The Temporal Politics of Protest: Multidimensionality and Utopia in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment

Abstract

In this essay, we will examine the role of the past, present, and future in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, arguing that the encampment's unique potentiality arose from its subversion of the linear timeline that upholds capitalist, colonial institutions. We use the theories of Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity to explore the encampment as a space of utopia—of shared abundance and egalitarian collective care—that is historically grounded, realized in the momentary present, and insistent on a better future. We offer several anecdotes of life within the encampment to communicate the feeling of utopia, then contrast these moments with an inquiry into the university's extreme suppression of the movement, considering how such suppression was reinforced by the media and powerful political and academic institutions. We conclude with a deliberation on the student protests as a movement within the larger fight for Palestinian liberation, asking if and how the utopia within the encampment can have a lasting impact at Columbia and beyond the university.

>> Introduction

Jose Esteban Muñoz opens his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity with a striking call to action: "We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds."¹ Hope fuels revolution and utopia awaits at its end—yet, there seems to be an impenetrable disconnect between the present moment and the future. What is the purpose of today, in this framework, but to be imagined away in service of a better tomorrow? Too often, we address injustice in terms of the world we might create someday; too often, our optimism dissolves into cynicism, despair, and fatalism as our utopia seems further and further away in the nebulous future. In April and May of 2024, however, a particular kind of revolution—the "student intifada"—swept the U.S. from Columbia University to UCLA, bridging present uprising and future utopia in the process.

The student intifada is, at its core, a fight for universities to divest from all economic and academic stakes in Israeli apartheid²—a movement that progressed from protests and sit-ins throughout the academic year to encampments and building occupations by the spring semester's end. The impossibility of normal university function forced the university administration into feigning negotiations with protestors before siccing riot police in the hundreds on them to trample the movement. We argue, however, that the unique potentiality of the student intifada is not one that can be destroyed so easily.

It is true that the encampment was ultimately a transient moment shut down by the university through brutal police raids, censorship, and surveillance measures. Even in November of 2024, seven months after the encampment, Columbia enforced security checkpoints at every campus entrance, prepared to lock down the campus at a moment's notice. Columbia has arbitrarily added certain rules and removed others from the university's code to obstruct protest;³ the university also randomly installs bounce houses and ice cream trucks on its lawns as if to beguile the student body into happily forgetting the movement whose epicenter stood on the same lawns just months before.

At times, it seems to have worked. Campus lies quiet more often than not. And yet, Columbia continues to scatter wooden planks, plastic crates, and small utility vehicles on the lawns each night, terrified that the students might pitch their tents again. The encampment rattled the university so deeply because it disinterred something that Columbia refuses to confront, laying bare the hypocrisies of the university as a warmongering academic institution. The community created within the encampment proved that the students could exist with each other beyond the institution, subverting Columbia's facade as the sole arbiter of food, housing, education, and life. Columbia can only flail incoherently in response, attempting to regain its legitimacy through coercion, seduction, and further authoritarian measures.

It is precisely the idea of the encampment as an instance of protest in which a utopian "future" is built and realized in the present—even as such a "future" for the world outside of the encampment is being protested for—that we will explore in this essay. We first theorize the temporal logic of the encampment, then explore several moments from the Columbia Encampment to demonstrate its creation of a future within the present. We contend with the dialectic tension between utopian abundance within the encampment and violent scarcity outside of it, and with the immense privilege we hold as Columbia students. We consider how negative responses from academic, political, and media institutions shaped the encampment, and why the encampment forced the university to show the brutal iron fist inside of its velvet glove. Finally, we deliberate on the fight for divestment as a movement within the larger struggle for Palestinian liberation: What is the place for joy in a movement fueled by righteous anger and grief? How does our fight within the university connect to the fight in Palestine?

