For a couple of day and a half, pro-Palestinian activists at Columbia College arrange what they referred to as a “Liberated Zone,” a brief group with the spirit and values they wished existed on campus at all times.
It was an impromptu tent village, with greater than 50 tents, pitched on a big inexperienced garden simply exterior the college’s imposing predominant library. It had a gathering space beneath a white awning heaped with provides donated by fellow college students. A purple spray-painted signal introduced its identify: “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
For these hours, dwelling and gathering within the encampment felt purposeful and vital, the activists mentioned. A movie screening was held after midnight; there was a teach-in. A whole bunch of scholars marched across the encampment to point out help.
“It actually looks like we’ve taken over the college and made it into the imaginative and prescient that college students need it to be, and never what these bigwigs who need to encroach on tutorial freedom need it to be,” mentioned Maryam Alwan, one of many organizers.
However for Columbia College, the encampment was something however an Eden. The college’s president, Nemat Shafik, recent from a congressional listening to through which she had pledged to implement the college’s guidelines on protests, tried to get the scholars to face down. When they didn’t, she determined to interrupt with a decades-long norm within the college’s strategy to quelling protests.
She gave the police a inexperienced gentle to return in.
“The present encampment violates all the new insurance policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating setting for a lot of of our college students,” she wrote in a letter to the Columbia group despatched round 1:15 p.m. on Thursday.
Inside minutes, law enforcement officials, many in riot gear, flooded into the campus and surrounded the garden. Contained in the encampment, roughly 100 college students linked arms and sat in rows. A big crowd of scholars and onlookers gathered. The police started to arrest the scholars, putting their palms into zip ties. The gang chanted “disgrace on you” and “allow them to go.”
The protesters didn’t resist. That they had anticipated they might be arrested, they mentioned, as a result of they’d vowed to not transfer till Columbia divests from corporations supporting Israel, one thing the college has repeatedly mentioned it is not going to do. The scholars had been all additionally suspended, the Columbia administration introduced.
Many within the crowd watched, they mentioned in interviews, with a way of disbelief, or anger. Some college students, although — those that had felt harassed by the chants and actions of the pro-Palestinian college students — mentioned they had been glad that the college had lastly agreed to observe its guidelines.
The arrested college students left behind the remnants of their tent metropolis. Underneath police watch, Columbia services staff started to clear the garden, throwing gadgets into massive plastic bins. They poured packing containers of Dunkin’ espresso, nonetheless scorching, onto the bottom, creating steam within the gentle rain. The college issued a assertion saying the tents and college students’ belongings had been positioned in storage.
Because the camp was dismantled, some onlookers dispersed, however others continued to rally. They relocated a protest to the subsequent garden to the west. Dozens of scholars hopped over a fence and fashioned a circle on the moist grass. “Disclose, divest, we is not going to cease, we is not going to relaxation,” they chanted.
Cornel West, the general public mental and impartial candidate for president, got here to deal with the scholars in solidarity. He referred to as Columbia’s response to the protesters “a colossal failure by way of morality.”
“We all know from the historical past of the species to face up for reality and justice is to pay a worth,” Mr. West mentioned.
By 4 p.m., two new tents had been pitched, and the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” signal had been resurrected and displayed once more.
Karla Marie Sanford contributed reporting.
