Justin Ling: I went to Columbia

Are pro-Palestinian protests out of control? Or is the now internationally infamous protest something more complicated?

A statue of Alma Mater on the Columbia University quad. Justin Ling

By: Justin Ling

NEW YORK — There’s a fresh-faced kid with a kippah on his head, sitting on a five-foot high pallet of unassembled metal fencing, and scribbling in a notebook. The makeshift throne from which he is surveying Columbia University will, probably, help manage the crowds during its graduation ceremony in a few weeks. 

But given the scene now in front of him, nobody is quite sure whether those pallets of metal bars will need to be built at all. 

“I think they have a right to be here. It's an act of protest,” Daniel tells me, nodding towards the dozens of colorful tents in front of us, all behind fencing of its own. “I also have a right to be here, because it's my campus.”

In just over a week, Columbia has become the centre of an international media frenzy. The students are demanding that their university disclose their financial ties to, and ultimately divest from, Israel. The protest-turned encampment has inspired similar actions straight across America.

About a dozen feet away from me and Daniel, a melee of journalists from Europe, South America, the Middle East, and across the United States are jostling to interview the encampment's self-appointed spokespeople. We have flocked here because the scene has become the epicenter of an international debate about antisemitism, free speech, and the war in Gaza.

The protest has attracted scavengers. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson had been there the day before to proclaim that “those who are perpetrating this violence should be arrested.” Senator Tom Cotton, vying to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, has called for the National Guard to be deployed. On Thursday, when I was there, the biggest name present was former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

“Every time I see Columbia in the national news, I die a little bit on the inside,” Daniel sighs. “I don't think it's something that deserves that much coverage. I think it's been blown way up.”

I really liked Daniel. Everyone else I spoke to about the encampment was very certain. Daniel wasn’t certain. 

I came to Columbia because I wasn’t certain either. I, like the rest of the world, have followed the reports of Columbia students screaming “we love Hamas” and calling for another October 7. I’ve also been horrified, like these students were, at the reports of mass graves found at Gazan hospitals, and the reports of an impending Israeli operation in Rafah. I know that free speech on campus is something that genuinely ought to be defended — be it for anti-war protesters or far-right yahoos — but I also know that Jewish students shouldn’t feel unsafe at their own school. And, indeed, some do.

Earlier this week, amid rising tensions, Columbia announced it would move classes online. One rabbi associated with the University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on campus advised hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and stay there. He wrote that the university “have made it clear that Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety.”

When The Line suggested I hustle down to New York to get a sense of the goings-on first-hand, I jumped.

For two hours every afternoon, Columbia University now controls access to the campus for accredited media. School security scrutinized my ID, then took a photo of me holding it before allowing me to be ushered to the scene. 

From there, we were free to wander. Most of the campus was serenely calm and full of students, some of whom were taking photos in their graduation gowns. When I finally reach the steps overlooking the quad, standing next to its famous bronze statue — Alma Mater, a woman sitting on a throne, wearing an academic gown — I spotted the encampment in the far corner of the courtyard, just past a field of little Israeli flags.

Walking up to the entry, the protesters’ list of general demands were posted in neat serif on a sheet: “Financial divestment,” cutting off all financial ties between Columbia and Israel; “academic boycott,” ending Columbia’s relationship with Israeli universities; “stop displacement,” in both Harlem, where the university is located, and Palestine; “no police on campus.” Stop dealing with the NYPD; and “end the silence.” Release a statement denouncing the war in Gaza.

Beneath the sign stand a crew of protesters in yellow vests. They are here to provide security and to block journalists from entering the encampment or taking photos of the students inside. (As an organizer points out, photography without consent is against university policy.)

So me and the rest of the media gaggle are left outside, swarming whichever media-trained spokespeople the protesters offered to us. Ask any other protester for a chat, and they pointed me right back to the spokespeople. 

“No offence,” Darializa, a sociology graduate student and teaching assistant tells me. “But media gets really aggressive.”

Watching the spokespeople work, however, it makes sense. They run through a gruelling media gauntlet: One interview after another after another. Some gave interviews in Arabic, Turkish, Spanish. Darializa, clutching a Gatorade, apologizes and tells me she’s losing her voice.

If any student or protestor makes a a single poorly-worded statement, it will be fed right into the international media whirlwind. The start of every interview begins the same way: “Which outlet are you with?” they ask. One organizer says they’ve had problems with right-wing activists making it into the school on bogus press credentials and hectoring students.

Get them talking, however, and the spokespeople relax.

Darializa says she only decided to join the encampment after some of her students faced reprimand from the university for their pro-Palestinian activism. “I think for many of them, they are actually very frustrated with the way the narrative has changed to focus on universities and focus on this issue of free speech, when for them, it's has been and always will be about ending a genocide.”

