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Columbia University Student Activist Detained by Department of Homeland Security Following Threats of Deportation of Pro-Palestinian Students

The arrest comes on the heels of the Department of State’s announcement that it plans to deport students affiliated with pro-Palestine protests. The student, who is Palestinian, is a lawful permanent resident of the United States.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK—On March 8, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent graduate student at Columbia University, at his place of residence, an apartment building owned by the university.

The DHS agents said that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s green card.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. ET, Khalil and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents forced their way in behind them. The agents initially refused to identify themselves, instead asking Khalil to confirm his identity before detaining him without explanation. The agents proceeded to threaten his wife, telling her that if she remained by his side, they would arrest her too.

Later, the DHS agents stated that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s student visa, despite the fact that he has a green card, not a visa, and is a lawful permanent resident. An agent showed Khalil what he claimed was a warrant on his phone. Khalil’s wife went into their apartment to retrieve his green card while the agents remained with Khalil downstairs. When she returned, advising them of Khalil’s legal status and presenting them with Khalil’s green card, one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, “He has a green card.” However, after a moment, the DHS agents stated that the State Department had “revoked that too.” Khalil’s wife then phoned his attorney, who spoke with the agents in an attempt to intervene. When Khalil’s attorney requested that a copy of the warrant be emailed to her, the agent hung up the call.

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THE BATTLE OF HIND’S HALL FROM OUR SIDE OF THE BARRICADES

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.

Continue reading “THE BATTLE OF HIND’S HALL FROM OUR SIDE OF THE BARRICADES”

alleged assault of public safety officer

The Transport Workers Union condemned student protesters from Wednesday’s Barnard sit-in for allegedly injuring a public safety responder and Barnard for “consistently ignoring officers’ safety concerns.”

TWU’s statement, titled “TWU Blasts Barnard Protesters, Criticizes College,” described a 41-year-old officer, who is represented by TWU Local 264, being “pushed and shoved during the stampede” as protesters entered Milbank Hall at 4 p.m.

A New York Police Department spokesperson told Spectator Wednesday night that the department had a report on file for an assault at around 4:09 p.m. “in the vicinity of” 606 W. 120th Street—Milbank’s address. As of 4:43 p.m. Thursday, no arrests had been made for the assault, an NYPD spokesperson told Spectator.

“He was pinned by the rushing crowd against a beam separating the two doors,” the TWU wrote in its statement. “One protester lowered his shoulder and slammed into the worker like a linebacker.”

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Protesters stage sit-in outside Barnard dean’s office

February 26, 2025

Dozens of protesters staged a sit-in outside Barnard Dean Leslie Grinage’s office in Milbank Hall the afternoon of Wednesday calling for the “immediate reversal” of two student expulsions. The protesters dispersed at around 10:30 p.m. with a tentative agreement to meet with Grinage and Barnard President Laura Rosenbury on Thursday.

Protesters spent over six hours in Milbank, demanding that Grinage meet with them publicly and “accept the appeals of our expelled students.” They demanded that all Columbia and Barnard students involved in the sit-in receive amnesty and that the University not pursue disciplinary action for the sit-in.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest wrote in a Wednesday Instagram post that the protesters were demanding Barnard “reverse the expulsions” of two Barnard students whom CUAD wrote had been expelled for their participation in the Jan. 21 disruption of the class History of Modern Israel.

A flyer posted on the wall inside Milbank addressed to Grinage and Rosenbury listed four demands, including an “immediate reversal of the two Barnard students’ expulsions,” “amnesty for all students disciplined for pro-Palestine action or thought,” “a public meeting” with Rosenbury and Grinage, and “abolition of the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process and complete transparency” for disciplinary proceedings.

“Today, we are here to demand Dean Grinage accept the appeals of our expelled students, REINSTATING THEM IMMEDIATELY and ABOLISHING THE CARCERAL DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM,” CUAD’s statement on Instagram read.

Continue reading “Protesters stage sit-in outside Barnard dean’s office”

Barnard expels students for class disruption, pro-Palestinian protest

February 24, 2025

Barnard college, an affiliate of Columbia University in New York, reportedly expelled two students last week for disrupting a session of the class “History of Modern Israel.”

The Barnard students, both seniors in their last semester of undergraduate studies, banged on drums while chanting “free Palestine” and distributed flyers with the phrase “CRUSH ZIONISM” and a depiction of a boot over the Star of David, according to [news source].

A Columbia University student was also involved in the protest and has since been suspended and barred from campus, the university said in a press release last month.

