Introduction
Anti-Apartheid South Africa divestment movement (1981-1985)
On April 4, 1985, over 200 Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA) members at Columbia University sat on the steps of Columbia’s administrative building, Hamilton Hall, blockading the entrance. The student protestors had been demanding that their university divest from corporations operating in Apartheid South Africa since 1981, but their divestiture demands were described as “inappropriate” and ignored by the University’s Trustees (Schoolmeester 2010).
Careful to maintain their peaceful protest, the CFSA (Columbia University's Coalition for a Free South Africa) organized a blockade at the entrance of Hamilton Hall, the university's administrative building. They chained the doors shut and renamed it "Mandela Hall" in honor of Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid leader. The CFSA also marked alternative exit and entrance routes for students to use (Lee 2016).
The anti-Apartheid protesters held a 21-day encampment, which at its peak had a thousand students participating (Lee 2016). The 1980s divestment movement was haunted by the memory of Columbia University’s violent response to the anti-war and civil rights student movement in 1968, when the university called in the police on the peaceful protestors twice, resulting in the NYPD arresting over 700 student protestors, and violently attacking students on the quad (Lee 2016).
Two decades later, in the anti-apartheid movement, Columbia University responded by sending disciplinary notices to several students and threatening to expel student protestors (ibid.,). While the university continued to highlight civil and criminal violations allegedly committed by the students, a New York judge had passed a restraining order that prevented the police from intervening on Columbia’s campus, which allowed the divestment protests of the 1980s to remain peaceful and survive until the university acquiesced to negotiating divestment.
After long battles, negotiations, and protest actions on and off campus, the Trustees finally voted to divest from South African Apartheid in October of 1985. The Anti-Apartheid student movement in the USA forced over 150 universities to divest from South African Apartheid in the 1980s (Knight 1990).
Anti-Israeli apartheid divestment (April 2024 - Present)
Nearly 40 years later, on April 17, 2024, Columbia University students started another divestment encampment; this time, demanding that their university divest from Israeli Apartheid. Hamilton Hall was once again blockaded, and this time around, it got renamed “Hind’s Hall” in honor of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in late January 2024 (Al Jazeera 2024).
The Columbia student protests, and the violent police crackdown on them, sparked a nationwide -and a global- student movement demanding divestment from Israeli Apartheid, and echoing the global calls for a “ceasefire” and a “free Palestine.” These student movements come amidst what the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories found “reasonable grounds” to be a Genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza (UN news 2024), resulting in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, including what Save the Children described as “the deadliest and most destructive” war for children in recent history (2024).
A Brief Background of Liberation and Divestment on US College Campuses
Early student movements
Student protests have played a remarkable role in American politics and society in the 20th century. From the student movements at historically black colleges against racial segregation and inequality in the early 20th century (Womack 2024), to the birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in North Carlina in the aftermath of World War II, the history of student organizing in the US has been marked by historical junctures and moments of history-making.
American students study the civil rights movement, and most will learn about important student-led direct action, including how Black students got arrested for challenging segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina (Cobb 2017). Student non-violent direct action made up an important component of the civil rights movement and was met with similar policing, especially through the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, which sought to crush the movement for Black liberation (Stanford University, n.d.).
Student demands with a global dimension
In the middle of the 20th century, student demands took on a global dimension. For example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) echoed the anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. Over time, the SNCC grew to protest American warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia. The peak of this global attention occurred in 1970.
During this year, student protests in New Haven coincided with President Nixon's declaration of sending US troops to Cambodia. In response, students in New Haven, along with over a million students across nearly 900 university campuses nationwide, joined protests or strikes in May 1970. Their demands included the release of Bobby Seales, a member of the Black Panthers, and other political prisoners. They also called for an end to the American wars in Southeast Asia and the end of university campus complicity in the American war machine (Miller, n.d.).
Anti-war movements and student activism
The anti-war protestors burnt their military draft cards amidst a Congress-mandated conscription during the Vietnam War. Like SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded on university campuses in the 1960s to fight for integration and democracy, a mission that was soon dedicated to fighting the American war in Vietnam, encouraging draft resistance, and demanding that universities cut economic ties with the American defense industry (Miller, n.d.).
Violent response
The anti-war movement was met with violence, bloodshed, and a media frenzy, which bears resemblance to the response seen in the current pro-Palestine student movement. In 1968, Columbia University called the police twice on student protestors, resulting in violent mass arrests by the NYPD. During that time, the mainstream media in the US labeled the anti-war student activists as "vandals" and "barbarians," while also making hostile remarks about foreign agendas and the presence of "outside agitators." These parallels can be observed in the media's current hostility towards the pro-Palestine protestors (Burga 2024).