Our treatise on the encampment is not meant to be a passive reflection on the student movement, but rather a work that establishes the movement as something that cannot be buried despite the university's continued attempts at repression. By late June 2024, Columbia students had already established and dismantled a third encampment—"Installation 1"—to disrupt Columbia's alumni weekend, promising that they would be back with Installation 2, 3, 4, and more … until achieving victory. Even in the present moment, when it seems as though the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses has suffered a nihilistic loss, the university knows as well as the students do that it cannot stave off the rebirth of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments indefinitely. The quiet will only last so long. This essay, too, is a rebirth of the encampment, a continuation of the movement within the academic sphere that played an essential role in its suppression. We demonstrate that the silence of Columbia's swept campus is only temporary—that the movement will rise again and again to continue its realization of a revolutionary utopia.

>> Protest on the Multidimensional Timeline

The events of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment are often described on the traditional linear timeline, confined to the two weeks in which it was brought to life by the students and killed by the university. On such a timeline, we might observe that the encampment began in the early morning hours of April 17, 2024, when students with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—a coalition of student organizations standing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation—pitched a circle of tents on Columbia's eastern South Lawn. Over a hundred students pledged to remain until Columbia met all of their demands,⁴ notably total divestment from Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Just over twenty-four hours later, at 1pm on April 18, then-University President Minouche Shafik authorized the NYPD to begin clearing the encampment. As police officers stormed campus, Shafik sent an email to students and faculty in an attempt to justify her decision, citing the need to take an "extraordinary step" in "extraordinary circumstances," adding that she "regret[ted] that all attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved."⁵ As NYPD officers began clearing the encampment, hundreds of students, faculty, and legal observers watched in horror, screaming and chanting in defense of their peers. Minutes after officers handcuffed the last remaining protesters and loaded them onto NYPD correctional buses, more students immediately jumped the fence to the western South Lawn to establish a spontaneous second encampment. By the end of the hour, the lawn was packed with hundreds of protesters who ultimately held their ground for nearly two weeks. The demonstrations culminated in the liberation of Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind's Hall in honor of Hind Rajab (a six-year-old Palestinian girl tortured and killed by Israeli forces).

While this timeline may be useful for illustrating the progression of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, it hardly allows us to fully understand the student movement, omitting the echoes of past revolts and the material realization of a future that were fundamental to the demonstrations. A multidimensional timeline—one that allows the past, present, and future to collapse into the same spatiotemporal moment—conversely allows us to understand the encampment on its own terms. Such a timeline encompasses the full temporal spectrum within the student movement: the past persisting in the present, as well as the future manifesting itself in the now. Following this understanding, we might assert that the Gaza Solidarity Encampment began in April of 1968, when students with the Society of Afro-American Students and Students for a Democratic Society held rallies and occupied buildings to demand university divestment from the Institute for Defense Analyses, which conducted military research for the Vietnam War, and an end to Columbia's construction of a segregated gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park. These protests were cleared by the NYPD on April 30 in a violent raid that resulted in 712 arrests and 148 injuries.⁶ Following the escalation, the university conceded to the students' demands.⁷

A multidimensional timeline—one that allows the past, present, and future to collapse into the same spatiotemporal moment—conversely allows us to understand the encampment on its own terms. Such a timeline encompasses the full temporal spectrum within the student movement: the past persisting in the present, as well as the future manifesting itself in the now.

Indeed, CUAD—which proclaims itself to be a "continuation" of the Vietnam antiwar movement⁸—strategically launched the encampment in late April to invoke the protests that occurred in 1968. The temporal and political parallels between these movements were intentionally emphasized: students proudly unfurled a "Liberation Zone" banner as tribute to the "Liberation Zone" banner hung on the liberated Mathematics Building in 1968, and the choice to liberate Hamilton Hall was made because of its significance as the first building occupied during the 1968 protests.⁹ Even the brutal militarized arrests of students in both movements occurred on exactly the same day, fifty-six years apart. Despite the linear timeline's insistence that the Gaza Solidarity Encampment was a contextless product of the present—a show of exceptional and thus unforgivable dissent—the encampment transcended the confines of one-dimensional temporality.

