Text/Yi Xiao
Editor/Qi Fei
Editor's note:
For nearly a month, a wave of pro-Palestinian protests has swept American college campuses, with mass protests erupting at dozens of prominent universities to express dissatisfaction with the Biden administration's diplomatic bias in favor of Israel. Among them, Columbia University (hereinafter referred to as "Columbia") has become the eye of the storm. New York police officers have twice stationed at the university to arrest protesters, and Columbia University President Minush Shafiq's response has sparked controversy on campus.
Phoenix Weekly invited Yi Xiao, a master's student at Columbia University's School of Journalism, to share her insights during this time. As a student journalist, the more she conducts interviews, the more she discovers the dangers of flattening and symbolizing the individual in a strong emotional context. She said the article was not intended to analyze any complex narrative left over from history, nor was it intended to favor any political position reinforced by the Internet. How to see specific people has become the focus of her trying to embody.
On May 10, local time, the Columbia campus finally reopened. It has been 10 days since the New York police entered the campus on the evening of April 30 to clear the scene.
These days, the lawn east of the Butler Library, near the Pulitzer Building of the School of Journalism, is empty, and the school's plates for graduation ceremonies are stacked in piles next to it. The entrance to the lawn is blocked by three iron fences.
On May 2, the empty South Lawn of Columbia.
Originally, only one of the three gates of the school was open, but only students living on campus and staff doing essential work were allowed to enter. To help us as student journalists, the teachers at my journalism school send a list of student journalists covering the protests to the university almost every day to make sure we can get into the school.
For two weeks starting April 17, pro-Palestinian students set up a "Gaza solidarity camp" on the lawn, where more than 100 tents were set up. The demonstration ended with the occupation of the Hamilton building by protesting students in the early hours of April 30 and the arrest by New York police 17 hours later.
Looking back on this time, I interviewed many people, followed up on many things, and heard many different voices. For me, it is certainly a challenge to maintain an objective and fair narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether it is right or wrong, everyone has a scale in their hearts, either explicitly or metaphorically—when the scale is threatened, fierce and even angry words will be unconsciously issued, and then cause attacks and resistance; When that scale is recognized, a kind of collective power that is innate to humanity will break through the shackles of reality and fight for what it believes in for justice, even to the point of nearing revolution. In the midst of this, the evil and beauty of human nature have been strengthened, amplified and even exploited with hundreds of years of trauma and conflict.
What do protesting students want?
The timeline of the protests I experienced began with the police arresting the first protesters on the afternoon of Thursday, April 18. We were in class when we received an email from Shafik, the principal, who wrote, "Today, I had to make a decision that I wish I had never made. ”
The day before, the president, who took office last October, was summoned to the U.S. Congress to be questioned by members of Congress on how to deal with antisemitism. Shafiq made it clear that he would crack down on antisemitic rhetoric and revealed the school's handling of some students and staff. She has been criticized by some Columbia students and faculty members as a whistleblower for doing so.
The email claimed that a group of students who supported Palestine and opposed Israeli military operations posed a threat to the safety of the school. At the time, I didn't understand why a group of protesting students could be defined and described in such a strong language.
During recess, my classmates and I rushed downstairs as hundreds of students walked around the lawn in front of the Butler Library. They shouted slogans that had been heard on the campus since last October, and their faces were full of anger. My American classmates looked at me firmly and said, "This is the first time since the Vietnam War." History is happening. ”
In April 1968, Columbia students protested the U.S. government's support for the Vietnam War by demanding that Columbia stop working with a company that provided weapons research for the war effort and occupied five buildings, including the Hamilton Building, for a week. In the end, the police arrested more than 700 students, and more than a dozen students and police officers were injured in this modest operation. In 1980, Columbia students demanded that the university be defunded from the apartheid South African government.
A day earlier, members of the Columbia University Apartheid Divestment Coalition (CUAD), a Colombian university student group, had set up a "Gaza Solidarity Camp" by erecting green tents on the campus lawn.
