عقود من المناصرة الشبابية المؤيدة لفلسطين أدت إلى الانتفاضة الطلابية في الولايات المتحدة

On April 17, Columbia University and Barnard College students came together to pitch the first tent that would start a popular wave of student activism for Palestine.

The university’s response to the Columbia-Barnard encampment led to rapid expansion of more than 100 encampments globally. Over 3100 U.S. students faced arrests, according to The New York Times. Many of their professors found themselves needing to be bailed out too. Those at home watched as some students and faculty were met with extreme force from police. What higher education administrators did not anticipate was that their suppressive tactics would re-energize the anti-genocide student movement.

“We have reached a tipping point of almost reaching the point of no return as it relates to Palestine activism on college campuses,” said Dr. Hatem Bazian in a phone call with Palestine Square. Bazian is a Berkeley professor who was a founding member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and is the founder and chairman of American Muslims for Palestine. “The number of campuses, the intensity of what is taking place, the creativity, the courage we are seeing...”

Alia, a PhD student at NYU, has been organizing for Palestine on NYU campuses — including NYU Abu Dhabi during undergrad — for about seven years. She said in a phone interview that, while the turnout for the spring semester encampments was unexpected, neither the demands from student organizers nor the suppression from university administration is new.

NYPD responded to the initial NYU encampment around 8:00 p.m. on April 22, the day of its establishment.

“Faculty [members who are also part of Faculty for Justice in Palestine] formed a chain to protect the students,” Alia said.

Those faculty members were arrested first, followed by student protesters.

Walls added by NYU on campus to curb the students encampment. Courstesy of Jill Webb.

“There were also tons of people who cops assaulted in one way or another,” she said. Several students were left with injuries, including concussions, according to Alia. A student journalist on the scene was maced.

“It got quite violent in a way that the encampment never would have if police weren't called on campus,” she said.

Bazian said that the current movement has entered a similar stage of activism witnessed in the later days of the anti-Apartheid movement. 

“I think bringing [in] the New York Police Department, suspending the students, and acting this way have galvanized the student movement,” he said. “I think [the university administrations] miscalculated what the outcome and the response would be.”

Barricades set up on NYU campus during student encampments. Courtesy of Jill Webb.

This breakthrough moment comes after decades of strategic activism. Loubna Qutami, a UCLA professor who’s currently doing postdoctoral research in Palestinian Studies at Brown University, dates the start of youth advocacy for Palestine in the U.S. to 1952 when the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) was formed.

“It mobilized over 6,500 Arab students across the nation who were very committed to anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism,” Qutami told Palestine Square in a phone call. “They had deep alliances with the Black Liberation Student Movement, American Indian Student Movement… all of the other student movements.”

By the 1980s, OAS membership had dwindled and the General Union of Palestine Students, which had similar goals, took center stage. Organizing in the U.S. took a nosedive when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands as a promise for peace in 1993.

“That moment left a political void in the student movement,” Qutami said. “We always saw student activism around the question of Palestine, but at that time, it was a little bit less centralized. Sometimes it would happen in the name of an Arab Student Union, and sometimes in the name of a Muslim Student Union. Sometimes it would just be a group of students who wanted to do an event around Palestine.”

In the mid-nineties, Bazian was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and found himself among a group of students eager to address the situation in Palestine. In the fall of 1993, Osama Qasem, a Jordanian-Palestinian student at Berkeley, officially registered the first SJP at Berkeley. The club helped organize lecture series, protest rallies, movie screenings and student teachings about the Nakba, according to Bazian.

Bazian realized early on that individual SJP chapters should maintain their independence — a heavily centralized organization was not the goal.

“I do think one aspect of the success of SJP has been the autonomy of each of the chapters and their creativity in dealing and organizing to their specific circumstances,” Bazian said.

A bulk of the pro-Palestinian encampments and campus demonstrations have been led by individual SJP chapters. Their decentralization is something we can still see today, as various campus chapters take on their interpretations of what divestment means to them.

Some universities, including NYU, have also formed Palestinian solidarity coalitions of multiple student group organizations.

“There's definitely a lot of new folks who came into the movement in the past year,” Alia said.

While building community support is critical, the sudden burst of membership interest in a short timeframe can bring added challenges to student organizing.

SJPs did not rise across the nation all at once. By 2010, there were only 24 chapters.

“It was after UC Berkeley's BDS resolution that we really started to see the growth of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across the country,” Qutami said.