The history course is being run by Columbia, and the disturbance occurred on the first day of spring semester classes for both schools, according to the student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

The pro-Palestinian coalition criticized the expulsions in a statement posted to X Sunday, calling Barnard’s decision “a serious escalation in the crackdown” against student activism. The group said in their post they plan to hold “a week of action” Monday through Thursday in response.

Columbia University became the epicenter of nationwide protests last spring, during which students built encampments and denounced Israel’s escalating response in its war against Hamas. In one day of demonstrations last April, more than 100 Columbia students were arrested on campus.

More than 50 students from Barnard have been suspended for political protest, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

Found on mainstream news.

Columbia University suspends one student as it expedites investigation into Israeli history class disruption

January 24, 2025

Columbia University says it has suspended one student after “expediting” its investigation into a group who disrupted a class on Israeli history.

Demonstrators handed out flyers with “violent imagery” to students attending a History of Modern Israel class on Tuesday, the university said in a statement.

Columbia said it identified and suspended one student involved, pending a full review, and that its investigation remains active.

It was the first day of Professor Avi Shilon’s class, and students had only just been introduced to the course when protesters – whose faces were covered and appeared to be wearing keffiyehs, entered and distributed anti-Israel leaflets, student Elisha Baker told [news source].

One flyer shows a burning Israeli flag underneath the words “Burn Zionism to the Ground,” and another depicts a large black boot about to stomp on the Jewish Star of David and reads “Crush Zionism,” according to pictures taken by Baker.

“It was shocking for everyone in the class,” said Baker, a junior studying Middle Eastern history. “I’m still super excited for this class. It’s a shame that this incident is going to put us on edge inside the classroom.”

Found on mainstream news.

Actions at Columbia University on Anniversary of Hind’s Death

Anonymous submission from Columbia:

“Im so scared. Please come.” One year ago today, these were Hind’s last words as she called for an ambulance, while Israeli forces unleashed 355 bullets murdering her as she hid in a car. One year ago, the world failed Hind. But today and everyday we owe Hind, all our martyrs, and ourselves, action.

So today we acted. Inspired by Hind, and the bravery of every Palestinian child who has faced down Israeli genocide for the last century – whether they threw a molotov at a checkpoint, a rock at a tank, or made a call for help. So long as they resist, so must we. We attacked two targets at Columbia University. First, the Kravis Columbia School of Business, one of Columbia’s most recent violent gentrification projects into Harlem, the construction of which was conditioned on the creation of Columbia’s Apartheid Global Center in “Tel Aviv”. We will not allow this land-grab to go unchallenged. Second, we attacked the School of International and Public Affairs – the first Columbia institution to expel a student for their support for Palestinian liberation, currently run by a former “Israeli intelligence officer” – Killer Keren, and staffed by Rebecca Weiner, head of the Counterterrorism Unit of the NYPD, who directed the brutal police assault on our comrades in Hind’s Hall last May. We left Hind’s call painted on SIPA, and we cemented the sewage lines of the entire building, forcing them to shut down business-as-usual.

We are not experts in what it means to take revolutionary action. We are people – just like you – who, today, chose to act. We were afraid- to be arrested, suspended, and expelled; and that is exactly the point. The goal is not to be fearless, but to recognize that to be afraid is merely a symptom of our moral clarity. We are soberly aware of what we may lose if we act, and we are soberly aware of how much more we will lose if we don’t. The most severe consequence we could face today is not expulsion or prison time- it is the knowledge that we had the opportunity to act, and, instead, chose cowardice. The most severe consequence we could face is not only to have failed Hind one year ago, but to have continued to fail her today.

So we invite you to join us. Let us identify the actions that elicit fear in us, find the people who we can be courageous with, embrace the fear, and take collective action.

As Hind’s mother watched the scene of Hind’s Hall unfold, she said “I wanted these movements and support to come while Hind was still alive and not after… but I was still happy that there’s a possibility that Hind’s cause could move and mobilize people in this world.” Let us act together and transform that possibility into a reality.

For Hind, with love and rage from Columbia.

Found on social media.

Reflections on the ‘Global Student Intifada’

In a May 2024 communique, the student movement in Gaza issued a salute as well as a challenge to the global student movement. Published through the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, the statement acknowledged student organisations across the globe as ‘a revolutionary fighting vanguard, and a natural and integral part of our Palestinian Liberation movement’. Commending the student mobilisations which culminated in a wave of university encampments across Northern America in April, the Secretariat of Palestinian Student Frameworks in Gaza at the same time called for a ‘revolutionary escalation of the global student intifada for Palestine’.

Amidst the broadest and most sustained campaigns of international solidarity with Palestine witnessed in recent years, what grants students pride of place in the salutations, as well as exhortations, issued by the besieged in Gaza?