We might understand the transcendent potentiality of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment through its position as a "reviving of the dead," channeling the past to serve "the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old, … of rekindling the revolutionary spirit" rather than to merely "trot out its ghost."¹⁰ Indeed, the latter evocation exists on the linear temporal plane: Columbia cites the 1968 protests in exhibitions and news articles to reinforce the legacy of its students to march in service of the university's progressive facade. Rather than extract the past from its context, defanging it in the process, the encampment was a return to it; the anti-war movement, the anti-displacement and anti-gentrification fight in Harlem, the graduate student strikes, the anti-South African Apartheid protests—the liberatory sentiments fueling each of these protests gave life to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The Encampment was thus a past reborn, revitalized, and reconfigured. They called upon the university to remember the past accordingly, perhaps most notably the divestment movement of 1985—which ended with the students' victory as Columbia became the first Ivy League to divest from Apartheid in South Africa.¹¹

While Karl Marx recognizes the importance of drawing on past movements, however, he also argues that the working class movement "cannot draw its poetry from the past, it can only draw that from the future"; to fully grasp the historical moment, the working class must construct and learn its own language—the language of the future, distinct from the logics that comprise the now.¹² We might incorporate Marx's assertion into our understanding of the multidirectional timeline of protest: even as the movement for a revolutionized future unfolds, it constructs the language of this future in the present. Indeed, even as echoes of 1968 make up the resilient substratum of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, it sings the poetry of the future. The dynamic energy of the movement is poured into creating a revolutionized future in the present and into fighting for a better world, rather than relegating this "better world" to a far-off someday.

In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz expands on this idea of a concurrent future and present with his theoretical extension of a phrase first used by C.L.R. James—the "future in the present."¹³ James introduces the phrase in his co-authored book Facing Reality,¹⁴ in which he asserts that a socialist future is contained within the factory worker's present, a space where workers organize to subvert the despotic demands of capitalism. Muñoz acknowledges that this argument was widely critiqued as an "intellectual romanticization of labor," yet he posits that James's dialectic utopianism is not merely an ignorant idealization.¹⁵ Instead, Muñoz argues that this idea "helps us imagine the future without abandoning the present," creating a "kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual present," an "anticipatory illumination of a queer world."¹⁶ This anticipatory illumination serves subaltern politics by fostering a future that is neither disconnected from nor passively awaiting transformation, but is actively emerging within the resistances of the present. Using his understanding of futures realized in the present, then, we recognize the encampment as a realization of this utopian futurity. The encampment halted the capitalist operations of the university to create an asynchronous space that existed beyond the institution's restrictive present, which demands that the future exist only in a one-dimensional trajectory toward progress, prestige, and profit. Within this utopia, students and faculty could direct their energy toward the fight for Palestine and collective care for one another, rather than the productive labor that the university demands.

Muñoz sees instances of queer utopia—a world that transcends the respectabilities, privileges, rights, and responsibilities enjoyed by heterosexual people in the present—in "sites of mass gatherings, performances that can be understood as defiantly public."¹⁷ The Gaza Solidarity Encampment placed great emphasis on the fact that it was a "defiantly public" protest of both the university's investments in Israel and of capitalist practices that require people to earn the right to life. In fact, the encampment was intentionally constructed outside, in the middle of Columbia's campus, and timed to coincide with Admitted Students' Day for maximum visibility. Food, shelter, education, art, basic medical care—all were freely available to everyone who entered the encampment and agreed to the community guidelines. The profound and unending sense of community, collective care, and solidarity defined the encampment as a site in which students not only demanded change from institutions complicit in violence, but also managed to build a revolutionized "queer world" through their mode of protest. Indeed, it was a realm of collective hope, futurity, and transformation led by queer, low-income students of color—a site of entirely alternative ways of living and loving that fostered joy, affirmed difference, and resisted assimilation into dominant norms.

