The Student Intifada: Palestine, South Asia and the Question of Solidarity
A roundtable with student organizers from the Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Toronto, and Oxford encampments.
Illustration: Jamhoor
Over the spring and summer, we witnessed a wave of student-led encampments in solidarity with Palestine, beginning at universities like Columbia and Stanford and spreading across North America, Europe and beyond. Several profiles and commentaries have detailed what transpired at these encampments — how they re-centered Palestine on campus, radicalized students, reimagined the pedagogical possibilities of the university, and prefigured models of care and commitment we hope to see in society at large. Yet, the encampments were also spaces of conflict and contestation. Sustaining solidarity was challenging, especially in the face of university administrations mobilizing whatever policy and state apparatus at their disposal to suppress dissent.
Yet, two aspects remain under-explored:
First, the experience of organizers at different encampments has rarely been discussed side by side. How did varying national contexts and university settings shape both the trajectory of student mobilization and the nature of university repression? Such a conversation, we believe, will not only be valuable to publics but to organizers as well.
Second, many of the leading encampment organizers were of South Asian descent. How, if at all, did their South Asian backgrounds shape their political trajectories? How did they practice and live solidarity as South Asians in support of Palestine?
Here, we present an edited transcript of a roundtable conversation, held over the summer, between leading student organizers from five different campuses, all from various South Asian backgrounds:
Maryam Iqbal (Columbia; Kashmiri)
Shraddha Joshi (Harvard; Indian)
Muhammad Yahya Aftab (Cornell; Pakistani)
Sara Rasikh (Toronto; Pakistani)
Sameer Rashid Bhat (Oxford; Kashmiri)
The conversation was moderated by Asmer Safi, a Jamhoor member and one of the Harvard encampment organizers prohibited from graduating by the university.
Asmer: This is an important conversation. A lot of the profiles about the encampments have been siloed within the cities and countries where they took place. Less work has appeared connecting the different encampments and putting organizers from various parts of the world into conversation. This kind of exchange can be very helpful, for the public but also for us as organizers.
I was part of the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard for the past four years, and I participated in the pro-Palestine encampment there in April and May, which lasted a sweet and chaotic 21 days.
Let’s start with introductions. Please tell us a little about yourselves — where you were camping out, the duration of the encampment, your roles, and if you faced any punitive measures from the university administration.
Maryam: I am a student organizer at Columbia University, and I'm of Kashmiri descent. I'm currently suspended through the fall semester for my involvement in the encampment.
Sara: I'm a Pakistani Master's student at the University of Toronto. Our encampment, called the People Circle’s For Palestine, lasted for 63 days. At its peak, we had around 200 campers. I helped with research, media liaising, organizing rallies and various on-site tasks.
Shraddha: I just graduated from Harvard. I was part of the Palestine Solidarity Committee with Asmer and participated in the encampment. I was one of the 13 students whose degrees were withheld, Asmer included. We finally got them in July after a lot of advocacy from students and faculty. I come from an Indian background.
Muhammad: I’m based at Cornell and was part of the Coalition for Mutual Liberation that organized the encampment. Our campaign lasted almost three weeks. It was one of the last encampments to start and one of the first to wrap up. My role was flexible — I handled logistics, from making sure rainwater didn’t flood the camps to arranging food and cleaning up.
Sameer: I’m from Kashmir and am doing a PhD at Oxford, working on international law. I was part of the student group that met with the vice-chancellor in October following an open letter. However, the vice chancellor's office didn’t move much, so the encampments started in May. I was a negotiator for the Oxford Action for Palestine, in dealings with the university. Our encampment lasted about 60 days.
Asmer: I want to circle back to Columbia, as a central and inspirational encampment for many of us. Maryam, could you talk about the steps that went into organizing it?
Maryam: I’d been organizing with Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia since October. Back then, we were already planning a major escalation, but it was difficult to envision what that would look like at first. By January, we began thinking about an encampment. But I don’t want to take credit for the idea, because Stanford already had an active encampment since October that few knew about.
Our communications game was strong. Our Instagram posts, including a graphic I made using ’68 imagery, gained a lot of traction. I didn’t expect it to have such a domino effect, but here we are. It’s surreal to be sitting here with all of you who organized your own encampments. It was amazing to see how things unfolded.
Asmer: It was incredible. I remember a couple of days after Columbia’s first encampment was shut down, Shraddha and I were in a room and other co-organizers at Harvard debating whether or not we should organize an encampment. There was a lot of back and forth: are we replicating something that isn’t suited for our context? Should we do something completely different, like occupy a building, which you at Columbia did as well? Columbia showed us how to genuinely shake up the movement, especially in the Northeast. Organizers at Columbia deserve much credit for that.
I want to ask about the connections between the personal and the political. What was your political journey up to organizing the encampments? How, if at all, did your identity as brown or South Asians shape your activism for Palestine?