Banner in the "Gaza Solidarity Camp" on April 22.
Founded less than a year ago, the student alliance is made up of 116 student organizations across nine faculties with thousands of students participating. These include Students for Palestinian Justice (SJP) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), two organizations that support the Palestine Liberation Movement. According to Columbia's official website, the two groups were shut down last November for launching unauthorized marches and threatening campus security until the end of the fall semester.
The core demands of the protesting student groups include three points: severing financial ties with Israeli-linked businesses, financial transparency for universities, and amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for their participation in the protests.
These demands were influenced by a peaceful political movement that began in 2005. Its full name is the "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions" movement (hereinafter referred to as the "BDS movement"), and its purpose is to put pressure on Israel to abide by international law, call on the Israeli government to stop occupying the territory of the State of Palestine, respect the equal rights of Arab Israelis, and respect the right of return of Palestinian refugees living abroad.
But in Israel's eyes, the BDS movement is seen as "a ploy aimed at delegitimizing Israel." Opponents argue that the movement will hinder dialogue between the two sides, which is premised on the recognition of Israel as a colonial power and apartheid. Israel believes that such language is demonizing itself. Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs calls it an anti-Semitic movement and actively lobbied European and American lawmakers for legislative countermeasures.
Like many private universities in the United States, Columbia derives a portion of its long-term income from endowments, in addition to its annual revenue from tuition and other aspects. In fiscal year 2023, Columbia's revenue will be $6.2 billion, of which tuition accounts for 24%; The endowment fund is as high as 13.64 billion US dollars, ranking 13th among universities in the United States. Columbia's financial report shows that 12 percent of the university's annual budget is supported by endowments. Fifty-five percent of this funding is used to support student and faculty research, while the remaining 45 percent is shown for other purposes.
Typically, universities commission dedicated managers to allocate endowments across asset classes such as equities, real estate, and private equity investments (including venture capital) and reap the benefits accordingly. This type of investment has become an important source of finance for the development of many universities in the United States.
Columbia Endowment Fund Allocation at a Glance. Source: Columbia Endowment Fund Management and Performance Report
The pro-Palestinian students are demanding greater transparency of the university's finances and an end to the university's endowment to other businesses, such as Israeli companies and arms manufacturers, that have profited from the war in Gaza. Shafiq had earlier stated that Columbia would not divest from Israel, but would invest in health and education in Gaza. This was seen as an unacceptable practice by the protesting students.
The dozen or so protest students I interviewed, whether or not they were physically connected to Palestine, shared ideas such as anti-colonialism, imperialism, and oppression by great powers. I don't know if everyone understands the economic significance of the divestment or the historical origins of the movement, but everyone mentions the devastation of the war on the civilian population of Gaza.
As of 9 May, Israeli attacks on Gaza had killed more than 34,000 people, 41 per cent of them children, and injured 78,000. The Israeli death toll in the Hamas attack on October 7 last year was 1,139, and 128 of the 7,252 hostages taken are still being held.
For the protesting students, the casualty figures, updated at the daily morning meeting, are still shocking, even though they are familiar to them. This alone allows them to camp in protest regardless of the risk of disciplinary action or even police arrest.
Among the hundreds of protesters, there may be so-called extremists, but those who can share my personal experiences and sincere demands are not following the crowd.
They told me that the media focused too much on antisemitism and failed to see that it was not a person, but a country. They said that since last October and even earlier, antisemitism has become a weapon for some to speak out against the war in Gaza, and they cannot accept the school's handling of the protesting students. They said that this time the camp was not a whim, but because their voices had been suppressed for a long time, and this choice was left in order to get the attention of the school administration.
This time, they not only received the attention of the senior management of Columbia University, but also sparked a "pro-Ba" movement in colleges and universities across the United States the day after they set up camp.
But for many Jewish students, they felt an existential crisis when they saw the Israeli flag crossed in red and heard blood-boiling slogans such as "Israel is a terrorist state" and "We don't want Zionists."
