THE Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, reached a deal with students to work toward divesting from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.” It is one of the few schools to reach deals with students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza as demonstrations spread to more than 154 campuses nationwide.
This week on Intercepted, we bring you a special episode from inside the student movement for Gaza. Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, breaks down the campus protests and students’ demands for schools to cut off financial ties with Israel and weapons makers. Thakker is joined by Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism graduate student at Columbia University. Gillian takes us inside the protest encampment at Columbia, which inspired similar demonstrations nationwide before it was violently dismantled by police.
Transcript
This transcript is generated from audio recordings and may not be in its final form.
[Intercepted theme music.]
Prem Thakker: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept, bringing you a special episode straight from the campus protests sweeping the nation.
ABC: Across the nation and around the clock …
NBC: Clashes and arrests from the streets of New York, to the University of Minnesota, to Cal Poly Humboldt …
ABC: From California, to Michigan, and along the East Coast …
Over the last few weeks, several universities responded to pro-Palestine and anti-war campus protests by unleashing local police forces on students. At Columbia University in New York administrators suspended student protesters and authorized a police raid on campus. Last week, after negotiations broke down between protest leaders and the university, NYPD officers outfitted in riot gear arrested students en masse.
ABC7: New York City police burst into a building and encampment at Columbia University occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters. Police have arrested about 300 people at Columbia and City College of New York.
Over at the University of California Los Angeles, police stood by as a pro-Israel mob attacked a pro-Palestine encampment.
ABC7: More fireworks exploding in the middle of the tents, more fireworks being thrown over the barricade into the middle of the tents, more smoke coming from the tents …
The next night, though, police stepped in, by shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the pro-Palestine students who had just been assaulted the day before.
NBC LA: 3 a.m., hundreds of officers using flashbangs and firing non-lethal projectiles … Face off with the protesters before moving in tearing down the pro-Palestinian encampment.
The militarized response to peaceful campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were replicated at other schools. At the University of Texas in Austin, crowds reaching into the thousands have been met with tear gas and stun grenades.
CBS Austin: Armed state troopers were on campus at the University of Texas at Austin during a protest there, and dramatic video shows the moment a news photographer covering the event was tackled to the ground by police.
ABC7: Students received an email saying, if they didn’t evacuate the protest area, they would be subject to arrest.
Unknown speaker: After they couldn’t push us back further, I saw the mace. One of the cops just started raising it at our faces.
PT: At Ohio State and Indiana University Bloomington, officers with snipers monitored protests from rooftops. At Columbia, an officer accidentally fired his gun inside a campus building where students were, during the police raid.
At Washington University in St. Louis, officers beat and slammed a professor from another university who was filming them. They then dragged his limp body across campus. He was hospitalized with several broken ribs and a broken hand.
KSDK News: This video shows police tackle a 65-year-old professor as officers dragged other demonstrators toward a police van.
PT: The flashpoint comes amid demonstrations at over 154 university campuses nationwide. On Thursday, President Joe Biden characterized the protests as violent.
President Joe Biden: Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest.
PT: The so-called “violent protests” the media and politicians decry more often than not only turn out that way because of the actions of police or pro-Israel agitators. Student protesters are painted as easily manipulated violent agitators, rather than sincere organizers pressuring their schools to end their economic ties with Israel and calling for an end to the war on Gaza; a war that’s killed at least 34,000 people — more than 13,000 of those children — and has wounded and displaced many more.
Meanwhile, as members of Congress pressure schools to crack down on protestors, they are also discussing with university trustees how to crack down even further with agencies like the FBI. Here’s Representative Josh Gottheimer in a recent call hosted by centrist political group No Labels:
Josh Gottheimer: Based on my conversations with the FBI there’s activity I can’t get into— Given my committee responsibilities, I can’t get into more specifics. But I can just say that I think people are well aware this is an issue, but it should be— So, I can’t speak to the local FBI field offices, but it’s got to be all hands on deck, and I’m glad that the committees are going to be taking action. A lot of work’s been done here, there are a lot of layers. It’s not just— You know, this is a lot of years of involvement and action that we have to investigate here.