Shraddha: This is a big question, one I've been grappling with a lot for the past few years, especially this year. I can't say my South Asian identity in particular is what led me into thinking about Palestine. In the Indian American diaspora, the political orientation, shaped by caste and class, tends to be conservative and disengages with Palestine. That was the environment I grew up in.
But learning about Palestine made me reflect more on South Asia and vice versa. As I started reading more about the settler-colonialism and the imperialist configurations shaping what is playing out in Palestine, I began to think more about nationalism and the violence used to enforce it — whether in the context of the Zionist project or India's occupation of Kashmir.
We cannot stop at interrogating our own universities and governments in the US, but also pay attention to several governments in South Asia who are actively fueling genocide there. The surveillance technology and drones field-tested on Palestinians are used in Kashmir. Home demolitions used by Israel against Palestinians are mirrored by the Indian government against Indian Muslims. Missiles in Gaza have “Made in India” stamps on them. This relationship is concrete and tangible.
Learning about that made me realize the importance of transnational solidarity, of questioning our backgrounds, and of combatting the complicity of our communities. And not just when it comes to Palestine, but South Asia too: we have seen Indian liberals and progressives speak up for Palestine, but not for Kashmiris confronting Hindutva colonization. This year has really made those connections and contradictions explicit. As South Asians, there’s a very clear point of intervention here: we can challenge these collaborations and contradictions in our communities.
Maryam: I hesitate to say that being South Asian informed my organizing and stake in Palestine. What has informed it is being Kashmiri Muslim. While Palestine is important to all of us, I have noticed a lot of tensions within the South Asian community regarding Palestine, especially at Columbia.
When Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended in November, we formed the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CU Apartheid Divest) coalition. A lot of organizations joined but most of the South Asian student groups notably didn’t. They wanted to remain apolitical. Some joined after significant pressure.
Another major tension emerged after a Kashmir-Palestine teach-in right before the encampment in March. The Indian Students Association released a statement condemning it, claiming the two conflicts couldn’t be compared. Hindus on Campus also started attacking us online.
“One of the biggest fears of Hindu nationalists is that people will start to draw parallels between Palestine and Kashmir. And that’s exactly what we, as organizers from South Asia, need to do. ”
The conversation around South Asia’s complicity in Zionism is critical because we’re seeing a rise in Hindu nationalism on campus. I'm worried about the exchange of tactics between Zionists and the Hindu nationalists, especially within the diaspora. We all need to start preparing for this because it's only going to intensify. One of the biggest fears of Hindu nationalists is that people will start to draw parallels between Palestine and Kashmir. And that’s exactly what we, as organizers from South Asia, need to do.
Sara: I think it’s important to recognize that South Asian communities have a proud history of supporting Palestinian resistance and liberation — from the 1970s fundraising campaigns by Pakistani communist parties to Bangladeshi volunteers fighting alongside the PLO. This legacy of solidarity informs and inspires a lot of pro-Palestinian South Asian students, at least at the University of Toronto, where we discussed this history.
Our shared experiences can drive effective solidarity, especially in the West. We have a shared history of displacement, from the Partition of the subcontinent to the Nakba. That shared experience of colonial violence, forced migration, and loss draws South Asians to the Palestinian liberation struggle.
“That shared experience of colonial violence, forced migration, and loss draws South Asians to the Palestinian liberation struggle.”
My great-grandfather was killed during partition. I’ve had deep conversations with my grandfather about the trauma that this displacement caused our family. When I speak with other South Asians — Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Indians, Bangladeshis — we often talk about our families’ histories of migration and displacement. These personal stories also play a role in building solidarity with Palestine.
Yahya: I was raised in a very religious household and, as most religious Pakistanis, we hold Al-Aqsa and Palestine close to our faith. The pain of Palestinians was always imbued in my upbringing. I remember my mom tearing up as we watched images from Al-Aqsa and, in the late 90s and early 2000s, Pakistani Television network (PTV) would air clips from Kashmir and Palestine, which the family watched every night. The crisis in Palestine pulled at our heart strings — we were always praying for them, even before I had any political leanings.
As I grew older, I came to understand how Palestine’s plight is intricately tied to global flows of capital, and how capitalism plays a central role in sustaining the occupation. Before moving to the US, I was an organizer with the Progressive Students Collective in Pakistan, the largest left-leaning student organization in the country. In Lahore, I spent about seven or eight years organizing on campuses, which gave me a solid foundation when the crisis escalated after October 7th. At Cornell, I felt compelled to get involved and contribute as much as I could.
Sameer: A lot of what Maryam said resonates with me as a Kashmiri. Solidarity with Palestine feels almost natural, but it wasn't until I arrived at Oxford that I began organizing around it. I did my undergrad in India, and during those years, Hindutva violence and anti-Muslim aggression — especially towards Kashmiris — escalated sharply. That consumed most of my political work back then. But at Oxford, I met several Palestinian friends and got involved with groups that support Palestine. In recent years, small vigils or protests, especially after events like Sheikh Jarrah, helped sustain the momentum for groups like Oxford Palestine Society and the Rhodes Scholars for Palestine. They’ve done remarkable work within the university.