Many Jewish students left the campus. Almost everyone of the Jewish students I was able to interview expressed a psychological and emotional impact. In addition, there were differences of opinion among Jewish students – some felt that the movement posed an antisemitic threat because of its fierce demands for justification against Israel's existence; Others argue that anti-Semitism has been used as a rhetoric by politicians to not only evoke painful memories of their own nations, but also to distort facts that do not exist in large numbers in the first place, thereby winning narratives favorable to politicians.
Concrete slogans and abstract isms
"Freedom, freedom, Palestine!"
"Open, divest, we don't rest and we don't stop!"
"From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free!"
"We don't want the Zionists here!"
"There is only one solution, the Intifada (Arab uprising) revolutionary method!"
On April 30, protest students wore black and white headscarves, symbolizing Palestine, and held hands outside the occupied Hamilton building. When the police re-entered the campus, they repeated the slogans again and again.
Some of these slogans are considered by the university to have overtly anti-Semitic tendencies, such as the phrase "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", in which the river refers to the Jordan River and the sea refers to the Mediterranean, but the two sides interpret them very differently.
At the April 17 hearing, President Shafiq was questioned by Congress whether he considered the slogan anti-Semitic. "It seems to me that it is, and some people think it is not." She replied. According to the Associated Press, such an answer "dodges some trap questions."
Last November, Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian congresswoman in Congress, was condemned for using the slogan on social media. The condemning lawmakers saw the slogan as an allusion to the purge of Israel. "To treat criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitism would set a dangerous precedent – one that would silence dissent for human rights," Tlaib responded. And on April 17, the House of Representatives voted 377 in favor and 44 against to define the slogan as an anti-Semitic slogan.
Jeremy Faust, who grew up in a liberal Jewish community, thinks the phrase "from the river to the sea" is fine for him. "But others, like Intifada, can make people feel attacked, or brought back a bad historical memory."
Intifada is derived from an Arabic word that is close to "throwing away", "throwing away" something or someone. The term is used in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle to mean an organized Palestinian uprising against the Israeli military, which is both a civil struggle and a political guide.
Another Jewish student, Melissa Saidak, said that almost all the slogans – whether they were asking the Zionists to leave or from the river to the sea – made her feel very uncomfortable. As a Zionist, she felt that she was one of the very few outliers among her peers during the protest movement.
Students who support Palestine feel the same sense of marginalization, but unlike most Jewish students, they feel misrepresented by the media and society.
"A lot of my friends have been called pro-Hamas terrorists by conservatives, and I can't understand it at all." Noor, a Palestinian student in her fourth year at Columbia, said. She was reluctant to reveal her surname for fear of being exposed to her negative effects. In her view, the mainstream media focused on whether the students were anti-Semitic, but ignored the real purpose of the latter. "We're just a bunch of students. We are trying to make people care about the thousands of people of Gaza who have been killed through art, but our universities are condoning. ”
By art, Noor refers to the creative activities organized by the camp itself. The students would work collectively on the tarpaulin, sometimes with slogans, sometimes with illustrations, all around a theme: to commemorate the civilian victims of Gaza.
There are also sometimes spontaneous band performances on site. In the evening, several people sit around, playing guitars, flutes, and singing all kinds of songs. One of the original songs sings: "Palestine is watching, we won't shake, like a tree planted by a river, we won't, we won't shake ........."
The song has become the camp's theme song, and on the evening of April 30, when the police arrested the students, a group of protesting girls held hands and sang the song.
Ideally, the slogans and rhetoric of the protests should be worthy of scrutiny, and the participants should ideally be righteous fighters with a proper judgment of history. But in the real world, there is no perfect doctrine and no immaculate man.
Especially in the context of political polarization in the United States, human weakness is often labeled as a lever to attack each other, and if you add religion or value beliefs that believe that they are morally correct, people on either side will turn from concrete to vague unity...... I have repeatedly wondered what to do with this dilemma. It wasn't until I tried to get close to this group of students who were defined by the media, by the public, by the whole of America and even the world, that I saw contradictions, enthusiasm, and history in specific people.