PT: Even as schools try to shut down protests, this movement isn’t going away. To better understand the movement and students’ demands, we head to Columbia University, which has unleashed some of the most violent responses to protesters.
Joining me now to discuss what happened at Columbia is Gillian Goodman, a freelance journalist and grad student at the university’s journalism school. She’s been reporting on the encampment since it began.
Welcome to Intercepted, Gillian.
Gillian Goodman: Hey, thanks, Prem. It’s great to be here.
PT: To start, could you tell me how events unfolded last week, beginning with Monday evening, when the response to students escalated?
GG: So, Monday the 29, a 2 p.m. deadline was given for dispersal of the encampment, which essentially signaled that negotiations had failed between administration and a group of organizers of the encampment. When that 2 p.m. dispersal deadline hit, I was within the encampment, and they read the email aloud on the megaphone.
Student Protester: Earlier today, President Shafik sent out an email announcing the end of negotiations, and declared explicitly that the university will not divest from Israel.
GG: There was very little sense that anyone was willing to disperse within the encampment, I think there was a pretty clear unanimous sense. And so, what they did was basically go through the risks affiliated with not dispersing, so that all community members who decided that they were going to basically refuse the administration’s decision to disperse would know the risks that they were incurring, which included suspensions and, ultimately, expulsions, potentially, as well as Ineligibility to graduate for anybody who is going to be graduating in the next few weeks.
Student Protester: They’re coming around with all of these disciplinary notices. They’re saying that they want us to leave, that we’re a threat, that we’re a danger. Do we feel like we’re a danger here?
Crowd: No!
Student Protester: And what do we say to Columbia?
Crowd: Shame!
Student Protester: However, we want to make sure that the decision that we make about whether we stay here and continue to take up the space that is rightfully ours is one that everyone knows all of the risks of, and is and consents to as a group, right? This is the most important thing. We want to make sure that everyone is on the same page and has the same information.
GG: So, after this, I think there was a sense on campus that something had to happen, because negotiations had failed, they were refusing to disperse. There was a couple of hours of kind of eerie calm where there wasn’t much to do in the bright middle of the day. They held a press conference where they expressed extreme frustration in the administration. And then, the rest of the day from 2 p.m. kind of unfolded like a normal day in the encampment. They had teach-ins, they had speakers come in, they had people creating art. And then, night fell, and we all, I think, were waiting to see what the response would be.
A call to arms kind of came out across the encampment anonymous telegram channel around 11 p.m. that was far more cryptic than anything that normally came through. Usually, missives from the encampment had a very specific ask. They said, we’re going to rally at this time for this thing at this place. This was different. It basically said, all supporters come to the encampment to defend us. And that was it.
So, I was speaking with some sources inside. There had been a lot of these sort of false starts, where you come, you rush to campus at midnight, you think there’s going to be this big action — either from the administration or from the encampment — and then, sort of all quiet. I spoke to some sources who were organizers inside, and they said, this you’re going to have to see for yourself.
So, I got myself to campus, and they started what was a pretty typical rally that then moved into a picket. But they had organized into groups that I hadn’t seen before, sort of teams that seemed to each have different jobs. At around midnight, a second encampment was set up on a far lawn, on Lewisohn Lawn, but it turns out that this was actually a decoy encampment. While this decoy encampment was being erected, a separate group of organizers were occupying Hamilton Hall, which is one of the main administrative buildings on campus.
I was not at the decoy encampment; I was at the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: So, the students have entered Hamilton Hall just at about 12:30 at night. A second encampment was set up, but that seemed to be mainly a diversion from the larger action of taking Hamilton Hall, which is the main administrative building on campus. The doors have been barricaded with chairs from the inside, and the outdoor tables, metal tables, from the outside.
There was a student who tried to stop the protesters’ actions. So far, he has not been able to do anything, but is standing at the front of the doors discussing with a bunch of the protesters.