I joined the Rhodes Scholars for Palestine a while ago and have been actively organizing with them. My role has primarily involved negotiating with the university, even in previous years. These negotiations aren’t solely about Palestine; they touch on issues like the rising allegations of alleged Hinduphobia at Oxford, which escalated when a Hindu student resigned, for a number of reasons but they cited Hinduphobia as the reason. As South Asian, Kashmiri, and Indian students, we were caught in the middle of all this. We’ve also organized around Kashmir, raising awareness about the situation. So, my activism here has spanned several issues and naturally extended to organizing for Palestine. And of course, after October, it became the issue of our lives, and everybody rallied behind it.
I didn’t realize that the South Asian community in North America is so divided on this issue, but here, there was significant solidarity among Kashmiri, Indian, Pakistani, and Bengali students. It was encouraging to see a shared pain and understanding of the struggle for anti-colonial existence.
Asmer: Shifting from personal experiences that lead to activism for Palestine or otherwise, I want to ask about the encampment experience itself. How was the encampment received by the university administration? And how did the student body react — did opinions shift, for better or worse, in the context of the encampment?
Sameer: In October, an open letter was sent to the vice chancellor and the university urging action in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The university invited us for a discussion. The first meeting was deeply disappointing—their statement was blatantly one-sided, which is putting it mildly. It was outright anti-Palestinian. They condemned Hamas’s actions but didn’t acknowledge what was happening in Gaza or the retaliatory violence by the IDF.
We challenged the university on these points. But Oxford, steeped in its colonial legacy and history of racism, is resistant to anti-colonial discussions — especially when it comes to Palestine. When we tried to have those conversations, hoping to shift the needle a little bit, they were just not receptive. You could see it just from the tone the statement, their language and the meetings. Even when individuals within the administration privately expressed solidarity, they would backtrack in their professional personas, saying they couldn’t do much.
As for the students, there was a notable shift. Many college student bodies, or “common rooms” as we call them here, mobilized. Several passed motions in support of Palestine. The large national Palestine solidarity marches happening almost every other Saturday in the UK helped mobilize students. We participated in the London marches and followed them with local demonstrations at the university. When it became clear that the university wasn’t going to move, we initiated the encampment, taking inspiration from Columbia, Stanford, and other US campuses. The university administration was taken aback when we did this. And that's when a lot of students joined.
The decentralized structure at Oxford played to our advantage. The university would tell us they couldn’t make decisions because each college operates independently, but we used that structure to build student support and shift opinion. Nearly 30 colleges passed solidarity motions supporting the encampment, which helped us build momentum across the university.
Still, Oxford is much more conservative than other universities, and the administration initially ignored us. Only after a student sit-in at the vice chancellor’s office — where police were called, 17 students were arrested, and there was a lot of backlash— did they finally engage with us. But until then, they refused to acknowledge the encampment. And even when they did, it was like they were engaging without really engaging. Overall, dealing with the administration has been a nightmare.
Asmer: Sameer just mentioned how university repression can trigger more support and energy. Maryam, Columbia has been both a trendsetter and a beacon of repression, with Minouche Shafik as its face. Can you share your experience?
Maryam: Before we started the encampment, I prepared a post at 4:00 AM. I was scared to wait to release it until 7:00 AM because I thought we were going to be swept before that. I had no idea how long the encampment would last. Everyone was telling me to hold off, which I did. When 7:00 AM hit, I made the post public, announcing the encampment. The university was just so confused. I remember when we were setting up the tents at 4AM — these masked, shadowy figures — some students came out of Butler library — where everyone goes to study at night, because Columbia students don't sleep — and they looked so scared. I remember checking Sidechat, the anonymous campus chat app, and people were speculating wildly, asking if there was a new pandemic or something.
But after that initial confusion, something shifted in the student body that I’d never seen before at Columbia. The administration’s bad-faith engagement fueled that shift. They threatened us with the NYPD every few hours. We couldn’t sleep. (Ironically, I slept well in jail — that was the first time I’d really slept since the encampment began.)
Each time they threatened us, though, students and the wider city community would rally around us. And it stopped the NYPD from coming for 38 hours. When they did eventually arrive, the crowd around the encampment, including people standing outside Columbia’s gates, prevented them from easily getting to us. They arrested those outside first before coming for us inside the camp. That moment — the mass arrest in front of the student body — was a turning point for many, especially liberals and non-radicalized students. As sad as it is, people care more about what happens on their campus than what’s happening in Gaza. It's very telling for us as organizers: we have to inflict stuff on ourselves in order for students to care, and that the genocide itself isn't enough for students en masse to mobilize.