"Tingba" student: The camp is what makes me feel safe
On April 29, a panoramic view of the camp was taken from the Columbia School of Journalism.
Noor is a Palestinian who grew up in Hong Kong. Her mother is from New York and her father is from Palestine. The day I met her was April 27th, and the camp had been set up for a week. She sat cross-legged on the lawn and told me her story.
Having lived in Hong Kong for 15 years, she has never felt deeply connected to her Palestinian identity, as the locals see her as a foreigner. But when she returned to high school at a boarding school in Connecticut, she began to appreciate Palestinian identity. "One time at a summer camp, I introduced myself and I said I was Palestinian, and one girl immediately said, 'Do you mean Israel?'" "I had to start defending my existence," she recalled. ”
After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the land on which Noor's grandparents were located was transferred to Israel, and they emigrated to Lebanon. When the Lebanese civil war began in 1975, they fled to New York with Noor's father. Noor feels that no one in the United States wants to listen to the Palestinians.
On the day of the interview, she expressed concern that she would be suspended from school before graduation. After the New York police arrested 108 students for the first time on April 18, on April 23, 53 students at Barnard College, one of Columbia's undergraduate campuses, were temporarily suspended. Barnard College says this is to maintain a safe environment that is "free of harassment and discrimination."
To her dismay, the focus has been on protesting whether students are antisemitic and pose a threat to the safety of others. "The irony is that the school treats us as if we are acting at the extreme, but the truth is that the school is kicking its own students out of the dorms." "Our camp is the place where I feel safe. ”
She was also unhappy with the media coverage. "It wasn't until the Ivy League students were arrested by the police that people started to care about it. And at this moment, thousands of Gazans are dying, shouldn't the camera be on them? ”
On April 28, "Tingba" protested that students were making slogans.
The camp is built on a lawn surrounded by bushes that act as a natural barrier. The students filled the bushes with small Palestinian flags and strings of lights next to them. On the periphery of the lawn, near the center of the school, a large square of cloth reads "Welcome to the Palestinian People's University", and a sign near the entrance to the library reads "Stand with the Palestinians".
More than 100 tents stand on both sides of the camp, with an open space in the center and a whiteboard on the table with the daily schedule. The food area serves three meals a day, snacks and drinks. A tent in the corner has a label "People's Library" on it.
A corner of the food area of the camp.
For first-time entrants, students are advised to read the community rules placed next to them, the first being "Everyone is equal" and the other saying "Please don't litter."
A few days after the camp was founded, on a somewhat gloomy weekend evening, I was filming as a student journalist and stumbled into a reading group. About fifteen students sat in a circle on the lawn, reading the pamphlets distributed by the library. They also gave me a copy. It was raining lightly, and a girl next to me held her umbrella above me. In the rain, the students continued to discuss the protest tactics described in the book.
Afterwards, one of the organizers of the reading group told me that her family was from Puerto Rico and Chile, and that her parents had been deeply affected by the involvement of the United States in the history of both countries. She described it as "the violent imperialism of the United States." Like many protesting students, she believes that the issue of Palestine is common to all oppressed peoples. She is a master's student in social work at Columbia University and participated in protest marches calling for the liberation of Palestine in early October. "Our demands have not been answered by the school at all. We have exhausted all methods, and this is the last step of last resort. She said.
From the day the protest began, the school set 2-4 p.m. as media time every day. During this time, reporters from major media outlets would walk around the camp with cameras. As a result, the students formed response groups, and only those who had been trained were interviewed. For some important moments, they will also hold spontaneous media conferences.
In the assemblies that followed, I often heard the words "imperialism", "anti-oppression", "liberation of the colonies", etc., so the students gathered came from different countries and ethnicities, not just Palestinians or Muslims. Tang Boyan is one of them.
Boyan Tang is a Chinese-American born in San Francisco and a member of CUAD. I first met him at the school-wide parade on April 24th. Outside the procession, he often ran to the front and directed the direction of the procession.