GG: And it moved very, very quickly. They essentially started their entry into the building just after midnight and, by 12:30, the building was completely secured with a really robust human chain around it, and the beginnings of a barricade on the inside and outside, that they continued erecting the rest of the night.
PT: OK, thank you for taking us through that.
And I think it’d be helpful, because this was such a flashpoint moment at Columbia, to back up a little bit to come to some of the roots of how this first began. Could you take us through how the protest movement first started beginning on Columbia’s campus?
GG: So, there had been, for many months, disagreements building on campus over the administration’s handling not only of the ongoing war in Gaza, but how those protests were happening on campus. There was a sense that, while antisemitism is a very real and viable threat, the way that instances of hate speech in that direction were being handled was very different to how the instances of hate speech and Islamophobia were being handled.
There were many incidents, including physical altercations, in which pro-Palestinian protesters were sprayed with noxious chemicals, where they were doxxed, where their information was released, and the administration organizers felt had consistently ignored those instances. Whereas a really robust antisemitism task force was set up, there were many meetings, there were many emails.
So, I think that sense that issues of free speech and issues of repression were not being handled equally across all protesting groups.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Were you around when they were setting up the initial camp early in the hours of Wednesday morning?
Ry Spada: I was part of it, yeah.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Can you talk to me about the decision to take that step? Because I think it really represented the next step in Columbia’s movement. What did that feel like? What were the fears and excitements around taking that next step?
Ry Spada: I mean, I think there was — as there is kind of with all sort of radical actions — I think there was a sort of baited joy. We were all really excited to have this moment to express the anger that we’ve been feeling with this institution. Personally, as a Jewish anti-Zionist student, I’m just deeply disappointed in the ways, obviously, that Colombia is weaponizing antisemitism, and Jewish trauma, and the Holocaust, to legitimize their complicity in what is a genocide.
There was a sense of, sort of, this needs to happen, like you said. We had been having protests here, and they had been cracking down really hard on them. They’d been pushing forward a really biased messaging. They had not even said the word “Palestinian” until, you know, maybe two weeks ago. It just felt like something needed to happen.
GG: This all came to a head the 17 of April, Wednesday, the 17, where, at 4 a.m., a group of organizers erected this encampment on a central lawn at Columbia, and then, at noon, held a rally to introduce that encampment to the world, and to the rest of Columbia’s student body and administration, and to air their demands. Which were, primarily, divestment from all Israeli profits and holdings, disclosure of all of those financial connections. And then, later, amnesty for any students who were disciplined in those actions, as well as an academic boycott of any academic relations between Israel and Columbia, including the Tel Aviv Center.
So, I think that encampment came as a surprise to a lot of people, even though there had been many, many actions, it just was the first escalation. And, even though it was not the first encampment that had happened — I mean, Vanderbilt had had a similar encampment since the end of March — but it was one of the most high-profile. And, even from that very first day, that first Wednesday, it was pretty robust. There was a significant amount of tents, there were a significant amount of people. And so, it didn’t start very cautiously. It started quite decisively.
PT: The timing of the construction of the encampment is also important to the story, because it occurred on the same morning that the House Republican-led Committee on Education and Workforce was bringing Columbia administrators to testify on questions of antisemitism.
Rep. Virginia Foxx: Since October 7th, this committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses — particularly the most expensive, so-called “elite” campuses — have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.
PT: Antisemitism is, of course, a very important issue, a scourge of society. But, nevertheless, members of Congress seldom care about Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism to the same extent.
So, I wonder, on the earlier days of the encampment, if you could speak a bit more to how students were feeling, what they were talking about. You mentioned their broader goals, and I’m also curious about how they expressed their hopes, their visions, particularly given the fact that looming over them was this high-drama affair in D.C. that seemingly didn’t care at all to engage with their concerns.
GG: What I think is really interesting to note is that the encampment began being set up at 4 a.m. that day, so it wasn’t in response to anything specific in President Shafik’s testimony, right? Which I think some people had thought that it might have been. They hadn’t even heard what she was going to say yet. But I think it was this idea that Congress was so deeply invested in what has become, I think, a kind of euphemism or scapegoat idea, without engaging in any of the other side of things.