Before the encampment, it was hard to mobilize students. We put so much effort into figuring out things like the timing of protests or the right messaging to have mass appeal. But once the encampment began, it became the center of campus life. People were showing up in droves. Students were yelling “Intifada” on Columbia’s lawns. It was surreal. Something broke in the Columbia student body.
After the first round of arrests — when I was sent to jail — students jumped over the fence to replace us and get arrested themselves. Over 100 students were arrested by the NYPD that day. Student had just voluntarily started a second encampment. We didn't have that planned at all. Columbia students, not necessarily part of the initial organizing, chose to do that on their own. They chose to start a second encampment solely because they saw their peers get arrested. That was the peak momentum I've ever seen at Columbia.
I have critiques about the second encampment. While it served as a space for radicalizing students and holding teach-ins, it didn’t feel as materially threatening to the university as the first one. It was calmer, almost like a festival at times. I mean, Columbia hated it anyways, but I felt like there was more potential there than was realized.
After a few weeks of the encampment, we made a deal with the administration: we agreed to stay in middle of the lawn if they didn't call the NYPD. Then Minouche Shafiq sent an e-mail saying Columbia would not divest from Israel. The next day, we occupied Hamilton Hall. That occupation lasted less than 24 hours, but it was a was very, very traumatic day for everybody at Columbia. The NYPD sent hundreds of police officers. They couldn't get past the barricades that we had built around Hamilton Hall, so they ended up using cranes to smash through the windows at the top to get in. They even fired a gun inside, which we found out later. The level of police brutality was shocking, and students witnessed the full force that Columbia was willing to inflict on us just to stop us from protesting for an end to a genocide. That was a very radicalizing moment for the student body.
And now I’m noticing that Columbia freshmen are not nearly as radicalized as the rest of the student body. They haven’t gone through the same experience we did. It’s unfortunate that genocide alone isn’t enough to radicalize some people. For many in the West, they need to see those they deem equally human suffering to be moved to radicalized.
Asmer: Thanks for sharing, Maryam. That’s a deeply troubling account of everything that happened, and I know it doesn’t capture the full intensity of what you experienced.
Sara, the University of Toronto had one of the longest encampments. What does it take to sustain an encampment for so long?
Sara: Going into it, we accounted for logistics and safety—enough marshals, tents, water, and a lot of applesauce! Like other encampments, we thought we’d only be there for about 24 hours, so we assumed we’d have limited food access. What we didn’t plan for—because we didn’t know we’d last for 63 days—was how to build and maintain solidarity in the face of challenges like anti-Palestinian, anti-Black, or anti-Indigenous racism. We didn’t anticipate that, and it became a real issue during the encampment.
That said, while students entered the encampment radicalized around Palestine, many left with more global revolutionary politics. There was a profound shift among the student body, which was truly beautiful.
A student at the University of Toronto encampment holding a key symbolizing the 1948 Nakba and the right of return. Image: @occupyuoft
The university treated differently from how it treated Israeli students. For Israeli students, the university initiated a meeting without any protest. Meanwhile, we had been protesting for over eight months before the encampment — every single week with walkouts, die-ins, and rallies — and they ignored us. We only got our first meeting with administration after occupying Simcoe Hall, the president’s office, in April, two months before the encampment. In that meeting, a Palestinian student asked President Meric Gertler if she should just be OK with her tuition money being invested in manufacturing companies that are murdering her family members? He directed her to the Health and Wellness Center. And he reaffirmed the university’s adherence to its inadequate divestment policy.
The policy forbids direct investments in socially harmful actions but allows the university to do business with companies or fund managers involved in those actions. So, as long as the university itself isn’t directly engaged, it can continue profiting from harmful entities. During the encampment, we also learned that raising concerns about these investments must go through a slow, bureaucratic process — a process ill-suited for responding to genocide.
We also discovered, through the injunction they filed against us, that the university tried to call the Toronto Police, but the police refused to intervene without a court order. Campus security threatened us with arrests after the action, and we saw the alignment between university administration, campus safety, and police — their priority was protecting private property over students.
At a certain point, we stopped negotiating with the administration because they weren’t acting in good faith. They issued trespass notices and filed an injunction against us. But we remain open to productive negotiations in the future.
Asmer: Thank you, Sara. Yahya, can you go next?
Yahya: Reflecting on Maryam’s account of the Columbia movement spilling out into the city, our experience at Cornell was quite different. Cornell is a small university, in a very small town on top of a hill that no one knows about. We had other challenges, very different compared to a big city with an already existing activist base that was ready to support.
We were initially surrounded by hardcore Zionists, who were running smear campaigns, driving those trucks and using intimidation tactics of the big city in a very small town, with a very small brown, Arab and Muslim population. But this context also meant that police brutality wasn't a major concern. We knew that the local police holding cells could only fit about 10 or 11 people, so if we got arrested, they couldn’t hold us all.
