May 6, 2024
NEW YORK (AP) — Months before they pitched their tents on Columbia University's main lawn, inspiring a wave of protest encampments at college campuses nationwide, a small group of pro-Palestinian student activists met privately to sketch out the logistical details of a round-the-clock occupation.
In hours of planning sessions, they discussed communications strategies and their willingness to risk arrest, along with the more prosaic questions of bathroom access and trash removal. Then, after scouring online retailers and Craigslist for the most affordable options, they ordered the tents.
Inspired by the protests at Columbia, hundreds of students have set up protest encampments on at least a dozen other college campuses across the country to protest lsrael’s actions in the war with Hamas. Among other demands, they are calling for their schools to cut financial ties with Israel and the companies supporting the conflict. The protests come as universities are winding up the spring semester and preparing for graduation ceremonies.
Those involved with the Columbia protest, also known as the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” describe their organizing efforts as both meticulously planned and heavily improvised. They say the university’s aggressive tactics to quell the movement have only lent it more momentum.
To attract the most news media attention, the organizers timed the Columbia encampment to coincide with university president Minouche Shafik's testimony last Wednesday to a congressional panel investigating concerns about antisemitism at elite colleges.
The following day, officers with the New York police department flooded the campus, dismantled the tents, arrested more than 100 activists, and threw out their food and water. Shafik said she had taken the “extraordinary step” of requesting police intervention because the encampment had disrupted campus life and created a “harassing and intimidating environment" for many students.
That decision fueled currents of rage that quickly washed across the country, prompting students at other college campuses to set up their own protest encampments.
Just hours after last week's arrests, some Columbia students jumped a fence to an adjacent lawn, wrapping themselves in blankets until a new provision of tents eventually arrived. In the week since police cleared the first encampment, the second iteration has grown not only larger, but more organized.
At the nearby law library, a group of negotiators representing the protesters has been meeting intermittently with university administrators since Friday to discuss their demands, as well as amnesty for students and staff facing discipline for participating in the protests.
Those talks broke down on Tuesday night, according to the lead negotiator, Mahmoud Khalil, after he said the university threatened to send in police and the National Guard if the encampment wasn’t gone by midnight. Hundreds of students and faculty quickly packed onto the lawn in the largest numbers since the start of the demonstration.
Overnight, the university backtracked, giving demonstrators a 48-hour extension if the group agreed to block nonstudents from the encampment and remove a certain number of tents. A spokesperson later denied that the university had suggested calling the National Guard.
Organizers said they’d dismantled a few tents for fire safety reasons, but were still admitting outsiders to the encampment as long as they abided by community guidelines, including: no photographs, littering or engaging with counter-protesters. They said they had no plans to leave until their demands were met.
Opponents of the encampment say it has destabilized campus life, forcing the university to barricade many of its entrances to nonstudents while putting Jewish students in harm’s way.
Omer Lubaton Granot, a graduate student from Israel who is studying for a master's degree in public administration at Columbia, said the university should have taken “more assertive action” in clearing the encampment. He accused protesters of embracing an aggressive anti-Zionist stance that made him feel unsafe.
“They’re canceling my identity and they’re threatening me as an Israeli and as a Jew,” he said.
Officials including President Joe Biden and Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have also condemned what they described as antisemitism associated with the protests. On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson held a news conference at Columbia to denounce the encampment.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, noted this week that many of the students were sleeping in the same brand of tents, which he said could indicate that “outside agitators” were responsible for arranging the encampment.