On April 24, Tang Boyan (first from left) walked in the procession of the whole school.
The next time I met him was when the students occupied the Hamilton Building. He was still in a hurry, and on the periphery of the protesting students, different student groups came to him for a meeting. When interviewing him that night, he greeted the passing students from time to time. I asked him if he was one of the organizers of CUAD, and he said that the organization is not hierarchical. "If I had to have a title, I was just one of the students trying to help."
Mr. Tang's parents, who are from Jiangsu, describe himself as a "typical second-generation Chinese" — his parents are very low-key and hope he doesn't get too high. In high school, he organized the youth climate strike movement in California. When Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen in 2015, he saw online that a U.S.-funded bomb was dropped on a school bus in Yemen, killing dozens of children, just like what happened today at Ghaza Shifa Hospital or Nasser Medical Center.
"It's like the mask of the empire being lifted off in front of humanity, and all that can be seen is its ugliness and grotesqueness." Tang Boyan said.
This camp protest was the biggest and most successful one he had ever experienced. After the interview, he picked up his phone and asked if a friend could let him spend the night. "Do you have air mattresses?" After making the call, he swiped the messages on his phone, and suddenly looked up and said to me, "Look, this is all from my mother." I haven't heard her back in a few days, so I'm going to have to call her back. ”
Soon after, police entered the campus. I don't know if he was arrested. At 1:30 a.m. on May 1, he replied that he was safe and that his friend had been released by the police.
Different views among Jewish students
The first time I met Ray, she was in front of a tent at the camp, kneeling on the grass and drawing.
"Your painting is beautiful. Is it a Palestinian child? "Thank you. Yes. As she spoke, she picked up her phone and continued to create by comparing the pictures on the Internet. Ray is a senior studying art at Barnard College. As a Jew, she said she wanted others to know that there were Jews who supported the murdered civilians in Gaza and were speaking out for Palestine.
Ray's painting on display outside the camp tent on April 29.
But there aren't many Jewish students like Ray. After the launch of the Gaza solidarity camp, students planted the Israeli flag on the lawn of the main campus road next to the sundial of Columbia University, and surrounded it with a Star of David. Photographs of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas were posted on a wall not far from the camp with Israeli and American flags.
On 25 April, Israeli flags were hung on the wall opposite the camp, and hostage photographs were pasted next to them.
On April 29, when negotiations between the school and the protesting students collapsed, pro-Palestinian students began walking around the school in protest. At this time, several pro-Israel students stood on the steps, and Tova Segal from Barnard College was one of them.
For her, some of these slogans are menacing. "90% of Jews are Zionists. Such a slogan to me is equivalent to a call not to let any Jews show up in schools. Tova said.
Zionism is a Jewish national revival movement launched in the late 19th century to call on Jews scattered around the world to return to their ancient homeland and rebuild the Jewish state. According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of Jews believe that Israel is a God-given land for them, and 12 percent believe that it is not.
Outside of Israel itself, New York has the highest Jewish concentration. At Columbia, about 13.6 percent of undergraduates are Jewish. Columbia University has a dedicated Jewish student activity center for this purpose.
Tova grew up in the Jewish community of Brooklyn, New York. "Judaism is my culture, my faith, my everything. And Israel is very important to us. That's how she described it.
On the evening of April 28, the lawn in front of the Lowe's Library was covered with Israeli flags.
"Sometimes I feel a kind of anger, an emotion that comes from the heart. It's like I need to get out of here. After a long time, I became numb. Tova said she wondered why so many students and professors had accepted a narrative that seemed infallible, and that the school's principal's repeated emails of vigilance against antisemitism did not make her feel accepted into the campus.
The protesting students would say that they were against the Zionists. During an evening assembly, the speaking student paused twice to remind the audience not to record the recording, and he raised the issue of security and expressed concern about the presence of Zionists among the students.
