Globalizing the Student Intifada
Updates from the past week of encampment.
Every Day of the Encampment is Another Victory
Last weekend, Columbia administration rushed to cancel and rearrange admitted students day - a day where they show off their campus to prospective students and their families for a replenishing source of revenue.
Saturday’s activities were canceled altogether while on Sunday, admitted students were quarantined in Lerner Hall by an administration frightened that their new students would catch the anti-Zionism bug. The school is so afraid of the encampment that apparently even catching sight of it will ring the death knell for their profits.
However, the admitted students themselves contributed to our movement and shared their schedule with us. We used this schedule to flyer at the proper locations in Lerner to inform admitted students and their parents of the reality on campus. Columbia is so entrenched in genocide that they will sic the cops on students who protest their investments in Israel's apartheid regime.
The administration must meet our demands: divestment, disclosure, and amnesty. If they call the police on us again, we will only regroup and grow stronger, just as we did on April 17. The longer the administration draws out negotiations, the more students we will recruit. Graduation looms large in the minds of Columbia's administrators as we camp on a lawn they are so eager to set up for commencement. As long as we continue organizing, educating, and occupying, we will remain an irrepressible force that continues to inspire students across the country to follow in our footsteps.
Over the last week we’ve won more victories. The university announced on Monday that all classes will be hybrid for the rest of the semester. On Thursday, they announced that final exams will have a remote option.
Zionist billionaires withdrawing their money is a significant blow to the school. For the trustees, like all capitalists, the entire movement is a numbers game—as long as they profit more from investment in Israel than divestment, their mouth will go where their money is. That’s where the encampment comes in—the more we disrupt, the more we paralyze campus operations and all that the admin stakes their money on—Zionist donors, tuition, reputation, exploitation—the less profits the school will make and the closer we get to victory.
Hybrid classes and pass/fail extensions are another victory for us. Campus life will not continue in the same way anymore. Campus operations are close to paralysis. “Business as usual” is impossible. We’ve opened up more opportunities for students and faculty to join us during the day. At the start of the encampment, we emailed our professors to allow a hybrid option so that students can attend classes remotely from the lawn; less than a week later, we won that demand from the entire university.
Centered in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, we will continue to win victory after victory from the school, drawing in more people as we organize, escalate, and persist in the struggle.
Following the 1968 student uprising, it took the university 20 years to recover financially from the sudden drop in applications, endowments, and grants.
There is a price to be paid for supporting genocide, for suspending, evicting, and repressing student. We are here to impose that cost.
Admitted students day is over—commencement is on its way. Let’s see how much of this campus we can reclaim by then!
Solidarity Encampments Spread Across America
The Columbia administration tried to shut down our movement by sending swarms of NYPD to arrest us. Instead of stopping, we helped ignite a student movement across the country. Thousands of faculty nationwide signed onto an academic boycott of Columbia. Organizers planned walkouts in solidarity with our movement and with Palestinian national liberation.
Most importantly, more than a thousand students have put their bodies on the line in Gaza solidarity encampments, from our neighbors at NYU, CUNY, CCNY and The New School, to those northward at Yale, Harvard and Cornell, to those on the West coast at USC, Cal Poly Humboldt and Berkeley, and to those in the midwest at Ann Arbor. There are more than 25 encampments nationwide. This number grows by the day. Vanderbilt’s encampment has been the longest running—more than three weeks now—and included a nearly 24-hour sit-in at an administrative building.
The administrations at other universities respond similarly to Columbia administration with unjust, repressive tactics. They attempt to emulate the Columbia playbook by threatening suspensions and arrests. Some have followed through on those threats. But university administrators are learning that what we chant is true: The more you try to silence us, the louder we will be.
In the face of this repression, students join massive solidarity networks, push back harder against university administrations complicit in genocide, turn repression into resistance, and struggle for a free Palestine.
At NYU, protesters actively resisted the police and pushed back the violent cops who invaded the encampment while Muslim protesters prayed.
The students at California State Polytechnic Institute, Humboldt escalated the farthest, with students occupying and barricading two administrative buildings still under their control. When riot police attempted to breach the barricades, the students fought back and held their ground with conviction. They resisted the police with water bottles, whatever objects they could find, and their bodies. They forced the police out of the building and reconstructed their barricade. The school administration was forced to close down the entirety of campus.
We are constantly learning from the successes and failures of the movement internationally, nationally, and historically. We evaluate what works and what doesn't. We adapt. And we apply our knowledge to fight in support of Palestinian liberation.
How do we get closer to our demands? How do we escalate, ending business as usual? How do we grow our numbers and make new allies? These are questions that every student who wants divestment should consider seriously.
“Antisemitism and all forms of hate have no place on our campus” – says University with Main Library Named After Nazi-Sympathizer
Mass arrests by riot police of over 100 students accused of antisemitism by the university administration took place last week with the landmark of Butler Library in the background.
Who exactly was Butler? Nicholas Murray Butler was the President of Columbia from 1902-1945. (These days, with imperialism increasingly in crisis, we don’t see presidents serving that long before they’re kicked out by student protests). Notably, he was President of Columbia during the rise of fascism—which he ardently supported and played a significant role in normalizing in the US.