Another spokesperson, Linea, is a quarter Jewish herself.

“I have been interviewed, and they just pull out the part where I say: ‘Oh, my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor,’ right?” She says. “None of my story about why I'm here, and why we have these demands of the school.”

Jonathan, a PhD student in sociology and a fellow Jewish protester, tells me that he wasn’t involved in pro-Palestinian activism until about six months ago, when Columbia cracked down on campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, suspending them from on-campus activities. Both groups posted a statement of solidarity with Hamas after the October 7 attacks, but have also supported a ceasefire and have since also called for a release of Hamas’ remaining hostages.

These students have clearly only become more determined to continue their protest since university president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD on the second day of the encampment and police arrested more than 100 students

Later in the day, over beers with a friend, a PhD law student at Columbia, I was told that the prevailing sentiment on campus is that President Shafik wildly overplayed her hand. She has now further entrenched the protesters and become reviled by much of the student body for her aggressive posture. Yet Shafik has also earned the scorn of right-wing critics eager to condemn her for allowing the encampment to continue at all.

Linea was one of the students arrested in that raid. She is now defying orders to stay away and risks her academic future by continuing to protest.

It’s the first time that the NYPD has been called onto the Columbia campus since 1968 when, in protest of the Vietnam War, students occupied five university buildings and briefly took a dean hostage.

“They actually blew up Alma Mater in the 60s,” Daniel tells me. “Just a little fun fact.” The famous statue was, apparently, blown right off her throne. 

The protesters are playing the historical hits. When it first began, the encampment had a big sign reading: “Liberation zone,” similar to the one which hanged from occupied university buildings in 1968.

“Obviously, there are parallels,” Daniel says about the scene before him. “But in terms of like, how righteous the movement is? I don't know.”

The activism of the past wasn't always good, right, or advisable. In 1987, Montreal-native Ken Hechtman and a fellow anarchist buddy were expelled from Columbia for stealing uranium from a physics lab. (He was later kidnapped by the Taliban.)

Even when it comes to the morality of justified protests, we tend to memory hole the inconvenient bits. The student activists and yippies who descended on Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention weren’t just chanting “peace now!” — they were also calling “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” and waving the Viet Cong flag. Others, facing a line of cops, screamed “kill the pigs” — and even released a literal live pig. Still, however offensive it may be to celebrate a miserable Stalinist and a guerilla force which had a penchant for committing massacres against ethnic minorities with flamethrowers, as the Viet Cong did, we can pretty safely say that, at least on these issues the past Columbia protesters were generally judged to be correct by the jury of time.

The students remember that. As Darializa points out, this long history of activism is even a point of pride for the university. “The demands of students during the Vietnam War protests, eventually, were met. The demands of students in the South African apartheid divestment campaign were, eventually, met. Prison divestment: Eventually met. Thermal coal divestment: Eventually met,” she rattles them off one-by-one. “And so Columbia has a long history of being resolute as it seeks divestment from things that it finds morally reprehensible.” 

Another student, Jonathan, notes: “I think it's deeply ironic that the university brands itself on [the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests] when it cracked down on it at the time and, currently, is doing the same thing,” Jonathan says. “Perhaps [they will put] photos of the encampment ... in a nice frame somewhere on campus 10 years from now.”

While much of the international media is focused on allegations of antisemitism, the protestors themselves  would rather centre the discussion on the ongoing war in Gaza, and the claims of war crimes and genocide.

But the conversation about this protest invariably comes back to the safety of Jewish students on the Columbia campus.

“I was called a slur — off campus — on Monday,” Daniel tells me. Some Jews on and around campus have been told to “go back to Poland.” One Arab-Israeli social media influencer was punched off-campus. 

The general climate has emboldened antisemites. Daniel feels comfortable enough to sit outside the encampment to journal. Other Jewish and Israeli students mill about the outskirts. Other Jewish students are inside makeshift tent city itself, participating in a teach-in, led by a Palestinian professor. The protestors even held a Passover Seder.

The spokespeople all told me: Antisemitism is real, and there have been instances of antisemitism surrounding their protest. But, they say, most of it can be ascribed to outside actors who have glommed on to the protest. Antisemitism is much more rare than the national panic would have you believe, they say.

“What the students are calling for is for an end to a genocide, right?” Darializa says. “And I think even just saying that word makes people uncomfortable. And discomfort is very different from a call for violence.”

And yet it's impossible to deny that both appeals to violence and rationalization of terrorism are accepted in the movement. The media frenzy has turned, just today, to Khymani James, one of the organizers. A video emerged of him insisting “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” When James delivered a press conference on Thursday, he insisted that it was bad actors who sought to “hijack narratives of campus safety to achieve their true mission.”