A movement that simultaneously creates the world it demands transcends the limitations of a one-dimensional, linear understanding of protest. Past, present, and future unite in one potent political moment, a moment that is history come back to life, history in the making, and a future realized all at once. The victory of the students and the people is inevitable because it is now, because it is the beating heart of every movement. The potentiality of the encampment can thus only be understood on a multidimensional timeline. Muñoz offers examples of "outposts of actually existing queer worlds" in Cruising Utopia to convey the existence of a queer future in the present, providing anecdotes of himself and other authors.¹⁸ In line with Muñoz's strategy of storytelling, we offer several anecdotes that demonstrate the revolutionized present utopia constructed through the student encampment in the following pages. Our anecdotes serve as points on the timeline of the encampment—multidimensional points in which time converges with itself, insisting that the future can exist in the present.

April 17, 2024, 6:13am

Dawn is crisp and cold in the newly established Gaza Solidarity Encampment. In mere moments, campus—and the world—will slowly wake up to the news: Columbia students have answered the call from Gaza. They have liberated the center of Columbia's campus in the spirit of the 1968 occupation of Hamilton Hall and are inviting all lovers of life and love to protest for Palestinian liberation—there is enough food for everyone.¹⁹ A teach-in on the anti-apartheid movement at Columbia will happen at 10am in the re-established Liberated Zone. Here, just as before, no one need earn their right to life.

Someone hums "Linger" by The Cranberries and starts an impromptu choir. Another passes around instant coffee. It's calm, despite the uncertain situation—and when the sun rises, the sky turns a stunning pink and purple. Students clamber out of their tents with a wide-eyed wonder unique to young adults; the encampment glows as if transported to another world entirely. When the light hits just right, it's easy to imagine it has been.

A girl laughs, clear and bright.

It's easy to believe it will be.

April 18, 2024, 1:22pm

Where you go, I will go, my friend.

Where you go, I will go.

When New York Police Department officers march onto campus, it's for the first time in nearly sixty years. They advance in three seemingly unending rows—an unforgiving thrust cutting through the countless students that have gathered on campus, like a bulldozer razing the Earth. The entire campus is screaming, people are pouring out of buildings to witness the scene in horror. Campus has never been so claustrophobic, and there's hardly room to move.

Someone cries.

Centuries of revolution, and each of them must have witnessed a moment like this: a sacred hope, carefully nursed to life, then trampled by a seemingly inevitable force within a matter of minutes.

Because your people are my people,

your people are mine.

The protestors in the encampment are sitting in concentric circles, linking arms. NYPD officers circle them like sharks. An arrest warning blares over and over on a speaker; no one moves. It's hard to hear anything under the confounding noise—but faintly, faintly over the clamor, the wind carries the protestors' voices. Eyes screwed shut against the terrifying reality, threatened by the NYPD, they sing:

Your people are my people,

your people are mine.

April 18, 2024, 1:53pm

After the last of the arrests, there is a strange stillness. No one knows where we could possibly go from here. Columbia has seen its largest day of mass arrests since 1968, and it seems, for one heartbreaking moment, that the hundreds gathered around the now-destroyed encampment have been intimidated into silence. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the world we glimpsed through it have been forced back into a linear timeline headed toward a someday, a maybe, a not now.

A minute passes, then five. Some people, bored, walk away entirely.

Then, with the conviction that Palestine cannot be relegated to later, a few people jump the fence to the western South Lawn, directly opposite the first encampment. The gates to the fence are locked, meaning the students are now technically trespassers and risk discipline—but they run to the middle of the lawn anyway. In a split second, more follow.

"Join us! Join us!" They cheer, sitting and linking arms. As the lawn fills—fills, with five students for every one that was arrested—the movement itself takes on a life of its own, one that neither the students nor the university administrators could have predicted. This second encampment is borne out of the spontaneous action of the present moment, a present moment simultaneously generative of the future.