Melissa, a Jewish student in the Department of Social Work, believes that the word has lost its own meaning in this movement, as if all Zionists have been labeled as bad people. "Anyone who feels that Israel has the right to exist is divided into a framework that does not allow dialogue." She said bluntly.
As the community rules at the camp gate say, don't talk to the opposing party. She believes that this is extremely unfair to Jews, especially Jews from Israel. "Their expectation is for students from Israel to give up their allegiance to their country."
This protest not only stayed at the level of supporting the ceasefire and criticizing Israel's military action, but also mixed with religious, regional, and ethnic conflicts left over from history. Melissa said she had tried to go to the camp to talk to the students, but the students responded with silence because she was wearing a dog tag (to show support for the Israeli hostages). On one occasion, she walked outside the school wearing a dog tag and was called a terrorist by a protester.
Melissa said she was equally concerned about the situation in Gaza, but such protests had gone to extremes and did not really help Gaza in crisis. She believes that student organizations like Students for Palestinian Justice are using this as a moment to promote their own version of the narrative, such as convincing the majority that Israel is a colonial state, a terrorist state. "What frustrates me is that participants who don't know the history of Palestine and Israel feel that they can easily tell me what Zionism is. Yet I, a Jew, cannot tell the history and pain of our own people. ”
And Ray's persistence in the camp is rooted in her Jewish beliefs. The second time I saw her, she had been in the camp for 12 days. She invited me into the tent and introduced me to the hanging cloth that adorned the perimeter of the tent. On the hanging cloth is her work that uses family prayers as an artistic element.
She and her Muslim classmates had recently celebrated Passover at the camp. "Many of us have been taught from an early age that Israel is the only guarantee between us and the recurrence of the Holocaust."
But because her ancestors had been persecuted, she did not want to see the persecution of other peoples happen again. Ray's shoulders are tattooed with his parents' Hebrew names. Her grandfather fled from Auschwitz and came to New York, where her father was born on Long Island. She said her family often lives in fear of generational trauma.
"But I myself grew up in an anti-Zionist family environment," she said, "and what Israel did to the Palestinians was unforgivable, and that part of history was deliberately ignored by us." ”
She always believed that in the Middle East, Jews and people of other nationalities could live together in peace, but this place was not Israel. "I've been to Israel and it's beautiful. It's just that the foundation of its founding does not correspond to the foundations of Judaism. ”
On 29 April, Ray had been in the camp for 12 days.
The Jewish students I interviewed also had people in the middle ground who did not support the protests in the Gaza solidarity camps, but also considered it an exaggeration to characterize peaceful protests as anti-Semitic.
Jeremy, a fourth-year student, is a student representative at the Columbia chapter of J street U, a national student organization. This group supports Israel's existence as the homeland of the Jewish people, but believes that the future of Palestine and Israel depends on a negotiated settlement of the conflict, and criticizes Israel's long occupation. In its mission statement, the organization mentions that "Israel's endless settlement expansion, slow annexation, and forced occupation violate international law, trample on the rights of Palestinians, and push Israel further down the path of perpetual conflict, ilfreedom, and injustice." ”
Jeremy is blunt that he still believes in the right of Jews to national self-determination, but he is critical of the policies of Netanyahu's government. He disapproved of the school's use of force to dismantle a peaceful, non-violent, protest camp on the grounds of security and anti-Semitism. "Antisemitism certainly exists, but it's overblown to ignore the protesters who are talking about Gaza itself." He said.
Police Clearance: Myths About Campus Safety
At 9 p.m. on April 30, I stood across the street from the school's Amsterdam gate and watched as New York City police removed dozens of students from the school.
Some students shouted slogans for the liberation of Palestine, some remained silent, and some appeared to be still struggling to resist. The entire street is now fenced off. The crowd standing outside the fence shouted at the police, "It's shameless to arrest students." Earlier, a group of protesters not far from the school gate were also arrested. For those of us student journalists who follow events day and night, the moment has come.