A ‘revolutionary vanguard’?

Next to the regional armed movements which provide the bulk of military and logistical support to the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, the Western student body is surely a marginal figure, at best playing an auxiliary role. Yet the encampments have highlighted the centrality of university campuses as key battlegrounds for Palestine solidarity in the global North, and perhaps even the potential of students to accede to the exacting title of a ‘revolutionary fighting vanguard’. To produce such a force though, the Western student movement must reckon with the conditions of its possibility as well as the contradictions of the present moment.

On the whole, it’s possible to characterise the current movement as an organic recomposition of at least three social forces or political valences present in the imperial core, each bearing a distinct historical stamp. First, it is a natural outgrowth of an anti-racism revitalised and radicalised in recent years by the George Floyd uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the protest camps of NODAPL Standing Rock. Second, it inherits decades of strident campaigning by the Palestinian diaspora and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions organising. Third, it has revived the legacy of student opposition to imperialist wars and Apartheid, most notably in Vietnam and South Africa. As Aziz Rana recently put it, this movement can be seen as marking an indisputable return of the ‘language of empire’ to public consciousness.

While the language of anti-imperialism and internationalism has no doubt returned, however, the material demands of these ideologies pose a real and formidable challenge to student movements in the North. In this regard, the Research and Destroy collective is correct in its assessment that the student intifada has to contend not only with state violence and secondary antagonists, but also with ‘the difficulty in the alignment of form and content, of tactics and goals, given its position as a solidarity movement distant from its primary antagonists and its primary purpose, the liberation of Palestine’. What the movement inherits and combines by way of anti-racist, BDS, and anti-war campaigning is by no means a guarantee of strategic efficacy.

From ‘anti-war’ to the people’s war

Despite the strong affinities built over the years between black, Indigenous, and Palestinian activists, this affinity has yet to translate into tangible and sustainable forms of internationalism. And while BDS has provided an effective strategy on several fronts, its impact is and continues to be blunted on others, not least that of the university-finance-military nexus. Thanks to the rise of asset management as a mode of enclosure and capital accumulation in recent decades, universities have been lavishly equipped with the means to out-manoeuvre student organisations and their already limited capacity to enforce and realise demands for divestment. Indeed, and as noted elsewhere, the challenge of divestment today often involves not so much specific investments in single companies as it does market performance in entire sectors, meaning that students are really faced with the entire architecture and ‘overarching system of finance capital guiding the ways their universities now accrue value.’

Moreover, while the language and clarion calls of the student movements of the 60’s and 70’s may still resonate with considerable force today, this resonance belies a telling ideological shortcoming. While struggles in Vietnam and Algeria inspired movements for peace in the West, they were received as a call for war in the Third World – namely a people’s war. The difference is striking, and it remains palpable today in the widely divergent aims and respective strategies employed to achieve them, including in the largely pacifist orientation of much Palestine solidarity organising in the West.

Finally, there is the reality of Israel today, which is neither Apartheid South Africa, or French Algeria, or even the US in Vietnam. It is rather the purest expression of militarised settler colonialism acting as a lynchpin of Western imperialism and fossil capitalism as a whole, and its fate has implications of world-systemic and world historical proportions. More than a geostrategic bulwark and forward base for the US empire, the Zionist state is a key and integral component of the cycle of capital accumulation in the region, described by Ali Kadri as ‘accumulation through waste’. Centred on the production and circulation of oil and weapons, this system ensures the recursive de-development and degradation of state capacities in the region, undercutting social reproduction on a societal scale. Far from being epiphenomenal, systemic destruction through instability and war is an elementary feature of this logic and, therefore, of the totality of capital. Israel plays several of key roles in securing the continuation of this cycle, including that of arms producer, geopolitical irritant, as well as a catalyst of region-wide militarisation.

These realities, and the challenges they pose, have not gone unnoticed by the wider student body. Calls for a ceasefire are only the most audible and visible demands of the movement, and underwriting them is an ideological shift which is likely to push the movement beyond the simple opposition to a genocidal war. As the encampments’ organising cadres have been at pains to highlight, Israel’s onslaught has been but a catalyst for a process that was already underway in the politicisation and conscientisation of a broad swathe of the student body in the US. A consequence of this has been the critical grasp on a fundamental quality of the world system which Israel embodies outright, and which makes opposition to it a material necessity and not just a moral imperative. This is the basic fact that core and periphery are interlocked through value flows which determine political, economic, and social life at the most intimate level.