April 21, 2024, 2:03am

It is the third night of the second encampment, and the past few days have been unusually cold for mid-April. Tonight, with a low of 40 degrees and rain, is one of the worst.

Whereas the first encampment had been meticulously planned, the second encampment was an impromptu creation. Spontaneity was its advantage, but this also meant everything had to be built from scratch. The "cornucopia," once a white canopy with supplies, is now a pile of organized boxes and bags. Students are sleeping on tarps randomly scattered across the lawn. Though it's an organized chaos, it makes some simple things—like staying warm—difficult.

Two figures hover over a group of sleeping protestors, whispering between themselves before grabbing an extra tarp from the cornucopia. They tuck it around those who are asleep. Later, when the two are asleep, an on-shift member of the security team does the same for them.

April 22, 2024, 6:39pm

There is a baby sitting on a blanket in the encampment, not much older than one. She is surrounded by five adults who coo at her, at her smile, at her little feet. They teach her how to clap, and she learns. To her left, a Columbia faculty member leads Seder. Students are eating dinner—Ethiopian food, courtesy of someone's family friend.

The encampment is alive, as always, but especially so today. After the sun sets, there will be a Dabke lesson.

April 23, 2024, 11:11pm

Sixty-seven bullets shot, four unarmed college students killed, nine more injured.

The fear is palpable tonight, heavy on everyone's mind as hundreds gather on campus for the second time in a week. Columbia has set a midnight deadline to reach an agreement with the students—the university, however, continues to negotiate in bad faith, erratically suspending and unsuspending lead student negotiators. Threats made by Columbia to authorize the National Guard to sweep the encampment circulate. The memory of Kent State, of the words of then-Ohio governor James A. Rhodes is present:

We are going to eradicate the problem…. These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the Brown Shirts in the communist element and also the Night Raiders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people in America. And I want to say that they're not going to take over a campus.²⁰

It's difficult to hear anything over the thwap-thwap-thwap of the helicopter overhead, much louder than usual. The night is pitch-dark.

April 27, 2024, 3:56pm

Despite relentless threats from the university, the students continue to stand their ground, and spirits are high today as welcome news spreads of a fresh delivery to the encampment: homemade Palestinian desserts, mtabbak and knafeh. The line to the cornucopia—now an impressive makeshift kitchen of folding tables and designated allergy sections—is already long, stretching up and down the pathways. A student presses hand warmers to his cheeks and jokes that even the sun can't enter the campus without Columbia University ID—the Columbia campus has been locked to non-university affiliates for over a week. Another laughs as he takes his share of mtabbak. The desserts are almost out.

A girl runs up to the cornucopia, out of breath as she pants, "I'm late! Is there any more?"

A cornucopia volunteer smiles, gestures wide, and says, "Of course! There's always more." And, in the encampment, there always is.

April 29, 2024, 1:53pm

"Do you want a spray of water?" a protestor asks.

Administration has threatened suspension on all involved students with a deadline of 2pm to agree to their plea deal; students have taken to picketing around the encampment instead. It is the hottest day of the year so far, and it is tense.

The protestor grins, impishly waving their spray bottle. "A spray of water. Want it?" For a moment, the tension is broken. Picketers shriek as cold water hits the backs of their necks, and the protestor laughs. Even in the face of such brutal university repression, the encampment functions as a space of resistant life.

April 30, 2024, 1:40am

Following Columbia's bad-faith negotiations and incessant retaliation against protestors, the people have liberated Hind's Hall.

The liberation of Hind's Hall is both symbolic—echoing the 1968 protestors who reclaimed Hamilton Hall as "liberated Harlem"—and strategic. The encampment is not only a utopia, but a utopia that serves to facilitate revolution. A glimpse of the future in the present serving to ensure that such a world is made reality for everyone, everywhere. The students have taken up the call from Gaza—and they begin the revolution by liberating themselves, each other, and their spaces.