Rep. Kathy Manning: Professor Shafik, I understand that all Columbia students go through an orientation that includes anti-discrimination training. Does that training include comprehensive education about antisemitism, including the central role Israel plays in Judaism?
Minouche Shafik: Thank you for that question. In the past, that was not the case, and that is something we are actively working on.
KM: But is that taking place right now?
MS: We have trained our student affairs staff across Columbia.
GG: And so, I think it wasn’t anything specific that she said, even though, later, many people — including many faculty — took issue with how she handled the task force. But I think it was a wider sense that this circus around this is made to really dismantle academic freedom, it’s made to dismantle pro-Palestinian speech, and it was made to discredit the movement regardless of how President Shafik responded.
So, the second day of the encampment’s existence, on the 18, it was dismantled by public safety. And that’s when the arrests, the initial round of arrests occurred.
Student Protester: And, as the police entered the lawn, we sat down and linked arms, and we chanted, and sang hymns and the songs of revolution. And we made certain that they understood that we in no way respected or were intimidated by their authority.
GG: People were fairly undeterred by this in a really huge way, because it was incredibly historic that the NYPD had come onto campus. I think it was deeply traumatic for a lot of people — both within the encampment, and students who had no relation to the encampment — to see this happen. But it was largely peaceful, no one resisted arrest. I think organizers had expected to be arrested in some ways, and that was part of their escalation.
So, as the encampment regrouped and reformed, there were new tents springing up on east Butler Lawn right next to the original encampment within two hours of the arrests. Really quick mobilization. They hung a banner — “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — very shortly afterwards, and people began having a sit-in. Very quickly, speakers arrived. Cornel West was there also within maybe 45 minutes of this new sit-in, and tents began springing up towards the end of that day.
So, the first days of the encampment really felt like a new sense of world building. It reminded me of things that I had seen back in Occupy City Hall. This idea of, we can form this kind of mutual-aid-based almost utopian society in which we have true academic freedom. We have true freedom of speech that felt in contrast to how organizers were feeling Columbia was treating them, and that we can have radical thought and action in a way that we create. And I think that kind of heady world-building characterized a lot of the early first days of the encampment, even as it was beset by challenges pretty much every day.
PT: Could you speak maybe a bit more to the atmosphere in the encampment throughout your time with them and with the students? I’m wondering broadly how the students are using the space to organize. But, also, the emotional feelings, the communal aspect you’re talking about.
What was it like inside the encampment?
GG: Inside the encampment, I think, maybe I can best describe it to you by walking you through it visually.
In the very first days, there was no access into the lawn, so anyone wishing to enter would have to hop a fence. And so, there would be someone from the encampment stationed at all of the fences, both to speak with members of the community who didn’t wish to enter, who maybe had an issue with the encampment, they would engage in conversation. But, if you were coming into the encampment, there was someone who would grab you by the hand, who would help you over the fence, step you down onto a chair and into the environment.
Later, a gate was opened up, so there was easier entry, and there were community guidelines erected at the front of the gate, especially in the latter days of the encampment after the first sort of three or four. So, if you were new to the encampment, someone would take you in, they would read you through a list of 10 community guidelines about respecting the space, about understanding what you’re saying when you’re entering in terms of a free and viable Palestine within our lifetime, a staunch rebuke of antisemitism. And, included in those community guidelines were really, really clear missives about everyone is welcome, in terms of every faith, every background is coming to the space to learn, and coming to the space to show support and solidarity for Gaza and the people of Palestine.
So, after you were read your community guidelines, you would enter through the rest of camp and, towards the latter days, they erected what they called a cornucopia, which was sort of the supply center of the camp. And that would have hot food throughout the day, snacks and cold food early in the morning and late in the night. Blankets, tents, art supplies, bug spray, sunscreen, things that had been brought in by supporters from the outside, community members. I saw kids as young as 10 bringing supplies in.