The problem was that Cornell — as a behemoth institution, outwardly Zionist — allowed this intimidation to happen. They let Hillel and other Israeli groups be aggressive towards us, doxing us and supportive professors. The university administration though remained faceless, using this against us. We saw these faceless bureaucracies standing in front of very personalized accounts of violence, grief, pain and anger. Much like at the University of Toronto, as Sara mentioned, the university president redirected students to the office of wellbeing in response. They played the bureaucratic game, constantly changing the people negotiating with us, so we couldn’t pin down who was responsible. They used all the sort of excuses that were available to them from the liberal repertoire, similar to other university administrations. They also withheld degrees, surveilled us, and knew the identities of anyone who joined negotiations. Police officers had our names and IDs too.
Asmer: Thank you, Yahya. Shraddha, your thoughts?
Shraddha: It’s been really valuable hearing everyone’s experiences. At Harvard, we didn’t face the police brutality that Maryam described. Our dealings with administration was a constant conversation that started in October, revolving around their lack of the response and their lack of care for Palestinian students and students supportive of Palestine.
Harvard caught national attention in the fall when Zionist doxing campaigns disproportionately targeted brown, Black, Muslim, and South Asian students, creating a climate of fear around speaking up for Palestine. There was widespread hesitation to engage, along with feelings of abandonment by the university, as there was little to no response to the blatant Islamophobia and hate crimes happening on campus.
What ended up radicalizing many students was the repression. In the spring, the administration changed after Claudine Gay was replaced by Alan Garber, and instead of engaging with Palestine Solidarity Committee or Jews for Palestine, they started cracking down on protests. They started changing protest policies and came up with new definitions of “disruption” to entrap students. A turning point was when we organized a solidarity protest for Columbia students the day NYPD was sent to their campus. After that, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended, which galvanized even more support. The protest led to an encampment.
The adminstrations’s response to the encampment was mostly through back-channel conversations between supportive professors and the interim president. But they made it clear that there would be no movement towards divestment, even condescendingly offering an info session on how the endowment works. After that, we refused to decamp, which led to suspensions and mass disciplinary action. Several others and I were suspended during that weekend.
Throughout the encampment, student support fluctuated. We used Sidechat and other metrics to see what the students were feeling. Initially, students were excited, but as tensions with administration escalated, some pulled away. Then, when suspensions happened and degrees were withheld, we saw an immense rise in support. Everyone was suddenly pro-encampment, pro-Palestinian Solidarity Committee. That support culminated in this massive walkout during commencement of over 1000 Harvard students.
“Why does our peers not graduating anger us, while the murder of children — and Harvard’s role in that — does not elicit that same level of anger? ”
It was largely in solidarity with the students who had lost their degrees. One point of our organizing and messaging ever since then has been to emphasize that these are 13 students who aren't getting their degrees, but they will get them eventually. You can’t compare that to the 15,000 children who have been murdered in Gaza, who will never even grow up to receive their degrees. Why does our peers not graduating anger us, while the murder of children — and Harvard’s role in that — does not elicit that same level of anger? That has been a constant conversation, one that I'm sure incoming students and the continuing students will continue to advance as repression escalates.
The university released a new set of extremely arbitrary rules over the summer, which essentially make it impossible to put up another encampment. But, whatever form protest takes next semester, there will be new rules that come with it, and it'll be a constant tension of navigating that and the student body.
Overall though, the encampment was politically crucial. It made people at aware of Harvard’s relationship with genocide. That would not have happened at such a scale without the encampment.
Sara: Agreed. While Yahya was speaking, a few incidents in Toronto came to mind that I’d like to share. Throughout the encampment, the university sent us emails emphasizing their commitment to neutrality and ensuring student safety. Yet, their financial investments clearly served one side — the Israeli state. They invest in weapons manufacturers that produce arms that kill Palestinians, which is obviously not neutral. Then, when they filed an injunction against us, they cited various unsubstantiated claims of anti-Semitism and violence, implying that Palestinians and pro-Palestinian students on campus were responsible. This in itself is anti-Palestinian racism. Thankfully, the judge ruled that we were neither violent nor anti-Semitic. We even got a ruling that slogans like “From the River to the Sea,” “Intifada,” and “Glory to the Martyrs” are not anti-Semitic. That was a huge win for us and for organizing efforts across the city.
To give you a sense of where the university’s priorities lie: Jewish campers were attacked week after week, including during their weekly Shabbat service at the encampment, and the university did nothing. But when Ramy Elitzur, a faculty member who sits on the university’s Governing Council, compared Jewish members of the encampment to Nazis at a council meeting, the provost apologized to him for the pain and trauma he had experienced because of the encampment.