Campus erupts in cheers when the people unfurl the "Hind's Hall" banner. Students clamber out of their dorms with a wide-eyed wonder unique to young adults; the building is illuminated from the inside as if transported from another world entirely. When the light hits just right, it's easy to imagine it has been.

A girl laughs, clear and bright.

It's easy to believe it will be.

>> Solidarity and its Ironies

Recounting the encampment today, nearly a year since its end, these anecdotes almost seem more dream than reality. Our collective sense of the movement as a realized utopian future is easy to relegate to a self-serving fiction of revolution—a fantasy of a different way of life when, in reality, the institution remained largely untouched. After all, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment—with its cornucopia overflowing with free food, free healthcare, free knowledge, free art, and a profound sense of mutual affection and care—emerged as Israel continued its scholasticide of Palestinian students, schools, universities, and teachers.²¹ The abundance was enjoyed by students of a private American university while scarcity and want pervaded Harlem, the U.S., and the rest of the world. As much as the encampment stood in solidarity with Gaza, one might criticize it as more of an antithesis to it.

Indeed, the utopian vision of the encampment belies dark ironies within the movement. These ironies, however, were not overlooked by the student protesters themselves, who worked diligently to redirect donations to Harlem and Gaza. It was, of course, the encampment's status as a highly visible movement within a prestigious university that prompted the outpouring of material and financial support, and students collectively sought to redistribute this wealth in the most substantive ways possible to communities with much fewer resources.

Despite the abundance within the encampment, it is an inaccurate disservice to the movement to characterize it only as well-intentioned yet fundamentally privileged. The majority of protesters were queer, gender-marginalized, low-income student workers of color—students that the university administration targeted by weaponizing access to food, housing, healthcare, and education. Columbia revoked students' housing with minutes' notice, suspended students through an expedited disciplinary process, put international students at risk of deportation, and eventually barred nearly all students from accessing dining halls in the days following the police raid of Hind's Hall. The encampment was thus a material mode of defense and resistance against the university's malicious attacks; when Columbia abandoned its students, their peers stepped up in every capacity they could. It dissolved the authority of the university as the sole arbiter of food, housing, healthcare, and knowledge upon which students depended. The cornucopia accommodated virtually every dietary restriction possible; peer counselors and trained medics took shifts in the easily accessible medic tent. Volunteers ran shifts charging portable batteries for the encampment, taking out the trash, and patrolling for security. Professors, activists, and organizers offered free, accessible, and equal education for all within the encampment, and students even built a "People's Library," a spare tent filled with leftist literature.

Like every protest movement, the encampment was riddled with contradictions—but these contradictions, at least in part, served the purpose of sustaining, protecting, and advancing the student movement. Though the abundance was fragile and temporary, it served as a glimpse into a world of sustainable security.

>> Understanding Opposition

Despite the encampment's internal contradictions, it is undeniable that the encampment was a tangible glimpse into an impossibly sweet, vibrant utopia, thriving even in the face of repression. It was marked by both adaptive spontaneity and impressive organization; the commitment to Palestine at the core of the encampment was unending, but so was the dedication to the space, to the community, and to each other. The university's suppression of it seemed, to those who experienced the encampment firsthand, disproportionately virulent in comparison. We might point to the "Palestine Exception," a term coined by civil rights attorney Michael Ratner²² to describe an institutional "exception" to free speech protections. While the Palestine Exception is unmistakably present in all areas of academia and protest, we argue that the university's brutal response to the encampments can additionally be explained by the threat that they posed to the logic of the Western university—their ability to transcend the one-dimensional confines of both linear temporality and institutional understanding.

