By Rachel Hamdoun

Marked by the blooming of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, a year has passed since the revolutionary uprisings on American campuses, most notably at the renowned Columbia University in New York.

From setting up tents on campus to resisting police arrests and violence, students at Columbia and across the United States (and surely many around the world) rekindled the flame of youth and student activism amid the US-backed Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. 

Through civil disobedience and peaceful protests, they confronted the imperialist system that exploits academic institutions as tools of social control to propagate its ideologies and obscure the failures of its own history and present.

At this very moment, as I write this article, the students at Yale University have announced the relaunch of their encampment on campus, as the institution remains invested in the Israeli occupation.

Thus, we come to ask ourselves—and others—what have we learned from the daring student movement, and what does this hold for the future of students and oppressed peoples in the Global South?

One thought to keep in mind is: when has intimidation and threat ever instilled fear in the minds of those who fear neither the book nor its author, neither the pen nor its holder, and neither the weapon nor its maker?

This new era of McCarthyism, revived under the administration of Donald Trump through the suppression of freedom of speech, is now being challenged by those who refuse to be silenced—the students and those who bring their voices to the streets.

Because of the student uprising, we were shaken awake to how deeply entrenched and invested American academia is in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the aggression on Lebanon and Yemen. 

Students themselves, six months into the genocide, were jolted into a harsh reality, as the extent of their academic institution’s complicity in war crimes and the occupation of the Palestinian people—committed by Israel and fully supported by the US—sent shockwaves through professors, parents, and the public over the past year and a half.

They questioned how much of every student’s tuition and tax is going to that very occupation and therefore refused to have their hard-earned money be complicit in it.

Columbia University is no stranger to this scene, nor are its buildings. It is quite remarkable to note that April is almost traditionally marked as the month of spring revolution by its students. 

In April 1968, students took over the iconic Hamilton Hall and staged a sit-in to protest the US war in Vietnam and its civil rights violations at home against Black students.

Then in April 1972, students took over Hamilton Hall once more, along with Kent Hall and Lewisohn Hall, in solidarity with the anti-war demonstrations. 

Thirteen years later, in April 1985, nearly 300 students blockaded Hamilton Hall to demand that Columbia divest from South Africa-related companies due to apartheid. 

In April 2019, students camped in the President’s office in Low Library to demand divestment from fossil fuel companies to combat climate change—a demand Columbia agreed to.

Now, Columbia (and other American universities) did not so much as lift a finger to negotiate with students or acknowledge the gravity of the matter, choosing instead to deploy police and the National Guard.

We came to understand how much Palestinian symbolism, like the chant “from the river to the sea” and the Palestinian scarf or kufiyah, and virtually anything resembling resistance against imperialism, has become the boogeyman of Western governments.

The suppression of free speech, enforced by Western leaders, shackles Western residents to misinformed worldviews and enables the West to reproduce knowledge on its own terms. This breeds the notion of manufacturing consent, which Noam Chomsky describes as a US tactic to weaponize media and justify its war crimes.

Protestors affiliated with Writers Against the War on Gaza, who printed their own newspaper mocking The New York Times by naming it “The New York War Crimes,” confronted the weaponization of media that continues to label protestors, professors, and students as criminals and “terrorists” for demanding an end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

We were taught the meaning of “globalizing the Intifada”—much to the dismay of both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

Intifada—Arabic for uprising or resistance against oppression—has been barred from use in the Western public and cultural sphere and is curiously absent from the “free speech” doctrine supposedly upheld by Western culture.

Intifada challenges the system that has produced and governed mainstream Western media, which portrays the term as a scare tactic to fabricate the illusion that intifada supporters are out to target Jewish people.

This stems from the Zionist roots of the mainstream corporate media and its controllers, which is ironic given the fact that numerous pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire rallies have included Jewish participants.

Over the past year and a half, more people have recognized that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism, revealing the US administration’s ploy to exploit Zionist propaganda as a free pass to discredit the public’s efforts to end the US-Israeli war on Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen, and to smear the protestors as enemies of the Jewish faith.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampments were—and remain—more than just a surge of protest against the US government’s military and financial support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Earlier this month, the documentary “The Encampments” immersed audiences in the daily lives and struggles of Columbia University students who pitched tents on campus to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza and demand that their university boycott and divest from the occupation.

Produced by Watermelon Pictures and singer Macklemore and directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, the documentary shares stories of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, detained on March 8th by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and still in custody, and of Columbia alumni who are now activists. 

A striking element was the alternating footage between Gaza’s relentless destruction and the Columbia encampments, showing how the oppressor remains the same.

That said, the struggle against the oppressor also remains consistent—and has only grown stronger. The same chants that rang out 58 years ago during anti-war protests against the US’s war in Vietnam can still be heard today across the nation’s protests. 

They have simply been adapted: from “Hey, hey LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson], how many kids did you kill today?” to 2024’s “Hey Biden/Trump, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today?”

Each protest is not an isolated event. They are building toward a larger wave that transcends campus boundaries and floods into the streets like a tsunami, defying the government’s repression—repression masked under the convenient banners of “antisemitism” and the “war on terror” waged against protestors.

The privilege of being a student is having a voice, and being the voice for those silenced by political agendas driven by profit and power. The privilege of being a student is wielding the pen as a weapon of resistance against imperialist ideologies and systemic injustice.

Students across the US are rewriting history, just as those before them did decades ago. These students are rewriting history to break free from colonial rhetoric and wage the war on Gaza with their pens and voices. Their battlegrounds are their campuses, and their fight is for Gaza’s liberation.

What the students, academics, and everyday people calling for an end to the Gaza genocide have taught us is this: never underestimate the power of the people or the damage they can inflict on the hegemonic and “imperialist” system that silences dissent and enforces its political and economic agendas. 

This is precisely why the act of boycotting products made by Israeli companies—or American companies invested in occupied Palestinian land—has proven so powerful. It has shaken empires built on the blood of the oppressed.

Rachel Hamdoun is a correspondent for Press TV in the United States.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)