The night before in the Pulitzer Building, I caught a glimpse of a group of students walking out of the camp, and it was nearly midnight. We grabbed our cameras and rushed out, and within ten minutes, the students were walking again in protest. Several people moved tents to another lawn on campus. I followed them, took pictures, and after a while, the words "Go to Hamilton" popped up in the group chat.
I rushed to the Hamilton building, where protesters had blocked the door with a few tables and chairs, a small window had been broken, and a group of protesters had entered the building. Hundreds of students hold hands in front of the building, forming a human wall. We weaved through the crowd, trying to find the most suitable place to record everything.
The crowd erupted in cheers when three masked protesters threw down an oilcloth with "Hind's Hall" written on it from the building's exterior window. Hind was a 6-year-old Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces.
Students protest in front of the Hamilton Building in the early hours of April 30.
On April 30, protesters threw down an oilcloth with "Hind's Hall" written on it from the building's exterior window.
The protests continued until around 4 a.m. that day. At 9:34 a.m., the school sent an email saying that a group of people had occupied the school building, and then announced a lockdown of the campus. That day, I walked on campus, more than a dozen students slept in front of the Hamilton building to "stick" to their posts, and several girls slept in the aisle to the Hamilton building.
Two Muslim boys in the camp were kneeling and praying. The campus has never been so quiet and empty.
That night, I watched as the police took the students out of the building. A special truck drove in with a self-lifting ladder, and the special police entered the building in full gear. No one knew what was going on in the building. After the incident, the NYPD released a video of the arrest inside the building and issued a statement saying that a police officer had staggered a shot in the Hamilton building, but there were no casualties.
On the night of April 30, police entered the school to arrest protesting students. Photo: Wang Zhixiang
On the night of 30 April, police stood in front of the camp that was being demolished. Photo: Wang Zhixiang
The next day, the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned the university's leadership for police involvement, saying it was made without consulting the university faculty and senate and that the decision was made in violation of proper procedures.
At 11 a.m. on May 1, Shafiq emailed: "These students are fighting for important causes, namely the rights of the Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. But she said the occupation of the building raised the security risk to an intolerable level. She also thanked the New York Police for their incredible professionalism.
CUAD issued a statement denouncing: We must ask ourselves, for whom is security for? "We can only infer that the only security Shafiq says is the protection of the imperialist interests and profits of the university board at all costs."
Walking into the campus, police officers can be seen everywhere. Their heavily armed presence creates a surreal illusion. It's as if the campus has become a kind of militarized management site.
At 9 p.m. on April 30, the school gate was surrounded by police.
Officially, 14 of the 44 students who occupied the Hamilton building were outsiders. Mellisa, a Jewish student, believes that the police entry into the school is the result of the violence added by these "pro-Pakistan" protest groups to the escalation movement. The most unfortunate thing about them, she said, is that students who are not part of the privileged class and who are unable to cope with the consequences of arrest. "They have nothing to do with those involved, but they pay a heavy price." She said she was not surprised when the incident escalated. Because she believes that the core of this movement is not peace, but a public statement to get rid of Israel as a state. She did not think that was an effective way to show solidarity with Gaza.
Another student, who asked not to be named, said that that night, he not only saw the "hypocrisy of the capitalists" behind the school administration's use of force to protect their own interests, but also experienced the daily situation of civilians in Gaza, even if the two situations are incomparable.
When asked what he thought of the "violent student occupation of the building", he said: "Like all resistance movements, this in itself is a challenge to the established order. The student said he felt that the core of the movement was not hate, but love.
Through the whole event, I realized that human beings are limited – there is no such thing as perfection and no absolute rightness. But when people define specific individuals by political symbols, different positions become weapons against each other. Students on either side of the spectrum spoke of being marginalized, viciously attacked by individuals, or labeled by society. When specific people are put into a set of rigid ideological frameworks, human nature is also sentenced to "prison sentences". Correspondingly, the door to dialogue has been closed. Fortunately, there are still many people who are willing to rationally discuss and even debate the reflection and significance brought about by this movement, and these concerns and reviews are also an important mark for history.