The university's inability to grapple with the encampment is evident in the fact that it attempts to absorb this rupture of chronology into their linear metanarratives. In an email sent to faculty by Shafik following the second round of student arrests at Hind's Hall, Shafik wrote that "it took Columbia a long time to recover after 1968, and I know none of us wants that to happen again." Shafik entirely misuses the historic significance of 1968 in an attempt to "trot out [the revolutionary spirit's] ghost" in service of the administration's posturing as a gracious peacekeeper.²³ She fabricates an imaginary "us," aligning the university with the faculty as moral and rational actors, and consequently implies a hostile "them" that must be eradicated. Shafik uses the 1968 protests as a means to double down on the university's repressive tactics, entirely ignorant of what led to the "recovery" she speaks of: ending the construction of the segregated gymnasium, divestment from the IDA, and the establishment of the University Senate to grant students, faculty, and staff power in university policy-making. Columbia only "recovered" from 1968 because the university met the students' demands. Shafik's insistence upon the university's temporal logic precludes a genuine engagement with the past—instead decontextualizing it to make the encampment fit with the university's linear understanding of the past, present, and future—resulting in the decentering of the movements of both 2024 and 1968.

Columbia also attempted to assimilate the encampment into its normative logic by reifying the authority of its linear time, declaring the encampment's present multidimensionality dangerous, irrational, and thus unacceptable. Campus gate closures, the constant threat of a police raid while helicopters circled incessantly overhead, rumors of the National Guard being called in, and cryptic emails from university administrators served not only to intimidate protesters, but also to fuel fear of the encampment within the broader Columbia community. Indeed, Columbia tracked students' ID card swipes in and out of every single building, monitored students' movements through footage on thousands of security cameras both on and off campus, and hired private investigators that questioned students at their private residences.²⁴ Such conditions only generated and encouraged vitriol faced by protesters daily. Within the encampment, students were on constant alert, perpetually masked to fend off the constant barrage of cameras meant to dox them, thus putting them at risk not only of Columbia's disciplinary targeting, but also jeopardizing their professional futures.²⁵ Counterprotestors verbally and physically abused students on their way to and from class; the NYPD officers stationed outside of Columbia's gates sexually harassed students on the street instead of protecting them. Each measure that the university implemented for the supposed protection of its campus compromised the students's safety, subjecting students and faculty to a constant state of targeted surveillance and policing. In the encampment, it became a habit for students to bid each other farewell with a reminder to "stay safe."

Rhetoric platformed by mainstream media and championed by political and academic voices played a similar role. News articles overused buzzwords such as "anarchy," "chaos," and "violence," fixating on the idea of the obscure "outside agitator" to stoke public fears of "Hamas-backed protests."²⁶ We might understand such a characterization through Sara Ahmed's "Killjoy Manifesto," an essay included in her book Living a Feminist Life,²⁷ in which she examines the ability of conservative opposition to turn moral conviction into "violence." Ahmed writes that "the figure of the murderous feminist is useful: it allows the survival of men to be predicated on the elimination of feminism."²⁸ By using a caricature of feminism, conservatives construct a dichotomy between a universal moral "good"—the lives of over half of the global population—and the "evil" seeking to destroy it (which, of course, must be destroyed instead). The figure of the murderous protester is as useful as that of the murderous feminist, necessitating the preservation of productive peace to be predicated on the elimination of protest.

The university's affirmation of its rigid temporal framework, which dominated mainstream discourse, contributed to the fear surrounding the encampment that elicited such critical, and sometimes violent, responses. The university, media, counter-protesters, and politicians worked together to erase the past and deny the possibility of a future, illustrating the necessity of "reviving the dead" to disprove manipulative, antagonistic claims of the institution. The university claims that divestment is an impossible goal, yet the successes of 1968 and 1985 prove that the institution can and will condemn death, displacement, and apartheid. Oppositional discourse claims that the protests are rooted in antisemitism, yet past movements affirm the protests' position as a continued refusal of Western violence. Just as the university discounts the past, it simultaneously rejects the potential of a future, specifically one that upsets and challenges its academic hierarchy. The powers that be already see that such a world has been created within the encampment, that the utopian temporality of the encampment resists the university's appropriation even as it exists in our memory, and fear the day that it rises again and spreads.

