Movement Study

The young people painting signs and banners to hang around the not-yet-built CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment last Wednesday night were remarkably prepared for police retaliation. There was no fear of the cops, that is, so much as the knowledge that they would come, and come roughly. As one student told me, “I expect, you know, one could break my arm.” And did this scare them? “No.”

Their bravery was on display less than a week later, when the NYPD brutally raided the camp, assaulting several City College students as well as neighborhood residents who rushed out of their homes to defend the young people. The raid came less than an hour after the cops marched onto Columbia’s campus, just before midnight on May Day, and began beating and arresting the large group of students who kicked off the national movement of encampments on colleges over two weeks ago. Equipped with riot gear and military-grade vehicles, cops thrashed some protesters so severely that they were sent straight to the hospital instead of jail, where over 300 ended up. Nearly every seasoned movement reporter who covered these raids has expressed the same concern: that the police on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning were acting with force and vitriol previously unseen, by students or New Yorkers. There was at least one instance of cops entering a room in Columbia’s student-occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind’s Hall, with guns drawn. Columbia administrators—along with Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul, who both joined the school in calling for police retaliation—had clearly sacrificed their students’ safety. It should be noted that this move was encouraged by those even higher up than New York’s cop-loving leaders: President Biden’s press secretary had released a statement condemning the protesters’ use of the term intifada as “dangerous hate speech.” Twelve hours later, cops began violently assaulting those protesters, those students.

For decades, Americans have seen what it means to use our might throughout the world. The violent blow our country extends abroad comes right back to us when we want the belligerence to stop. That is, indeed, what today’s students want. From CUNY to California, their demand is singular: Divestment from the mechanics of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The encampments make the demand physical; the courage of those building them makes the physical heavy. Their solidarity is one of anticipated brutality. The promise to one another is that they will not give in when it arrives.

The students have kept that promise. That this generation should now have the instinct to protect themselves from brute force shouldn’t surprise anyone. Those who grew up in the US have been implicitly told since kindergarten not only that they are not safe in their own schools but that in fact they might be willingly sacrificed at any moment in order to preserve Rights to which they might not themselves be entitled. This widespread abandonment of children and adolescents may also be the reason for the overwhelming emotional response to merely seeing teachers stand arm in arm to protect their students.

For the moment—who knows for how much longer—the most effective place for Americans to stand against Congress’s support of Israel’s war is the campus. The decision to be seen and be heard and be unmovable for as long as moving us matters to those in power follows so instinctively, I think, because in many ways there is nothing else left to do. Maybe this is why the encampment I saw being built at City College felt so sturdy, less an act of defiance than an acknowledgement of its necessity.

In the 2020 uprisings, a startling number of Americans from every racial, gender, and class category learned what it was like to be attacked by swarms of police. For many, curfews turned nights into marathons, with protesters marching as long as possible while the cops struck in waves. Like so many before us, across decades and continents, we used what we knew about our cities to turn them into fortresses. What the police wanted was to break our resolve to remain in our own streets. The resolution to press on was driven by the same instinct to confront driving protesters now. Four years later, those in power have only strengthened the ability of police to stomp out this confrontation. Of all the sins in the world, especially the sins of the wealthy, investing in genocide has proven to be the one our leaders will protect most. On campus after campus, to Democrats and Republicans alike, what makes the screams to stop a genocide such a threat? Can it be so simple: that all these people want is peace from us while they slaughter?

In his 1997 memoir of returning to Palestine after thirty years in exile, the poet Mourid Barghouti describes the stillness he found in his childhood village:

That student movements are by definition fleeting means we cannot rely on them as our only means of confrontation. Students cannot stay students forever, and the encampments can only serve their purpose as long as there is no other way around them. That they are built by people committed to learning and changing gives them a strength that many spectators cannot recall from their settled station. Perhaps more than any of us, students are willing to try whatever they possibly can to stop their country from carrying on the way it always has. Because there is stillness in time under occupation, but there is stillness in the occupier’s time too. Last Thursday morning, the students at City College approached their campus with a plan for a better future. They knew where to go; they knew to get there swiftly. Tents in hand, they ran.