The student’s movement beyond itself

Formalised into concrete and lasting strategy, this basic fact stands to make the student intifada a potent force indeed. To that effect, the groundwork has already been laid by the mobilisations across campuses worldwide. What distinguishes today’s student movement from those of yesteryear is that it has finally stood the critique of ‘financialisation’ the right way up. Since at least the turn of the century, financial capital has been identified by the Western left as its principal adversary, and successive waves of revolt have rallied under the banner of anti-austerity.

Within this vision, ‘neoliberalism’ has been, at best, understood as a capitalist broadside against labour, with finance acting as an instrument of plunder, despoliation, and new waves of enclosure. Vast, almost incalculable, transfers of wealth is both the goal and consequence, and where the periphery is taken into account, it does not complicate the picture so much as simply add a bottom layer to this upward transfer. For perhaps the first time in these two decades, a movement has now emerged in the North which is incorporating into practice an urgent corrective to this overall vision.

Unlike their predecessors, the current revolts on campus are not staged in protest to job cuts or student debt, but to the leveraging of universities as a link in the value chain between core and periphery. While it remains to be seen whether their momentum will be regained in the autumn term, the initial thrust of the encampments struck in the right direction, This struggle realises on the level of practice what has so often been posited only in theory. That is, that finance and the financialisation of higher education does not simply represent an attack on the ‘commons’ or a public good, but rather the acquisition and burning of social surpluses in the core to fuel the wasting and immolation of human lives in the periphery.

This process can doubtless be said to hold for any number of sectors and institutions commandeered by finance and ‘rentier capitalism’ in the North, but the extent to which its contradictions have been heightened and politicised on campuses seems unparalleled. Of course, this has much to do with the student’s contradictory position itself, which is somewhat ‘liberated’ from the fetters of the wage through the peonage of debt.

The political consequences for campuses are significant, with state repression dismantling one of the few traditional bastions for political organising left intact, if teetering, by neoliberalism. Whatever its outcome for universities, this unravelling crystallises a fundamental observation by organisers themselves, which is that the student activist is but a ‘transitional figure that ideally helps to broaden the movement for Palestinian liberation beyond itself from the campus as battlefield, generalising it into a struggle that engages with the material contradictions and antagonisms of society at large.’

Whither Palestine solidarity?

In this transitional process, it is not just the figure of the student whose destiny becomes manifest in its own dissolution. The question of Palestine ‘solidarity’ itself now meets a belated reckoning, its erstwhile self-evidence cracking under the historical force of Al-Aqsa’s Flood, and its faultlines revealing new depths and divergences. This is precisely as it should be: the Palestinian resistance has sought nothing less than to ‘crack history open’ and divulge the latent possibilities seemingly foreclosed by the hegemony of empire.

In the region itself, ‘normalisation’ named the total victory of fossil capitalism and systemic destruction. October 7th derailed this consensus and charted a different course, one which has recentered Palestine as the fulcrum of class struggle and which moreover insists on its final determinacy through what can only be described as a people’s war. The importance of the latter as a political project and strategic horizon cannot be over-stated, and its meaning has yet to become clear for Western solidarity movements. While it is unlikely that the resistance leadership fully anticipated the abyssal depths to which Israel would sink in exacting bloody retribution, the destructive and vindictive nature of the response was well within its expectations.

The Flood was nevertheless unleashed as an opening salvo of a war, the outcomes, stakes, and risks of which would implicate the masses of Palestine and the Arab world as a whole. The objectively incalculable cost incurred as a result is not the price of a negotiated ceasefire or a phased return to normalisation, but that of a concrete and calculated set of objectives which would give the resistance an advance position and a firmer footing in its anticipated popular war. These include but are not limited to: the liberation of a maximal number of Palestinian captives, the delegitimisation of the Vichy government of the Palestinian Authority, the undermining and demoralisation of Israel’s military and security apparatuses, and the deepening of its internal political crisis. These are the intended advances in a war of manoeuvre for which the resistance had been painstakingly preparing and capacity-building for years.

Across the West Bank and the wider region, the Flood continues to rally the masses and popular armed movements, crystallising political alignments and opening up new fronts of resistance. Beyond the region, however, such lines have yet to be drawn, and Palestine solidarity remains imprisoned in the form it acquired through its interminable war of position. If it is to have any meaningful role in the political terrain opened by the Flood, the solidarity movement must re-examine both its form and content in line with the people’s war, including its current objectives as well as its long-term ambitions.

In concrete terms, this will of course depend on a practical evaluation of the movement’s situation and conditions in any one locale. All the same, the task likely entails a reappraisal of some broad and characteristic features, which should provide the movement with a departure point rather than a terminus. Key among these is its spontaneity, which may have been a necessary condition for its emergence, but which is wholly insufficient for and antithetical to its continuation, let alone its escalation. Without a concerted political program giving it strategic and ideological clarity, the movement is unlikely to acquire a form adequate to the task at hand.

