between local and global issues, demonstrating how the struggles of the oppressed are intertwined, from working-class students in the United States to Palestinians in Gaza. It exposes the connection between Israel’s genocide in Gaza and policies in the United States and abroad that empower police to stifle dissent and criticism. And it advances a communitarian vision, prioritizing the safety and wellness of its participants even in the face of violent police raids. The chants of these protests are much like poems that offer indictments of our current world as well as glimpses of what liberation movements are trying to build.
Puerto Rico y Palestina, una misma causa
On May 6, 2024, students at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras set up an encampment demanding the university end its contracts and partnerships with the arms companies Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell, and remove these companies from university job fairs. Honeywell actively recruits students to develop technology for warplanes as it expands its presence on the island. Palestinian liberation is widely regarded as an anti-colonial struggle, drawing support from formerly colonized populations and nations around the world. Students in Puerto Rico see the connection.
The United States continues to uphold colonialism through its treatment of Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean that is officially a territory of the United States despite a complex history and fight for independence. Residents of Puerto Rico are officially U.S. citizens, but the island has no representation in Congress and is governed by a shadowy board that was not elected by residents. Despite being part of the U.S., the island suffers major infrastructure issues characteristic of poorer nations, such as a lack of clean water, safe roads, and hospitals, regular electricity outages, and widespread unemployment.
Like many nations in the Global South, the island has major debt. The U.S. Congress enacted the PROMESA Act, a law that allows the unelected Fiscal Control Board, or “La Junta,” to oversee the island’s finances and budget, allegedly to enable the island to pay off its debt. La Junta enacts a neoliberal vision, cutting funding for public resources like schools and government agencies while Puerto Ricans pay the highest sales tax rate in the country in the name of lowering their debt. These austerity measures and tax schemes have proved extremely lucrative for Wall Street investors and hedge funds.
Meanwhile, living conditions continue to deteriorate for island residents. Student organizers with the encampment work to sustain themselves, and despite the precarity of their circumstances, they organize within the university system.
“Right now, our public university, the University of Puerto Rico, suffers the greatest budget crisis in the history of our country, operating at a deficit. While we fight in solidarity with Palestine, the Fiscal Control Board decided to eliminate an additional $100 million from the university budget. In Gaza, Palestine, their 12 universities no longer exist because they were bombed,” student protesters wrote in an official statement in Spanish. “These similarities are not coincidences but rather part of the colonial capitalist system that oppresses both peoples.”
The democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico is a member of the board who cannot vote on any of their decisions. The Supreme Court has ruled that the board can function in complete secrecy as they have cut funding for schools, universities, environmental protection agencies and pensions and privatized the electric company eliminating the largest union and leading to the normalization of power outages. Critics such as the independent journalist Bianca Graulau argue that this undemocratic board secures Puerto Rico’s status as a colony, and its policies make life untenable for everyday Puerto Ricans, many of whom are forced to emigrate to the mainland United States to survive. This exodus of Puerto Ricans from the island opens it up to real estate investments from wealthy Americans.
Palestinians in Gaza have faced water shortages and electricity outages because of Israel’s blockade, which has limited resources that can enter the strip. Similarly, Puerto Ricans face displacement from their homelands, water shortages, and electricity outages due to a complex situation created by their colonial aggressor. Students argue that the very system that robs them of funding facilitates the genocide in Gaza. In Puerto Rico, residents face crumbling infrastructure because resources are used to pay off debt, generating profits for Wall Street and the American Empire. Meanwhile, the U.S. provides billions in military aid and weapons to Israel, which serves as a boon for the arms industry benefiting wealthy shareholders and reinforcing the power of the American Empire and its alliance with Israel.
NYPD, KKK, IOF: You’re All the Same
Around the country, the violent police response to student encampments has been captured in viral videos. At Emory University in Atlanta, a professor named Noelle McAfee witnessed a group of police officers hitting a student before those officers turned to violently arrest her. Police have used tear gas, stun guns, and rubber bullets against students and faculty. At the City University of New York (CUNY), students allege that police officers broke a student’s ankle, broke two protesters' teeth, attacked students, faculty, and journalists with pepper spray at close range, and beat many people with batons. While 173 individuals were arrested on April 30, thirteen protesters are currently facing felony charges that could result in nine years of jail time.
To Ghaied Hijaz, a student at Birzeit University in the West Bank in Palestine, police repression in the United States mirrors the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Many police departments, such as the NYPD, train with the Israeli Defense Force. Protesters have also emphasized that police departments in the U.S. originated from slave patrols who served to catch enslaved African-Americans who escaped, a legacy of white supremacist terror that laid the foundation for groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
Many encampments from Columbia University to California Polytechnical Humboldt University have erected homages to Tortuguita (Manuel Esteban Paez Terán), who was killed by police who raided a protest against a billion-dollar police training center built on a decimated forest in Atlanta that has been dubbed, “Cop City.” There are currently plans to build 69 cop cities across the United States.
At the CUNY encampment, students were able to communicate with Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is currently incarcerated and widely regarded as a political prisoner for his radical views and work as a journalist and former Black Panther. He is facing life without parole for having allegedly killed a police officer in 1981, although the evidence incriminating him has been widely contested and his trial failed to meet international standards, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.
To a crowd of jeering students and supporters, he said, “You are part of something magnanimous, magnificent, and soul changing, life changing, history changing. Do not let go of this moment. Make it bigger. Make it more massive. Make it more powerful. Make it echo up into the stars. I am thrilled by your work. I love you. I admire you.”
Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop We Will Not Rest
As Israel draws from the West much of its financial capability to carry out the ongoing genocide, students have seized on the issues of capital and distribution of resources as central themes for their demonstrations. Encampments in the United States have called on universities to cease investing endowment funds in Israel and the companies that enable the occupation, and end academic relationships with Israeli universities. Calls for divestment may be particularly salient at CUNY, which has a racially and economically diverse body of students, many of whom work multiple jobs to pay tuition.
“New York City is an expensive place to live in, so we are constantly struggling,” said Dima Seelawi, a CUNY student. “As a grad student, my other classmates can barely afford living in the city, but my money is going towards things like funding genocide. Our tuition money is contributing to this, our tax money is contributing to this, and I’m losing family and friends in Gaza. This money that's going to fund the settler colonial state could have been used to fund educational institutions, health care, the homelessness crisis here in Harlem,” said Seelawi. These alternative values were reflected in the very functioning of the encampment, where food was available to everyone and students planned on donating excess supplies to community members in need. In the center of the encampment, students hung a Palestinian flag, which the administration had asked them to take down, offering them portable toilets in exchange. Students refused and were instead using restrooms at nearby Yemeni-owned bodegas. The bodega owners allowed students to use these bathrooms as an act of solidarity with the encampments and Gaza.
At Emerson University in Boston, students connected with the unhoused population, whom they described as their “staunchest allies” to the New York War Crimes, a publication that has emerged in response to the New York Times’ pro-Israel slant and is published by Writers Against the War on Gaza, a coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers committed to Palestinian liberation.
Students at California Polytechnical Humboldt University were widely celebrated for the “bonk heard around the world.” Students defending Intifada Hall, the building they occupied, pushed out police, and a student bonked a police officer with a large water container. They were the first encampment to occupy a building, and their militancy is intricately connected to their experiences as low-income students with a large BIPOC student group, including Indigenous students. The manufactured crises faced by these students and marginalized populations more broadly under capitalism informed their militancy, which organizers explained to the New York War Crimes thus: “There’s mold in a lot of the dorms. Earlier this year, there was a huge eviction of homeless students who were living in their vehicles on campus. There’s an intense feeling of being policed on campus as well. Students feel that the administration does not care about them. So when given the opportunity, they put that feeling into action. And because they were able to participate in a successful repelling of the police on night one, they learned that bowing to administration and bowing to the police do not keep us safe, that we have the potential to keep each other safe.”
Encampment Is Justified When There’s a Genocide
Mainstream reporting and elected officials—from New York City Mayor Eric Adams to President Joe Biden—have described student encampments as violent, aggressive, and anti-Semitic spaces. Students at the encampments said the exact opposite.
“This place is one of the safest places I’ve ever been in—the sense of belonging and community is amazing,” said Seelawi. “It’s something I’ve never experienced before. Honestly I have been feeling the most unsafe around the NYPD.”
A few days prior, campus security had attempted to dismantle the camp, but faculty and Orthodox Jewish supporters created a physical barricade between security and the students and chanted, “To get through our students, you have to get through us.” They were able to fend off campus security for a few days before the university administration called in the NYPD to violently clear the encampment.
Student movements have played a vital role in transforming society since the anti-Vietnam war protests in the 1960s. In a 1989 address to students at the University of Chicago, revolutionary icon Kwame Ture reflected on the lessons from the social movements of the 1960s. He said, “Students once having rejected a society, bringing together their ideas and their energies and their strengths to work against these values connected with the masses, always give us revolution.” Ture defined revolution as “overturning the values of a given society.”
The worldwide suppression of student organizing aims to prevent this revolution and further cement existing values rooted in preserving imperialist foreign policy and the profits of arms companies at the expense of Palestinian life and liberation. Suppressing student activism serves as a deterrent to make it too difficult to organize everyday people and build mass movements for societal transformation.
Hijaz emphasized the need for the continuity of the student movement in a panel at the People’s Conference for Palestine. “The student movement at Birzeit has come to realize over the past three years that any form of surrender, breakdown, retreat or fear in the face of oppression and occupation leads to dire consequences.” Hijaz delivered this message as she wore a shirt commemorating Aysar Safi, a symbol of the student movement who was shot by Israeli forces on the anniversary of Nakba Day on May 15, 2024, and bled to death as the IOF prevented medical teams from reaching him.
For Hijaz, the path forward for students and all those who stand for justice is clear: “Either we fight the battle together as united free people or we are slaughtered individually under the fangs of the oppressive system of tyranny and injustice.”
Across the world, students are putting values into action and demonstrating the potential for an abolitionist future in which safety stems from meeting people’s material needs with food, housing, health care, and schools with state-of-the-art infrastructure instead of mold and crumbling buildings. This future is possible only through divestment from a capitalist economy that profits from genocide, apartheid, surveillance, and climate destruction while celebrating competition, conflict, privatization and hyper-individualism.
Just Transition provides a framework for this shift, according to the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a coalition of more than sixty U.S.-based grassroots organizing groups made up of working and poor people and communities of color. They describe Just Transition as a framework to understand the shift to an economy rooted in the well-being of humans and ecosystems. It is a “profound transformation of our society. … It would rely on socio-economic systems and practices that emphasize solidarity, co-operation, commoning, sharing and caring.”
The Student Intifada offers a glimpse of a Just Transition, a new system focused on people’s well-being and the regeneration of ecosystems.
Long Live Hind’s Hall
Every Fascist State Will Fall