Child: Well, it’s actually pretty cool, because you can see everything and what’s going on. And it’s a good experience to see what people are fighting for.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: And what do you think people are fighting for?
Child: Like, everybody to be free, and no genocide.
GG: And folks as old as 70s and 80s dropping off everything from coffee to more tents. Once you pass the cornucopia, the central part of the encampment was a large expanse of tents; at its height, it was easily over a hundred tents I counted. Each sort of festooned with signs that would have different things from “bold, beautiful, arrested” to “dykes for the death of the empire” or “Jews for Palestine.” And so, you could sort of get a sense of people’s specific bent within the camp from some of these handcrafted signs.
And then, the focal point of the encampment began as and always was this open central area where they would hold teach-ins, and speakers would come, and they would have morning assembly every day at 10 a.m., and then nighttime assembly at 10 p.m. And the speakers that cycled through were everyone from higher-profile politicians — Ilhan Omar came at a certain point.
Fox 5: Congresswoman, what message are you sending today with your visit to the encampment?
Rep. Ilhan Omar: I just wanted to see and make sure that we were hearing from the young people, that it is peaceful, that they want the issue to be focused on the demands that they are making.
GG: Her daughter is a Barnard student who was one of the very first people suspended for their involvement in the encampment. To folks who were ex-Columbia students who witnessed the 1968 protests on campus, would come and speak to that. There were families; I did a piece about children inside the encampment. I think the youngest that I spoke to what had brought their 14-month-old daughter, and she was eating avocados off a pink plastic tray. So, a real family sense, a sense of collective joy, a sense of collective learning, a sense of longing for collective liberation.
And that’s why to me, it always felt like utopian world-building. It was really an attempt to have an extremely democratic society in which all decisions — I watched them vote on proposals, it took an extremely long time, because anyone who wished to speak could speak, and every proposal was considered — in ways that I don’t know are always sustainable. But, like I said, with similar things like Occupy Wall Street, this sense of, a new world is possible and we’re going to build it, is really what I felt from inside the camp.
And I will say that I was there every day since the beginning of the encampment. I was not there every hour — many, many things happened outside my purview that I didn’t see — but everything I did see for a significant amount of time was incredibly peaceful, was incredibly welcoming.
I sat at seders for Passover.
[Sound from seder.]
GG: I sat at an interfaith sermon. I sat at many, many teach-ins. And there are moments of tension, always; you know, you disagree if you’re building a world together, not everyone wants the same exact world. But there was never moments of violence that I witnessed.
PT: I’m glad you bring all that up, because it reminds me of the array of media depictions we’ve seen on the protesters broadly, but specifically on the Colombian encampment. Those have ranged from calling it, I believe, a socialist or communist Coachella. To, of course, calling it a deadly pit of violence and antisemitism. And the popular line in The Post is now “outside agitators.” But seemingly those all were off the mark, and not just in the way they were describing it, but also just because they were confused in how they were trying to attack these students; they couldn’t pick one thing.
And one thing about that is sort of the procedure that you lay out, the discipline that these organizers had, that was quite impressive, both in terms of how they were organizing this encampment and the protest, but also their messaging discipline. How they spoke to the media, who was speaking to the media, who was representing the protesters.
So, I’m wondering if you could speak to that element of it.
GG: Pretty early on there was a lot of media attention directed at the encampment. And so, I think they realized quite quickly that that was going to be a central need for them. And, as they have said sort of since the beginning, all eyes on Gaza. If you want to speak to us, we want to ensure that the thing that we are protesting is front and center, more so than us, which I think became more of an issue in the later days.
They designated, essentially, media spokespeople very early. And those media spokespeople, if you came in and you said you were a journalist, those are who you would be directed to. And, especially if you were an outside journalist — I think student journalists within Columbia had a different relationship to the encampment — but especially outside media, you would be politely invited in, you would be identified as media. You would then often be held in a media area near the cornucopia, off to the left of the entrance of the encampment. And then, eventually — sometimes it took a while — a media-trained member of the encampment would come to speak to you.