In 1919, Butler changed the Columbia admittance process to limit the number of Jews who could attend Columbia—the first US university to establish an anti-Jewish quota, which the activist Upton Sinclair referred to as an “academic pogrom.”
Butler said Mussolini (the Italian dictator and theorist of fascism) was a “genius in the field of government given to Italy by God” and explicitly praised "the stupendous improvement which Fascism has brought.”
In 1933, the same year that Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, and months after the Nazis had their book burning, Butler invited the Nazi ambassador to Columbia with open arms. He continued Columbia’s student exchange program with the Third Reich, accepting Nazi-approved students at Columbia and sending Columbia students there. In other words—a student exchange program with a genocidal regime.
In fact, students and faculty who protested the Nazis faced heavy repression from the university— sound familiar?
Robert Burke, class president and an intended member of the Columbia College class of ‘38, was expelled by Butler for leading pickets protesting Columbia’s ties with the Nazis. Two faculty were also dismissed. Despite student protests, the administration insisted on sending a delegate to a Nazi propaganda festival in 1936—a year after the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Despite the fact that a thousand students and professors voiced their objection to having Nazis on campus, students and faculty picketing the normalization of ties with a genocidal regime faced repression from a president who insisted that political concerns were irrelevant in educational matters.
Amidst students demanding that Burke be granted an honorary degree—demands that continued at least into the early 2000s—the university continues to deny this antifascist student his degree, instead siding with the ruling of their Nazi-loving predecessor.
In another parallel, the university president was strongly anti-union (surprise), and went so far as to expel the chief editor of the Columbia Spectator, Reed Harris, for criticizing Columbia’s exploitation of student waiters. He was reinstated following a massive student strike in the early ‘30s, but chose not to return. Despite student demands decades later to grant him an honorary degree after he passed away, the university still denies him his degree.
The university says antisemitism has no place on our campus—we agree. So why does it still name multiple buildings—including its main library—after an open antisemite and Nazi-supporter?
Yes, the university should combat antisemitism—and let’s start by renaming the library from the Nazi Butler to the antifascist Burke!
Statement: Student organizations in the Gaza Strip in solidarity with the Student Intifada in the United States
“In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful…
We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising up in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist-U.S. genocide against our people in Gaza. As we remain under the bombs of occupation, resisting Nazi genocide, grieving for our martyred colleagues and faculty, and witnessing the destruction of our universities, we welcome the examples of solidarity offered by students facing arrest, police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion in order to demand that their universities end their complicity in the Zionist-U.S. genocide and renounce their support for the occupation and the war profiteers that arm it.
We have seen hundreds of students arrested across the United States as they work to transform their universities into “Popular Universities for Gaza.” Students, faculty, and staff are disrupting university operations and making clear that while universities in Gaza are being bombed, university business cannot continue as usual in the United States. These actions come as university administrations collaborate with members of Congress to discredit conscientious student activists and faculty, expel students, ban events, shut down student organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, and condemn activists working to end the Nazi genocide. At the same time, these same universities invest in the same companies that profit from the continued sale of weapons to the Zionist regime to continue its genocidal offensive.
Our students – and our educational system as a whole – in occupied Palestine are subjected to ongoing genocidal aggression: our universities destroyed and bombed, our student organizations banned, and our student leaders subjected to torture, assassination and mass imprisonment. However, in Palestine and around the world, the student movement has always been a driving force of our struggle for liberation. When we see videos and images from American universities today, we are reminded of our history of student struggle as well as the student uprisings of 1968, which challenged imperialism from Vietnam to Palestine and reshaped the face of Europe and the United States. Now, in 2024, the student movement is once again leading the way.
From here in Gaza, we see you and salute you. Your actions and activism matter, especially in the heart of the empire, in the United States. As members of Congress agree to provide $26 billion in additional weapons to bomb our people and continue the Zionist-U.S. genocide, you are taking meaningful action to shut down the war machine on your campuses. It is clear that a new generation is rising that will no longer accept Zionism, racism and genocide, and that stands with Palestine and our liberation from the river to the sea.
Your global student solidarity is breaking boundaries, and it is time to smash the US imperialist war machine. From Gaza to Columbia, to Ann Arbor and Berkeley, our hands are joined to end Nazi genocide and achieve our collective liberation.”
Student Frameworks Secretariat
• Islamic Bloc – Islamic Resistance Movement
• Student Unity Bloc – Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
• Union of Student Struggle Committees – Arab Liberation Front
• Union of Palestinian Student Struggle Committees – Palestinian Arab Front
• Islamic League – Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine
• Fatah Youth – Fatah movement
• Al-Initiative Student Gathering – the Palestinian National Initiative Movement
• Student Action Front – Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
• Palestine Liberation Youth – Palestine Liberation Front
• Al-Istiqlal Student Bloc – Palestinian Democratic Union Fida
• Student Struggle Bloc – Palestinian Popular Struggle Front
• The Land and Man Bloc – Popular Front (General Command)
• Progressive Student Union Bloc – Palestinian People’s Party
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