Meanwhile, the university stood by as pro-Palestinian students and community members were subjected to daily harassment. We had razor blades placed in our food, Zionist agitators showing up with knives aimed at our marshals, and I personally experienced vicious doxing campaigns. Posters with my face photoshopped onto naked bodies circulated, and offensive polls about female-identifying members of the encampment were also circulated on X. Some people were followed home, physically assaulted, or sexually harassed. If the university cared about the health and safety and the well-being of its students, it would take a stand against this. But it failed to do so time and time again.
Asmer: Thank you so much for sharing, Sara and Shraddha. It’s deeply disturbing to hear this. We experienced similar targeting at Harvard. Shraddha and I were part of a team that collected nearly 150 testimonies from students who had faced some form of harassment. We compiled this because some university administrators asked us to, but it went nowhere. When we confronted the university president about it, they weren’t even aware of it. It’s unfortunate how common this experience seems to be.
Let’s shift now to the encampment as a space for political education and solidarity. What did solidarity mean? How was it practiced? What were the constraints?
Yahya: Solidarity at the encampment was driven by a deep sense of empathy for people who were risking everything they had worked for. It was all about Palestine. In the everyday activities—people picking up trash at midnight, bringing blankets, doing the hard work for the collective — you could see the human spirit at work. There was a strong feeling that we needed to be there for each other.
We had an overwhelming amount of support, so much so that we couldn’t handle all the food and blankets. One person drove six hours to Brooklyn every day to bring us freshly baked pita and hummus. Unhoused folks from Ithaca even came together to support us.
“The encampment became a space where people channelled their need for human connection”
The political issue of Palestine connected with people’s frustrations about the isolation and bleakness of Ithaca itself. It’s a small rural town, and for eight months of the year, it can be a very lonely place. The encampment became a space where people channelled their need for human connection. I had never experienced this kind of care and community on an Ivy League campus, which is typically very individualistic and competitive. That changed when the encampment set foot on the Cornell's grounds. People broke that mirage of liberal individualism to show up for each other. That is what solidarity looked like at Cornell.
Asmer: Yes, interactions that seemed minor brought the place together into a material, physical space. I want to ask about solidarity as a process, involving contestation and negotiations.
Sameer: Because of the decentralized and individualistic nature of the university, it was quite difficult for people to express solidarity before the encampment. The encampment provided a physical space for people to come together and demonstrate solidarity, but it wasn’t without challenges. We didn’t anticipate being there for two months, and this led to a lot of conversations about decision-making and who was doing what work at the encampment. It was often people of color, especially women, who were taking on much of the labor. We also talked about how whiteness shows up in these spaces and how to engage with accusations of antisemitism. We needed the space we occupied to reflect true solidarity, and that meant addressing these difficult issues.
“Occupying that space was liberating, and it showed how the encampment wasn’t just about Palestine — it was also about challenging the systems of exclusion around us.”
The community’s support was key to building solidarity around the encampment. At Oxford, there’s a long-standing divide between the town and the university. Some locals have lived in Oxford their entire lives but have never set foot in certain university spaces because they are so exclusive — even though there are no gates. When we occupied the Radcliffe Camera, an iconic building, two elderly women told us they had never been there before. Occupying that space was liberating, and it showed how the encampment wasn’t just about Palestine — it was also about challenging the systems of exclusion around us.
Shraddha: We had a lot of conversations about political strategy, particularly around how to galvanize people while staying true to the politics of the movement. Harvard was generally hostile and apolitical when it came to Palestine, so the encampment was an opportunity to organize, mobilize and radical students. Early on, we saw a huge influx of support, including 500 students protesting the administration’s closure of the yard. Suddenly people were so enraged with the university. Many people showed up because they saw this as an issue of freedom of speech, even if they were not interested in the work of the Palestine Solidarity Committee. But this new influx of support could be mobilized and turned into something tangibly political.
“Sometimes we grappled with watering down our politics to a more “palatable version” to appeal to more people, but what good is solidarity if it doesn’t align with the demands of Palestinians on the ground?”
But as the repression increased, the crowd started to thin. People who showed up initially for the more “mainstream” causes, like free speech, were less likely to show up when things got tougher. That’s when we had to think critically about our political identity and the purpose of solidarity. At the start of the encampment, when we put forth our statement of values, we saw the right of resistance as an important part of our politics. Sometimes we grappled with watering down our politics to a more “palatable version” to appeal to more people, but what good is solidarity if it doesn’t align with the demands of Palestinians on the ground? That was a big part of the debate.
Towards the end of the encampment, student solidarity shifted between Palestine and the encampment itself. We wanted to make sure that the focus didn’t go away from Palestine. Ensuring that the focus remained on Palestine was a delicate balance. It was the core of discussions at Harvard. As the conversation shifted toward repression, we connected it back to the repression in Palestine, emphasizing that the frustration over local repression should fuel a larger outrage over the situation in Palestine. The encampment was ultimately a tool, a means to an end, and that end had to remain rooted in the reality in Palestine.