These narratives, which dehumanize Israelis in order to fully object to the humanitarian catastrophe being inflicted on the Palestinians, is increasingly common. But while these comments might be objectionable, in most cases, it continues to be a stretch to call them violent. And much of the discomfort being caused might not be pleasant, but it is also the point of higher education. As Daniel points out “you just gotta go to class with people you disagree with, even if they think horrible things.” 

For Jewish students, "it's very clearly uncomfortable,” Daniel says. “Unsafe? Like you said, there have definitely been anecdotal experiences where students have felt — and been — unsafe.” But, he says, he’s willing to accept that most of those incidents can be chalked up to outside agitators and not, at least for the most part, his peers. 

The selective outrage which we’ve applied to the Columbia encampment became particularly absurd when I showed up to a strange counter-protest later that evening, not far from the campus. It was the United for Israel March, organized by three evangelical Christians whose support for Israel is rooted in the belief that a Jewish state in the Holy Land will presage the return of Christ. A lone counter-protester, sporting a hastily-scrawled cardboard sign, put it well: “Evangelicals believe Jews who reject Jesus come the end times go to hell (found the antisemites.)”

The crowd seemed to be composed, mostly, of Jewish folks who were clearly perturbed to see the media reports of rampant antisemitism and wanted to make clear it had no place in New York City. I heard one say he drove an hour-and-a-half to be there. Many carried signs of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas and chanted “bring them home.”

This got weird.  

A man with a bullhorn implored the counter protestors to wage a “spiritual war” against those students inside Columbia. He insisted they would not “succumb to an antichrist agenda.” Later, faced with counter-counter-protesters, wearing keffiyehs and chanting “Palestine will be free,” he proclaimed that “Palestine is not even a nation, did you know that?” And insisted Palestine was invented by the Romans. One marcher carried a sign which tried to turn the pro-Palestine chant on its head: “From the river to the sea, that's the only flag you'll see” just above an Israeli flag.

When a small contingent of Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews showed up — counter-counter-counter protestors — waving signs and proclaiming “a Jew, not a Zionist!” they were met with a deluge of vitriol. Some chanted “fake Jews,” others screamed “shame on you” and “disgusting.” One marcher swung his Israeli flag at the anti-Zionist poster. 

Sean Feucht, one of the three organizers on behalf of the Evangelical set, vowed that “marches like this will happen on Harvard, MIT, will happen in Austin.” Feucht, it’s worth mentioning, has organized anti-LGBTQ rallies and played at QAnon conferences — a conspiracy movement that is directly based on antisemitic notions.

After a brief prayer, Feucht led his supporters back to the gates of Columbia, where the NYPD were literally reading the riot act. While the marchers complied and dispersed (it seems the only arrest was a pro-Palestinian student) they proceeded to blockade the sidewalk in front of the university's entrance. I watched grown men heckle and berate young students on their way in.

My brief trip to Columbia didn’t leave me feeling certain about whether these students are right, or wrong; or whether there is, in fact, an antisemitism epidemic on university campuses. But I am pretty sure that sending in the NYPD to crack their skulls, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott did in Austin, would be a grave mistake and a full-frontal assault on free speech — not just on campus, but in our society more broadly.

I’m pretty sure that protests, particularly when it comes to war and human suffering, always descend into hyperbole and even the fetishization of extreme figures. And yet, the protesters at Columbia are not at risk of joining Hamas any time soon. I’m also sure that it’s going to be awkward for them to go back to class with some of their Jewish classmates when this is over, but that's for them to figure out amongst themselves. There were plenty of Jews on campus — including a party bus rented by Jewish group Chabad, blasting music as they drove around the campus neighborhood — but there are undoubtedly others at home, heeding the warnings to steer clear of campus.

I think the one thing I’ve grown absolutely certain of is that we need to leave these students the hell alone, and allow them to resolve these strange and complicated conflicts like the burgeoning young adults that they are. Instead, they have been turned into a political prop by bad actors and hypocrites. Instead, we should listen to them: And focus on the human suffering in Gaza and the plight of the hostages. The university and the NYPD are capable of protecting Jewish students. They need not court the self-interested outrage mongers as they do it.

As I readied to leave, I caught a heated argument between some of the marchers and a critic of Israel. Through lots of cross-talk and eye-rolling, one man yelled: “Hamas could just surrender!” 

The pro-Palestinian guy chuckled: “I would love for Hamas to be destroyed!”

A third woman seemed somewhat taken aback. “Great!” She exclaimed. “So we all agree.”

The group found new things to argue about a moment later. But for that one moment, it seemed like everyone was a little less certain.

Justin Ling is a freelance journalist. You can subscribe to his Substack here.

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