The university encampments, for instance, are paradigmatic in this regard. As a tactic which is naturally and necessarily contained, in terms of both space and time, the barricaded camp is potentially far-reaching if harnessed to a wider strategy within which disclosure and divestment campaigns are situated as initial or transitory phases. The camps could serve as both muster and training ground, bolstering the movement logistically and numerically, arming it politically and ideologically, and furnishing it with the organisational means to deploy beyond the camp itself. To date, however, this potential does not seem to have borne fruit. Whether through repression or concession or a combination, universities effectively dismantled the encampments within weeks of their emergence. But the end of the encampments need not have spelled a setback for the movement, which seems to be the case currently. It could have instead meant its expansion and re-deployment beyond campuses given a longer-term strategy with sufficient collective buy-in, successive phases for escalation, and/or multiple alternatives for redirection. In lieu of this, however, and once the disclosure and divestment campaigns reached a (rather predictable) impasse, the movement failed to initiate any manoeuvres to that effect.

At present, therefore, it appears that while the ‘student intifada’ has invigorated the Western solidarity movement and perhaps the left in general, it remains ill-equipped to rise to the challenge of escalation issued by Palestinian comrades. The failure to develop a political program can reasonably be attributed to a number of causes, all of them instructive. Of course, they include material challenges of forming broad and sustained coalitions in the context of a neoliberal, repressive, and Zionist university apparatus, but they also concern the class composition of the student body and the ideological consequences thereof. Both these dimensions and others deserve attention elsewhere, but it is worth noting in conclusion at least one precondition for escalated action.

Whether or not student organisations are really, truly answerable to their Palestinian comrades will likely depend on whether or not they see themselves as actually implicated in the latter’s historic mission and the people’s war which now seeks to fulfil it.

Faisal Al-Asaad
Source: Ebb Magazine

no peace

Reflections on Columbia, the Student Intifada and the Culture of Counterinsurgency

28 October 2024 – by Anonymous

“The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May.”

The Urban Guerilla Concept, The Red Army Faction 1971

 

On 30 April 2024 — the 56th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia University mass arrests — the New York Pig Department besieged Harlem, locked down the entirety of Columbia’s campus, swept the Gaza solidarity encampment, and raided Hind’s Hall. This raid marked the end of the spring of the Student Intifada. Those of us who were at the barricades are still reeling from the experience. There are few moments in our lives where history opens its doors to us. Taking the leap through is disorienting, but the responsibility to make sense of this conjuncture falls squarely on those who take the leap.

Journalists and pundits have chimed in endlessly on the Student Intifada with a particular focus on Columbia University. Many of these pundits were nowhere near the action nor the partisans who made the action happen, thus they often get the basic facts of the action wrong. As one rebel once advised, “No investigation, no right to speak.” Additionally, the political orientation of the commentariat necessitated the silencing and erasure of the most radical flank of the movement. This flank played a vital role in not only the uprising at Columbia, but in the direction of the movement nationally. This essay is an attempt to both correct the record and offer up some political perspectives from a segment of this radical flank.

The next sequence of the Student Intifada remains elusive but it is important that interventions are made to push the movement in the correct direction. A minority with the correct revolutionary line is not a minority.

Continue reading “no peace”

‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ suspended Columbia activist said. Now his group rescinds its apology and calls for violence

Nearly six months after Columbia University banned Khymani James, a Pro-Palestinian student activist, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” the coalition that had apologized on his behalf rescinded its statement of regret – and advocated for armed resistance against Israel.

“Last spring, in the midst of the encampments, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) posted a statement framed as an apology on behalf of Khymani James,” CUAD posted Tuesday night on Instagram. “We deliberately misrepresented your experiences and your words, and we let you down.”

In a since-deleted post on X, James acknowledged in April that he had said several months earlier in an Instagram Live video: “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” In the now-deleted April post, he said, “I misspoke in the heat of the moment, for which I apologize.”

Columbia suspended James in April, and he since sued the university to get his ban overturned.

“I never wrote the neo-liberal apology posted in late April, and I’m glad we’ve set the record straight once and for all,” James wrote Tuesday in an X post. “I will not allow anyone to shame me for my politics. Anything I said, I meant it.”

CUAD helped ignite the protest encampments at Columbia in April that sparked a pro-Palestine and anti-Israel movement on campuses across America. In the months since that movement started, the group has taken an increasingly hard-line stance against Israel, advocating for violent uprisings against the country.

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group said in its statement. “Where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”

Found on Mainstream Media