Maryam: I agree with everything said. It was really hard. We constantly had to remind the Columbia student body to center Gaza and remember why we were doing this. There was already a lot of organizing happening at Columbia before the encampment, so solidarity cannot be reduced to just what occurred at the encampment.
Since October, how Zionists had acted on the Columbia campus, how the administration treated students, how the police treated us: all this really radicalized a lot of people who did not have a strong stance before October. For example, seeing how Zionists were so comfortable calling the cops on people of color at Columbia radicalized unaffected liberals — people who had no idea what was going on in Palestine.
The events in Columbia made people realize that Zionism was not just an issue in Palestine, but that it's connected to policing here, to surveillance, to all these issues that affect everybody, not just Palestinians. The repression we faced — doxing, policing, and surveillance — helped build a culture of solidarity, showing that Palestine isn’t a single issue.
Police arresting protestors at the Columbia encampment. Image: Joshua Briz/AP
Sara: Having grown up in Pakistan, like Yahya and Asmer, Palestine solidarity was shaped by a religious framing. It was a Muslim issue, rooted in religious animosity. But as I read more about Palestine, I understood how this perspective had historically been imported into Pakistan and many Muslim majority regions from the West during European and Zionist settler colonialism.
Despite recent geopolitical pressures from Gulf states to normalize relations with Israel, there has been growing resistance to this in Pakistan, with widespread protests. There is media coverage and support of Palestinian liberation.
In Toronto, we tried to foster a space rooted in the principle of interconnected solidarity, to create a site where diverse struggles could converge. We centered the voices and experiences of Palestinians while recognizing that their liberation is intertwined with broader struggles against racism, state violence, and colonialism. This interconnectedness allowed us to link local and global issues through teach-ins, where we invited Land Back defenders, Black resistance scholars, and others.
“To take a stand against Israeli apartheid is to resist the very forces that threaten liberation and justice in Pakistan.”
I've also witnessed Pakistanis questioning why they should politically focus on Palestine when Pakistan has its own struggles, like the internal colonization of Baluchistan, land theft in Karachi, or the cultural and material marginalization of the Siraiki belt. The answer lies in understanding, as Maryam said, that the fight for Palestinian liberation is intertwined with global struggles for justice and self-determination. From Kashmir to Baluchistan, there is a moral imperative and material reason to oppose Israel. In Pakistan, certain factions of the military are keen to normalize relations with Israel to access Israeli weapons and military technology, which can be used against our own communities and movements. I don’t want this be perceived as a transactional politics. To take a stand against Israeli apartheid is to resist the very forces that threaten liberation and justice in Pakistan.
Asmer: Thank you, Sara. We’ve talked about political education as a radicalizing tool, which was central at the encampments. How did the encampments provide an alternative curriculum to what educational institutions offer?
“Academics can write all the decolonial theory they want, but if it doesn’t reach the average person, what’s the point?”
Maryam: As student in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Major at Columbia, we are really blessed. We have so many Palestinian professors. However, the average person does not take these courses. The encampment centralized this political education, which was impossible to ignore, and which was why the Columbia administration hated it. The encampment was a permanent site at the heart of campus, where anyone walking by could join our teach-ins. The role of organizers is to bridge the gap between academia and the masses. Academics can write all the decolonial theory they want, but if it doesn’t reach the average person, what’s the point?
Yahya: That resonates with me. At Cornell, there was already a broader political culture around Black Lives Matter and holding the academy accountable for complicity in slavery and racism. The Palestine movement brought new conversations about imperialism.
We talked a lot about how white women were the new white men of academia. All the big humanities and social science departments — sociology, anthropology, and history — are controlled by powerful white women who promote sanitized version of humanities. We questioned the use of this type of humanities that cannot question genocide. These professors have made a big buck out of talking about Brown, Black, and Arab bodies and cultures but were absent when it came to genocide. You write about Indigenous ways of knowing but when Indigenous people are camped in the university lawn saying they want land back, where are you? What does your life’s work mean? The facade of liberal education broke down in front of our eyes.
Sara: When decolonization moves from theory to a militant critique of an active settler-colonial project, it’s dismissed. That’s when you know it’s threatening the status quo. We did walkouts and rallies, week after week. But we didn’t disrupt the status quo because it was understood that once the rally passes, things will return to normal. That is why the encampment was such a threat. It was a permanent site of protest that wasn’t going away until the demands were met: Disclose, Divest, We Will Not Stop. We Will Not Rest. This protest was different, and so the response was different.
“Teach-ins at the encampment sometimes become echo-chambers that reinforce existing beliefs without challenging participants...”
In terms of political education, while teach-ins offer valuable theoretical insights and build solidarity, their effectiveness is undermined if they fail to address the systemic issues of power and privilege within the organizing space itself. Teach-ins at the encampment sometimes become echo-chambers that reinforce existing beliefs without challenging participants or members of the encampment to confront their own complicity in oppressive systems. Political education should foster critical self-reflection and a diversity of perspectives. Our theoretical knowledge should practically and radically challenge entrenched inequalities.