That year also saw the establishment of a National Students for Justice in Palestine.

“It was formed in order to create an exchange of ideas and tools and education and resources between students at different campuses,” Qutami said.

That group began hosting an annual conference for all SJP chapters.

“Students were able to meet students at other campuses and exchange ideas and techniques and political education and really grow as a movement that was defining shared aspirations and principles and strategies,” Qutami said.

The 2014 war on Gaza expanded the urgency of student organizing, according to Qutami. By 2015, over 200 campuses had chapters, and some were beginning to work on their own divestment resolutions. Around the same time, the Palestinian Youth Movement was beginning to grow.

“Many of these college students who are about to graduate were joining groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement where they were continuing to learn about Palestinian heritage and culture, but also about political culture and about strategizing as a new generation of Palestinians for liberation,” said Qutami, who was a co-founder of the Palestinian Youth Movement, though she has since aged out. 

In May 2021, the Supreme Court of Israel decided to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in Jerusalem. That decision led to days of protests and the use of excessive force by Israeli authorities. Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum to withdraw forces from Sheikh Jarrah, as well as the nearby Temple Mount complex, but Israel continued its violent expulsion campaign.  Israel consequently launched an 11-day war on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 256 Palestinians — including 128 civilians — according to the United Nations.

In the U.S., protests began to pour out into the streets of major cities. Social media played a crucial role in this mobilization. U.S. citizens were able to hear first-hand accounts from Palestinians, as opposed to relying on mainstream media narratives.  

“People [could] see [with] their own eyes and hear from the ground what was happening,” Qutami said.

The U.S. movement began as an effort to show solidarity with Palestinians but grew into a larger expression against all state violence. The 2021 airstrikes happened about a year after a summer of Black Lives Matter uprisings.

“People were able to draw direct links between the two… how police violence against Black communities in the U.S. is directly linked to [the violence of the] Israeli occupation against Palestinians,” Qutami said.

Flash forward to today, many U.S. colleges have had some form of pro-Palestine action.

“Campus protests have been a part of American tradition going all the way back to the 1930s,” said David Farber, a U.S. history professor at the University of Kentucky.

Campuses are “natural sites for political activism” because young students are “at a place in which inquiry is rewarded,” according to Farber. 

“Before the 1950s, very few Americans even went to college, so student activism was not that big a deal,” Farber said. “We have seen increasing numbers ever since.”

What is notable about the current rise of student advocacy is the speed at which it has progressed. Farber partially attributes this to social platforms where students get daily updates and can converse with each other about ongoing events.

“This whole wave of campus activism [happened] so fast and in such a compressed period of time,” Farber said. He indicated that the surge of Palestine solidarity encampments nationwide this past spring differed from “probably any other protest that [has taken form] on [university] campus[es],” Farber said.

Pro-Palestine campus protests have calmed during the summer as college students leave campus. But many have pledged to return to organizing in the fall. 

After a summer away from NYU, Alia noticed changes after returning to campus.

“I walked into the Global Center for Spiritual Life and instead of the gates that we already have, which require swipe access, [there were] gates that are identical but instead of [their height reaching] your hip area, [they're twice the size now,]” she said.

Other campus areas that have been traditionally used for student congregation have new security measures too — notably, the site of past encampments has been barricaded off. To Alia, this is in complete contrast to NYU’s messaging that they are a campus without walls.

NYU also has new speech policies. In an update to the student code of conduct, the university now considers anti-Zionist speech and actions a form of discrimination against Jewish people in an attempt to prohibit the criticism of Zionism. 

The updated guidance on NYU’s website reads, “Using code words, like ‘Zionist,’ does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the [Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harrassment] Policy. For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity.”

On Aug. 29, Palestine Legal released a report addressing those changes saying, “The policy directly conflates Zionism and Judaism by stating that the former is a “code word” for the latter. It goes on to treat Zionism as a protected class on its own—a status afforded to no other political ideology.”

The Palestine Legal statement also said that such policies will curtail free expression on campus and will impact Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students on campus.

As a new school year begins, the images of officers in riot gear on campus linger in the minds of many Americans.

“To see the police [aim] at university kids that are protesting U.S. complicity in genocide — it is [like] living in a parallel universe,” Bazian said.

It has left some citizens thinking deeply about the current state of educational leadership in the U.S.

“It raises questions about what higher education in this country is,” Qutami said. “Why is it being driven by donors? And why is it being driven by police orders?”