A MESSAGE TO THE STUDENT INTIFADA:

Let us not dialogue with our persecutors.

In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, we must reject the “conversation between the sword and the neck.”

The footage you are viewing is contraband. It was smuggled out of Hind’s Hall and hidden from the NYPD in the band of a militant’s bra. Until now, the only footage to come out of the battle and raid was from the perspective of the pigs, but this footage is the worldview of the militant. We are releasing it in response to the latest wave of repression sweeping across amerika. The Student Intifada put the imperialist ruling class on its back foot. Echoes of 1968 and the threat of mother country militancy still loom over their heads—they remember the last time this kind of struggle erupted. They remember the last time youth in the metropole began to identify with the Third World guerrilla. The enemy is scared, and they should be. They’ve responded using every tactic of repression available to them, teetering on the edge of criminalizing all anti-zionist speech.

Yesterday, Columbia expelled another student for their alleged involvement in the Student Intifada. This is the first expulsion for alleged involvement in Hind’s Hall.

We send a message to our enemies:

We will not back down. We will resist you.

Much of the response to repression against the Student Intifada has hinged on the idea that these universities are acting in a way that is “hypocritical” or “not aligned with their values.” This is bullshit. The amerikan university system is behaving in a way that is totally consistent with its role in producing the material and ideological underpinnings of the imperialist world order. These institutions are not neutral, and they cannot be purified through mere wish casting.

At this conjuncture, the war industry and the amerikan university system are inseparable. After decades of neoliberal austerity, the amerikan university system is increasingly dependent on the Department of Defense (DoD) for research funding. In the year 2024 alone, the DoD gave $221 million to universities for basic defense research and $43 million for defense-related research equipment. The federal government funds over half of all research conducted at universities; this greatly raises the stakes of the Student Intifada. When we demand that universities divest from the war industry, these administrations understand that most of their research funding could be ripped out from under them if they were to concede to our demand.

On 28 February 2025, the Department of Justice’s “Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” announced that it would be “visiting 10 university campuses that have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023.” We are expected to believe that Joe Biden and the liberal camp he represents—who gave a standing ovation to a Ukrainian Nazi in 2023—and the current Trump administration—who are addicted to throwing up Nazi salutes—are repressing us out of compassion for Jews. This is an insult to thought, one that fervent zionists of every religious persuasion expect us to accept. It is obvious what is actually going on here. The demand that sits at the heart of the Student Intifada—mass university divestment from genocidal warcraft—threatens the existence of the military-industrial complex itself. Under the pretext of “eradicating antisemitism,” the federal government is threatening to rip away funding from all these universities if administrations do not make us stop.

Students, your demand is much more radical than you think. The military-industrial complex cannot function without the amerikan university system so, knowingly or not, you are calling for the overthrow of the entire amerikan university system as we know it.

The amerikan university system is the class enemy of the global oppressed majority, and every university administration should be understood as the head wardens in charge. They want to churn out good little Eichmanns and Hillarys. They want a labor force of elite innovators of baby-shredding technology. They want sleek bombs and obedient geniuses. A chicken in every suburban pot, a Tesla in every garage, and a STEM brat in every Lockheed Martin. They are attempting to discipline you out of every impulse towards justice and liberation. They will use all means of force to do it.

They cannot be reasoned with through kind words, respectability, and appeals to morality. They are monsters, and there is no such thing as “good faith negotiations” with a monster that is expelling, attacking, and siccing the pigs on those who resist its role in manufacturing endless genocides of colonized people the world over.

Put simply, we can’t keep bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Every single university that entered into so-called “good faith” negotiations with actionists reneged on every promise they made or gutted the demands of the actionists as to render them meaningless. This tells us, contrary to popular opinion, that not every campus situation is unique and isolated. The demands made by the Student Intifada undermine US-led imperialism because every single campus on amerikan soil exists to protect and advance the interests of imperialism by reproducing its genocidal ideology and building a new workforce to enforce it. As the federal crackdown shows, what goes for Columbia goes for UCLA and MIT and UMich and so on. Fragmentation has corroded systemic analysis and left us siloed. We are dealing with a systemic problem, and systemic problems demand radical answers.