Students reading at the University of Toronto encampment library. Image: @occupyuoft
Sameer: The knowledge production function of universities like Oxford are inherently violent. They either maintain the status quo or erase marginalized voices — even though, in theory, they may accept that those voices exist.
As Sara mentioned, the university is always quite happy and excited to talk about this or that new thought, so long as it remains a thought. As soon as you start to translate it into action which upends the status quo, they are not as happy. The university system is designed to keep us ignorant.
Political education became an alternative to all that. We educated each other about Palestine. But through this education, we also asked ourselves: Where do we stand? Do we just stand just for Palestinian liberation or are there other issues that are aligned with it? Palestine is not a single issue. It represents what is wrong with this modern neoliberal world. Through these political education initiatives, organizers played a role in situating our own struggles within broader historical struggles, whether it is Vietnam or Bangladesh. A lot of these struggles for freedom or recognition started from students in universities.
Shraddha: One of the main things that we really tried to drive home in our political education and campaigns this year was that we are not the first movement in history to demand divestment. There have been divestment successes in the past, both at Harvard and across other universities. We wanted political education to translate into a sense of action. Pointing to the movement for divestment from South Africa, and how the university had responded to public and student pressure, was important.
We want to continue doing the work of drawing these connections so as students, as citizens, we can check our university’s complicity in violence, enslavement, and the genocide of Indigenous people. It’s important to remind students that there were other students and people at the university in those various moments, who allowed that violence to happen. We are once again in a situation, where we can either allow violence to happen or we can push for change, so that this doesn't go down as just another cause that Harvard apologizes for 40 years from now.
Asmer: Thank you, Shraddha. As we go back to our universities this fall, how are you thinking about your organizing? Are you hopeful?
Yahya: I’m thankful I’m not going back to school. But we can use our experience to create organizations that embody the principles we fought for.
The encampment encapsulated a dream of living in a commune where hierarchies were abolished, where people knew what they were doing, where everything worked as a monolithic whole. If we can create that space in such hostile conditions, we can do it anywhere in the world. Humans are capable of cooperating for the greater good and thinking beyond themselves.
Shraddha: This past year showed us the power of mobilization and the importance of maintaining consistent pressure. That is something that students at Harvard are going to take forward.
I'm done with Harvard and will be starting at Cambridge (UK). Over the summer, I was in New York City and got involved with some of the organizing networks there. Those groups have very strong relationships to communities, which allows more to be accomplished than at places like Harvard. Here, there was a major separation between community and student groups, a lot of which was constructed by the university to isolate us. We didn’t have a network to tap into. Columbia has been a lesson and inspiration in how we can do that better. I hope that we can create collective pressure and break down the walls of academia that we also sometimes recreate within our movements.
Sameer: At Oxford, we managed to challenge the wall between the community and the university by exposing the university. The university cares a lot more about the grass on the lawn than the lives of people anywhere in the world. For people who don’t necessarily engage with political issues, seeing the university exposed was perhaps a transformative moment to hold our universities and institutions accountable. Universities are scared of collective action. Universities are scared of people, of students, coming together. I really appreciated the transformative work centering Palestine physically for two months did in a place like Oxford.
Maryam: As Shraddha said, the community was really there for Columbia’s organizing groups. When we launched our encampment, they slept outside of Columbia's gates. The university had closed the university to the public to isolate us from the community. And still, they slept outside to protect us from the NYPD. The university branded these people “outside agitators,” as if the community has no stake in what happens in our universities.
We need to get rid of the elitist idea that there is a separation between the community and our institutions. When I visited and went to a protest in Cambridge (Massachusetts), I realized how much I was taking New York protests for granted. Protests outside of New York are often long speeches where you stand in the middle of the street, and where no authority is challenged, nothing is materially shut down. Whereas in New York, Within Our Lifetime shuts down bridges every week. It speaks to the need to escalate in a material sense. The reason why these universities cracked down so harshly on our encampments was because we finally took up physical space. That challenges capital. The biggest lesson we need to take from the encampments is that we need to start at this point. There is no excuse for not escalating. And, so far, the best tactic has been to take up physical space.
“Students entered the encampment radicalized for Palestine, but many left radicalized for revolution. ”
Sara: Encampments are visible extra-capital formations that defy property relations and the foundations of the settler-colonial state. That is threatening. The state uses violence to against encampments of unhoused folks across the city, a majority of whom are Indigenous folks, to protect settler interests. Since the university and the state lean on private property relations to maintain their dominance, the encampment challenges that. Through the encampment, we kept Palestine in the news for 63 days. Students entered the encampment radicalized for Palestine, but many left radicalized for revolution.
Asmer: Thank you, Sarah, and thank you all of you.