And I saw them have media trainings. I wasn’t able to sit in on any of them but, basically, everybody who spoke had gotten this kind of media training that I think allowed them to express what they were hoping to express, which was organization, peacefulness, and a really strong, cohesive message of their demands.
And I’ll just say one, one more point that I do think is important to mention about these media spokespeople is, they’re not infallible. One of their primary media spokespeople in the beginning of the encampment, a recording [was unearthed] on social media of them defending statements that they had made, and that were quite violent, that were saying to kill all Zionists. And that person was then barred from Columbia’s campus and, since, has apologized for those statements, and I think has expressed a deep amount of disappointment that those statements would take away from the movement. But I do think it’s important to say that these people are— They’re not perfect people. And I think that sometimes everyone who’s saying the messaging isn’t going to have a 100 percent perfect track record. And so, that instance did happen.
PT: Thank you for noting that. And that reminds me that, of course, throughout this campus, throughout all these campuses, we’re dealing with students, not necessarily professional negotiators and so on. One thing that has been kind of deployed by administrators to respond heavily to these protests is these ideas of student safety, student comfort, the fact that it’s finals season, so these protests are a distraction.
But, of course, as we’ve seen at many of these protests — oftentimes, of course, not always — but oftentimes these protests are ones like Columbia’s encampment, where they’re doing teach-ins, where they might indeed get loud because they’re chanting or drumming. But much of it is dancing, chanting, learning from each other. And it really only gets more unsafe or more uncomfortable or more disruptive for people studying after the police responses.
So, I’m wondering if you could speak to, I know you mentioned speaking somewhat to people who might not have been involved in the protests. What was your impression of the temperature and atmosphere of campus throughout your time there? When were students most uncomfortable, when were students most distracted, and when were students most unsafe?
GG: I think it’s really interesting to what you’re saying about this idea that they are both young students who don’t know what they’re doing and high-level dangerous agitators. And it felt almost as if they were young enough to be dismissed by administration, but old enough to be punished as adults. They were old enough to have significant NYPD brought in for those first arrests, and then a really extreme militarization of the NYPD come in for the second round of arrests.
I would say the first round of arrests were definitely a flashpoint on campus. And I think, for those outside the encampment, to see fellow students — whether or not they agreed or disagreed with them — being brought out in zip ties was incredibly affecting and, from that moment on, campus was different. How people felt about the administration was different from that moment on, and I do think how people felt about the encampment was different from that moment on.
Some people, it really deepened their resolve, and felt that national eyes are upon us and international eyes are upon us. And, later, Gaza’s eyes are upon us. It primarily, I think, because people were shocked to see this police involvement, which hadn’t happened for decades on Columbia’s campus and, because it is a private institution, needs to be OK’d by the administration. So, the idea that the administration would not only willingly, but sort of seek out this kind of response really changed things for people in both directions.
I spoke with counter protesters, young counter protesters, like a woman, Shoshana Ofstein, who was going to be an incoming Barnard student next year; she’s now negotiating whether or not she’s going to arrive at Columbia. But she felt, as a Jewish person, that the NYPD hadn’t done enough.
Shoshana Aufzien: Hi, I’m Shoshana Aufzein. I’m currently living in Jerusalem. I’m back home — my family lives in the Upper West Side — and I’m an incoming Barnard student.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: Can you tell me what brought you out here today?
Shoshana Aufzien: I think the events that have been happening on campus are absolutely appalling. I don’t think anybody condoning terrorism should be allowed to be on a college campus. And I, frankly, feel safer living in a warzone right now than I do on Columbia’s quad.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: How do you feel about the arrests that happened in the NYPD’s presence on campus?
Shoshana Aufzien: I mean, I don’t think they’re doing enough, frankly.
GG: She was looking for more police involvement on campus. So, there was a really wide range of opinions on that. I don’t think everybody sat up and said, this is unacceptable, get these police off our campus. Some people really felt, I feel extremely unsafe, and I am looking to discipline those people that are making me feel unsafe.