These institutions, as apparatuses of the state, will only answer to organized force. Negotiations only matter if we have the leverage to make the enemy acquiesce to our demands. That leverage can only be obtained through continuously raising the stakes. Their actions against the people cannot continue with impunity. Hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Palestinians, the displacement of internally colonized communities to continue university land grabbing, riot police on campus, expulsions, suspensions, evictions, beatings, chemical attacks, unleashing a standing army on unarmed actionists. There’s no end to the violence they’ve wrought upon the world. There must be consequences—and it is consequences alone that will bring them to the negotiating table and force them to play ball.

Collaboration with the enemy on the grounds that they can be reasoned with amounts to treason to our cause. The repression they’ve inflicted on us is not a misunderstanding or a betrayal. It is the most honest they have ever been. The enemy knows what they would lose if we were to win, so what’s our excuse? Just like the rest of the world that lives under the boot of genocidal imperialism—if we want to win, then we must struggle. Struggle, for anyone in the imperial core, means sacrifice and the courage to refuse their blood-drenched offerings.

What people watching this video might not realize is that minutes before NYPD invaded Hind’s Hall, self-appointed and unaccountable “leaders” were privately colluding with Eric Adams’ mouthpieces and forcing a vote to get us to de-escalate and take down the barricades of our own accord. But the militants inside held the line, and we won out: we resisted, we did not compromise, we defended the barricades, we did not engage in the conversation between the sword and the neck. 

Beware of the opportunists and careerists in the movement who will try to defang us, collaborate with the enemy, and cede ground for their own personal gain. Do not let them. 

This is a video that shows the birth of political subjects, which is a rarity in the first world. We were not helpless victims. We stood our ground against the odds, showed immense courage and moral clarity, and forced the enemy to reveal their true face—and we did it gladly. Despite the counterinsurgent attempts to disorganize the militant front, we prevailed.

The most important negotiations are at the barricades, where nobody can conceal their hands. No iron fists in velvet gloves. Only the brute force of the imperialist state against the flesh and blood and heart of the masses.

If they want to strike a deal, let them try to strike one, but let it be on our terms. And our terms are simple: no compromise, no retreat.

Every time we force the enemy to unmask itself, it loses. The narrative they’ve constructed around their innocence, their neutrality, their fairness, and their commitment to “freedom” is disintegrating as easily as a spider’s web.

An institution culpable in a holocaust will never give you anything worth having. And everything they have done to Palestine, they have also done to Vietnam and the Philippines and Yemen and Puerto Rico and Cuba and the Congo and so on. The number one amerikan export is holocausts on loop since 1492. This is how the slop is made, and they take your participation for granted.

But the Student Intifada showed them that the youth of the metropole reserve the right to refuse, and indeed, we have. We’ve also shown them that we can stop them at the point of ideological reproduction, at the point of weapons manufacturing, at the point of daily life continuing at all.

They have tried to isolate us, paint us as freaks, and destroy our will. But remember that millions around the world stand with us. It is the pigs who are the freaks. We stand millions upon millions strong. The wretched of the earth are on our side of the barricades. When presented with the choice, remember this: strength in numbers is an international reality.

The resurgence of the Student Intifada is not a question of if, but when. There are rumblings everywhere. In February, migrant high school students in East LA took the streets for days in protest against ICE and deportations, against fascism and imperialism—another echo of 1968. This, too, is the Student Intifada. And to build an Intifada here is to build a popular cradle of resistance and a unity of fields to destroy amerika; to show how Palestine exposes every existing contradiction.

At Columbia, the head wardens continue to repress. Repression breeds resistance. Repression exposes. Repression births radicals and counter-repression gives the movement new life. We have faced the consequences of resisting; the war has come home; the war has been here since the first settlers arrived in 1492. Repression is inescapable, and its ramifications extend beyond a narrow focus on Palestine alone. The struggle is universalizing, consciousness is heightening—this marks a new stage of the Student Intifada. Refuse containment. Defend each other, defend the barricades.

There is no end to our struggle.

INTIFADA UNTIL VICTORY.

WHICH SIDE OF THE BARRICADES ARE YOU ON?

Source: Unity of Fields