>> Conclusion

To fully reckon with the power generated by the student movement for divestment, we must move beyond the university to understand its role within the larger movement for Palestinian liberation. Indeed, it was the universities' divestment that first signaled the fall of Apartheid South Africa; time and time again, in movements worldwide, it is the students who take to the streets to insist upon a better world now. The logic, in theory, is simple: without the universities' financial and academic support of Zionism, Israel will be forced to confront the economic repercussions of its policies and thus ultimately fail to maintain its apartheid system.

In reality, the picture is less clear. We must reckon with the fact that this utopia—spontaneous surges of protest that create abundance—cannot reach Palestine yet, even in the transient form it took in the encampment. Palestine continues to suffer a horrific live-streamed genocide that has killed scores more than 186,000 of her people.²⁹ Six-year-old Hind Rajab, tortured and killed by the IOF before she could see the students strike at the heart of Columbia's prevailing order for her, and for tens of thousands like her. Harlem, Sudan, Congo, the prisons, the wretched of the Earth—our utopia, nursed to life within the heart of the imperial beast, seems to exist on an entirely different plane from those we fight for. How do we contend with the community, the joy, the better world that we are privy to while the blood of Palestine spills endlessly on the streets of Gaza? If our grief and anger motivate us to action for Palestine, where—if anywhere—is the place for our joy?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that it is not only grief nor anger that drives us to fight for Palestine. In fact, the students are motivated by their love—it is love that gives rise to righteous grief and anger, and it is love that motivates us to move with conviction and brave solidarity. It is love that built the encampment and sustained it in the face of brutal university and state repression. Love is the source and the fuel of revolution. Love urges us to center joy, rest, and community in our movements as a means of stealing ourselves back from capitalist and carceral logics. The horror of police-backed institutional retaliation produces a certain silence now, but the asynchronous moments of warm care generated by the joy and love present in the encampment inspire us still. Love, then, is an atemporal, spontaneous rupture of linear colonial narratives that fuel hatred. It is how we build and sustain our capacity for the work ahead. Love is how and why we fight; we fight so that the children of Palestine, along with the children of the world, might feel the same joy—a joy that we now know is possible, right here, right now. And yet, love is not the fight itself. Love is the tool, but it is not the work.

The fight for divestment is motivated and sustained by love, but the fight itself requires our action. The encampment, at its core, was a committed show of resistance against Columbia's "business as usual" by students throwing their bodies, their livelihoods, and their futures onto the grating teeth of the administrative machine. The liberation of Hind's Hall was driven by students, moved by their love for each other, for liberation, for Palestine, refusing to be pacified in the face of a genocide and instead escalating in response to Columbia's own escalations against negotiators and protestors. Our joy is the tool—a tool that encourages people to do the work—but it is not the work.

The fight for divestment is not the ultimate fight for Palestinian liberation. It is not the neoliberal institutions' belated recognition that all decolonial movements are righteous in hindsight that will free Palestine, nor is it their divestment. The people of Palestine will be the ones to ultimately break down the apartheid walls. Our fight, parallel to the Palestinian fight, will not be Palestine's liberation in and of itself. Our fight is at the university. Our fight is education. Our fight is to Stop Cop City; our fight is to keep Columbia out of Harlem. Our fight is to hold fast on to hope for Palestine. Our fight is to keep creating new worlds, bigger and better each time—utopias that will not only guide our fight, but also define the world after. If all liberation struggles are interconnected, then our insistence of a liberated campus—in every aspect—is inextricable from the call to liberate Palestine. One day, when we emerge victorious and extend our utopia to all lovers of life and love, we will meet a free Palestine. One day, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment will no longer be constrained to the university-locked lawns and campus gates, but will reach all of us, all over the globe.