PT: And so, you talk about this high-grade stewing pot of emotion and reaction to what students, but also people across the country, are seeing. And we’ve talked a bit about the moments leading up to, and the exact moment of, students coming to take over Hamilton Hall on Columbia’s campus.
But could we talk a bit more about that night upon their entrance into Hamilton Hall, and then what ensued after? Both on campus but, of course, as well, throughout the city?
GG: So, a second encampment was erected that was sort of to act as a decoy to the main action of entering and occupying Hamilton Hall, an administrative building.
That moment, I think, especially of students breaking the glass of the doors to place a lock around them, felt very much like a no-turning-back moment. And I think a lot of what led to that was a feeling that they had exhausted every other option.
They had been engaging in school sanctioned protests for months, they had been engaging in sit-ins, in die-ins. There had been petitions, there had been emails, there had been the withdrawal of donations. I think a lot of organizers felt, especially after the escalation with the NYPD and their demands, they felt that their negotiations still had gone nowhere. The concessions that the university made, also, just to note, when negotiations failed.
So, there were a round of concessions on the table from the administration when those negotiations failed. The administration had offered scholarships for folks in Gaza and the West Bank, they had offered to convene a committee on academic freedom, they had offered to convene a committee to consider proposals of divestment. But I think organizers felt — and they said, in fact, in a press briefing, when that 2 p.m. dispersal deadline was brought down — they said that these felt like bribes. The scholarship felt as if the administration was throwing money at a problem, and the committees on academic freedom and the proposal of considering divestment felt empty to the organizers.
So, I think faculty were — a lot of them, really — on the side of the organizers, but also felt deeply that they maybe need to make concessions and disperse for safety. But, regardless of all of this, the organizers felt that escalation was their only hope, and they were really looking to the protests of 1968 explicitly, in which protesters occupied the same building, Hamilton Hall, to protest the Vietnam War and Columbia’s expansion into Harlem. That incident resulted in even larger scale arrests with greater violence.
And so, I think that the organizers understood that the historical precedent for what they’re doing was not without risk. And I think that moment when they took the hall and renamed it Hinds Hall, that moment, they understood, placed them in a historical precedent that was unsafe for them, and was violent.
And so, I think, watching them with their arms linked, singing protest songs, but in a much more somber tone than I had ever heard them sing before as 300 riot police entered campus, and all press was pushed out.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: So, police in riot gear, probably two to three hundred, have entered the campus. They’re coming in towards the protestors who are at Hamilton Hall right now. They’re surrounding the lawn with the second encampment in front of the protestors.
GG: There was almost no press, and almost no witness to the arrests.
Gillian Goodman, Reporting on Location: The students are still singing in front of Hamilton Hall.
GG: We all attempted to remain inside. A lot of people really put their bodies on the line, and sort of refused to move for a bit, but the police were incredibly effective in removing not only press, but also legal observers and medics. And so, the only information we have about what happened during the actual arrests — and of course, almost nobody saw what happened inside the building during the arrests — but that the only evidence we have from that is some footage that we’re slowly gathering from different sources, and trying to paint a picture of what happened.
PT: It’s striking when you talk about how quick the police response was to these students. And you have to wonder if it might just be too late to put things back to where they were before. Because even in those handful of hours that we saw images of students singing these very affecting songs, and as we see those students unfurl the banner that read Hinds Hall, in honor of the six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, you have to wonder if it’s too late, just because alongside this you’re seeing more and more campuses either expressing overtures. Or, in fact, promising divestment votes in the fall, as we see on Brown University’s campuses. There’s other campuses that are opening negotiations with protesters.
It just strikes me because, in the ’80s, students in Hamilton Hall were able to secure a divestment vote from apartheid South Africa. And now, here, despite Columbia students being met with police right away, and now they’re kind of reeling, their tents have been swept. On one hand, many protesters might feel very dejected but, on the other hand, they have young children in Gaza saying, thank you. And those images are being seen by people across the world. You have college campuses all over the place that are now facing similar encampment protests spurred, in part, by Columbia’s acts, and a lot of these campuses are now opening negotiations.
