'After watching the genocide unfold, I felt moved to act': US college students speak on their Gaza solidarity encampments

“Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!” 

This slogan reverberates across dozens of college campuses, where students have launched “encampments” in solidarity with Gaza following Columbia University’s lead.

At these encampments, students are taking over large spaces in their campuses, setting up tents, and vowing not to leave until their stated demands are met: that their universities disclose their investments, divest from Israeli apartheid, and end their complicity in genocide. 

Last week, Thursday and Friday, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, and Indiana University became some of the latest campuses to join the growing list of student movements setting up encampments in solidarity with Gaza.

The current list includes Emerson University, NYU, MIT, University of Michigan, The New School, and UC Berkeley. 

Despite mass arrests and police violence, Columbia students are holding their ground. 

“It's been a time for me where I've been able to not only connect with my Palestinian identity more so than ever... but I've also felt extreme amounts of pain, sorrow and grief that one person is not used to dealing with daily”

Malak Afaneh, Palestinian-American co-president of UC Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP), says the encampment at UC Berkeley grew from 12 to 50 tents in just three days.

It's a “very beautiful community space” with programming for everyone, from children’s art workshops to community teach-ins, Malak tells The New Arab.

Salem Khoury, President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Oregon, says, “We need to understand the momentum of this movement against oppression and for [Palestinian] liberation.”

For Salem, also a Palestinian-American, watching the genocide unfold over the past few months has been extremely challenging.

“It's been a time for me where I've been able to not only connect with my Palestinian identity more so than ever,” Salem says, “but I've also felt extreme amounts of pain, sorrow and grief that one person is not used to dealing with daily.” 

Sofia, a graduate student at Princeton, says, “I was feeling so sick and so ashamed watching the genocide unfold over the past months and felt moved to act.” 

Many professors joined students at encampments or held walkouts from their classes and taught at encampment locations rather than classrooms.

One professor at Princeton University says, “I am here because it is the right thing to do given the massacre that has been going on and the way that institutions are actively involved in supporting institutions in the occupation.”

The demands: Cutting institutional ties to Israel and ending the silence on genocide in Gaza

Students across the country who heeded the call from Columbia students have used Columbia as a model and have a similar list of demands.

Students are calling on their universities to divest from financial investments in Israel and from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid.

They are also calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the cancellation of university-sponsored study-abroad programmes in Israel.

"As a Palestinian, there's nothing more saddening and more tragic for me than knowing that my tuition money goes to funding this type of violence against my very own people on the ground” 

Further, they call for unconditional cooperation with Palestinian academic institutions, without requiring them to partner with an Israeli institution to benefit from partnerships with American universities.

Lastly, they want their universities to end their silence on Gaza and release public statements calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and a condemnation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“Palestinians have experienced numerous hospital invasions, flour massacres, on-the-ground sieges,” Malak Afaneh of UC Berkeley says.

“As a Palestinian, there's nothing more saddening and more tragic for me than knowing that my tuition money goes to funding this type of violence against my very own people on the ground.” 

Campus repression of student activism for Palestine

Over 900 protesters have been arrested so far in relation to campus protests for Palestine in the United States since April 17.

Columbia University’s President Minouche Shafik has been criticised for calling the NYPD in riot gear on her own students, especially given that the NYPD is highly militarized and trains with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Texas Governor Greg Abbott faced backlash after unleashing state troopers in riot gear and on horseback on peaceful protesters at UT Austin.

Reem, who was at the protest at UT Austin, says it was “dystopian” and “felt like a simulation.”

At Ohio State University, police attempted to arrest Muslim students while they were praying at the encampment. Two Princeton University graduate students were arrested within minutes of starting to put up tents, were immediately barred from campus, and evicted from campus housing.

They have since regained access to their housing, and are pending disciplinary committee investigations. 

According to Ohio State University’s LSJP, arrested students who wear hijab had their hijabs forcefully removed for mugshots; their hijabs were not returned after processing, and they were denied the right to space to pray, among other civil rights violations.

Over 50 officers forced students off the lawn and continued to make arrests, forcing students to disband their encampment. 

NYU put up a plywood wall in Gould Plaza, where students set up the initial encampment, after mass-arresting students and professors.

People on social media invoked parallels between this wall and the apartheid wall that Israel has set up in occupied Palestinian territories.

A law student at NYU involved in providing legal support to students participating in the encampment says it is ironic that NYU — a school which prides itself on being a school without walls — put up a wall to suppress student activism.

"They don’t actually care about student safety. They only care about protecting their image"

The wall “sparked a whole renewed focus on the student movement and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” she says. “I don’t think this is the end of the encampment. The encampment lives on.

“They don’t actually care about student safety. They only care about protecting their image,” the student, who wished to stay anonymous, added. “It was incredibly traumatising to watch our fellow students get violently arrested by police.”

Sofia from Princeton University says, “The university has talked so much about university policy, but has not mentioned a single word about why we might be out here protesting.”

Centering Gaza when discussing U.S. campus protests

Some people have criticised the focus on American universities rather than centring the genocide in Gaza, which is the core reason why students are protesting. 

“I think it's important for us not to make the struggle about us and what is happening in this country,” says the Princeton professor, “because at the end of the day, really why we are here is to end the genocide in the way that we can from over here.” 

As college students launched encampments, mass graves with hundreds of dead bodies were discovered in Khan Younis.

Many of them had their hands and feet zip-tied, children among them, with some speculations that they may have been buried alive. Israel has killed over 34,000 people in Gaza so far.

Salem Khoury of the University of Oregon says “People are [paying more attention to]numbers than actual families, women, children and men that are dying [in Gaza].”

"I came to law school personally because I genuinely believe in the possibility of a better world. And there is no possibility of a better world if Palestine is not free”

Student activists for Palestine also recognise their unique position of having access to educational institutions, which is not the case in Gaza.

“Many of us talk about student safety and repression on campus, but it's important to note that as of right now, there is no standing university in Gaza. All of their universities have been demolished by the Zionist apartheid regime,” says Malak Afaneh of UC Berkeley. 

Malak also adds that encampments were inspired by and are in solidarity with Columbia’s students, “more importantly, we're standing in solidarity with people in Palestine who are forced to live in tents day in and day out because they are being expelled and killed by the apartheid regime.”

The NYU law student adds, “I came to law school personally because I genuinely believe in the possibility of a better world. And there is no possibility of a better world if Palestine is not free.”

Nada Shalash is an Egyptian-American writer based in New Jersey, with bylines in Business Insider, Times Union, Boston Political Review, and other outlets. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she works on projects on racial discrimination in the criminal legal system.

Follow Nada on Twitter: @Nada_Shalash_