So, I’m wondering if you have any sense at Columbia while, despite the tents being gone, students being arrested, where does the divestment movement stand at Columbia amid all of this context?
GG: The only people able to enter Columbia’s campus are people residing in residential buildings directly within campus. If you are a Columbia student with a functioning Columbia ID who is not in one of those dorms, you cannot even walk through the gate. So, it’s incredibly difficult to have momentum and solidarity in a movement when a huge swath of campus can’t set foot on campus and cannot be together.
This is the moment I think that online organizing takes up some of the mantle of that, and there’s a lot of communication in Signal and Telegram channels, and also solidarity with other institutions, right? Like, the arrests at City College were massive and more violent than what happened at Columbia. And I think there is a huge solidarity emerging between Columbia and City College.
Of course, NYU has had an encampment, the New School has had a large encampment. And I think that kind of solidarity is forming because there is no access to an easier campus solidarity that could, I think, bolster the divestment movement.
PT: Well, as we are seeing across the country, there are definitely lots and lots of organizing happening still between pro-Palestinian students, pro-Israel students and demonstrators, and the police. And there seems to be no sign of slowing down.
But thank you, Gillian, for joining us. This was incredibly informative, and I think there’s been a lot of outsider media parachuting in to these encampments, especially from folks who maybe have been paying as much attention to these students and their concerns as you have been so intimately doing so. So, thank you for sharing that perspective with us.
GG: Absolutely. I’m really happy to be able to bring it to you all, and bring those voices in. So, thank you for having me, Prem.
PT: Absolutely.
That’s Gillian Goodman, a freelance writer and journalism grad student at Columbia.
Now, let’s dig deeper into the larger divestment movement. What exactly are these students so committed to, beyond calling for an end to Israel’s violence in Gaza and Palestine more broadly?
They have focused demands on university complicity. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student-led coalition, has identified five demands for the school, which include financial divestment, academic boycott, stopping displacement of the surrounding community and policing on campus, and releasing a statement calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
We’ll focus on number one: financial divestment. Specifically, students are calling for Columbia to divest all of its finances — including its endowment — from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine. They further want to ensure accountability by increasing transparency around financial investments.
Divestment emerged as a popular tactic in opposition to apartheid South Africa decades ago. In the early 2000s, college students around the country began pressuring their universities to divest from Israel. Several divestment referendums have taken place at Columbia’s campus in recent years; in 2018, at Barnard, about 64 percent of participating students voted in favor of divestment from companies that, quote, “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” In 2020, 61 percent of Columbia College undergraduates voted in favor of a similar resolution.
Fast forward to now. A whopping 90 percent of participants at Barnard voted in favor of divestment and, at Columbia College, about 76 percent. The pre-existing campus appetite for divestment from Israel was inflamed after October 7. While Hamas’s attack shocked the world, Israel’s brutal retaliatory collective punishment shocked people even further.
Students at Columbia were no different. They sprung into action, hosting vigils, rallies, and forums. Several other schools joined quickly after Columbia’s encampment, including Yale, MIT, and the University of North Carolina. These protests have largely consisted of nothing more than students in tents, or chants and drums. Nevertheless, administrators have been quick to meet such protests with a heavy police presence, but knocking down one only seemed to prompt five more elsewhere.
While many schools responded to students’ demands for divestment with violence, there were some notable exceptions. Evergreen State College, for example, struck a deal with students to begin work towards divesting from, “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Evergreen State is the alma mater of American nonviolence activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by Israeli bulldozers in 2003 as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes. In 1977, Hampshire College, a small private university, became the first to divest from apartheid South Africa. In the years following, colleges nationwide tipped like dominoes.
As the American student movement for Palestine peaks, it’s an open question as to whether Evergreen State could be the moment’s first domino.
That does it for this episode of Intercepted
Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. Laura Flynn and senior editor Maryam Saleh produced this episode. Gillian Goodman contributed reporting and audio to this episode. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. And I’m Prem Thakker, a politics reporter for The Intercept.
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