The memory of the Ohio Governor calling in the National Guard to the Kent State University Campus in May 1970, where they opened fire and killed four students and wounded nine, as well as the student protestors who were killed by the police at Jackson State University a week later, continue to haunt student activism in the USA to this day (Reveal Digital n.d.).
Generation Z and the Resilience of the Student Movement
Pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia University
The pro-Palestine student encampment at Columbia University, and the violent police response to it, soon ushered in a nationwide, and a global (AJLabs 2024), pro-Palestine student movement, with thousands of students setting up “liberated zones” and “popular universities for Gaza” on their university campuses.
According to The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), over 94% of student protests held between 7 October 2023 and 3 May 2024 were in support of Palestine (Doyle 2024). During the months of April and May, thousands of students across 150 university campuses, in 36 states, set up encampments and tents, and occupied university quads demanding divestment from Israeli Apartheid (JVP 2024). Like their 1960s predecessors, today’s Gen Z protestors showed resilience in the face of arrests and mistreatment by the police. In fact, it is particularly the crackdown on the peaceful Columbia protest that instigated other encampments nationwide.
From California to Oregon, and from Texas to Chicago, Michigan, and Vermont, students set up encampments demanding transparency in their university’s investment portfolios, divestment from Israeli Apartheid, an end to academic partnerships with Israeli universities, and an end to the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campus. With reportedly more than 2,650 protestors arrested since April 18 on university campuses across at least 64 different universities nationwide (Rigdon 2024), student activists showed resilience and resolution to maintain and even expand their encampments nationwide (Doyle 2024).
Prominent student organizations
At the forefront of the student movement are two prominent student organizations: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). SJP was first founded at the University of California Berkley in 1993, and soon spread to other university campuses, particularly as the second Intifada revived the student movement for Palestinian liberation.
Today, there are over 200 chapters of SJP on US college campuses, united by an umbrella National Students for Justice in Palestine, which seeks to “develop a connected, disciplined movement that is equipped with the tools necessary to contribute to the fight for Palestinian liberation” (National SJP, n.d.). Jewish Voice for Peace is a Jewish American anti-Zionist organization founded in 1996 that embraces the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel, and joins SJP in advocating for justice and liberty for Palestinians on university campuses (JVP, n.d.).
The fact that a pro-Palestinian and a Jewish American organization spearheads the campus movements against Israel’s Genocidal war on Gaza is telling of the atmosphere of the protests, and what Generation Z is bringing to the metaphorical political table.
Prefigurative politics and scenes of solidarity
The Gaza encampments are peaceful gatherings of diverse campus communities exercising prefigurative politics, in which protestors enact and live the alternative social relations they desire in the present.
In the Arab world, we are familiar with prefiguration from the Arab Spring, when protesters in Tahrir Square embraced differences in religion, politics, and ideology, and embarked on creating the social relations they wished to see in their future nation on the square (Van de Sande 2013): Christian protestors protecting Muslims during Jumaah prayers, young protestors cleaning the square and collecting trash, volunteer doctors treating patients for free during protests, protest organizers using direct democracy and horizontalism to make decisions, and artists performing and leading the community in song and dance, and so on.
Similarly, the Gaza encampments were scenes of prefiguration, in which students were creating the future in the present. Protesting students nationwide recount the beautiful exchanges between Muslim and Jewish students, as they observed each other’s prayers, partook in each other’s religious celebrations, and stood shoulder to shoulder fighting for liberation (Thrasher 2024). Black, Latino, White, Native, Asian, Middle Eastern, and disabled students stood side-by-side, sharing the strong message that “no one is free when others are oppressed.” As one faculty participant explains it, “the Gaza solidarity encampments have been a taste of what might be possible when everyone freely gets what they need—and when people unite across divisions to share shabbat, salah, and a demand to end war” (Thrasher 2024).
In a large, day-long campus protest on the campus of the University of Nebraska Lincoln, I witnessed the same dynamics: respect, love, exchange, learning, and community. Campus protests across the United States featured teach-ins on Palestine, colonization, liberation, antisemitism and islamophobia, and other topics (JVP 2024). They featured hot meals donated and shared by protesting students, faculty, staff, and community members, including Palestinian dishes such as Maqloubehs, Zaatar and Zeit, and Hummus dips. Music, Dabke dance, and art were also regular occurrences at these protests, featuring the tunes of Fayrouz, or American rapper Macklemore’s Hind Hall, and other musical selections, in addition to lessons in traditional Palestinian tatreez (embroidery), sign- and poster-making stations, and community libraries, including ones dedicated to Palestinian poet Refaat Al-Areer, killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in December 2023.
Mainstream media and accusations
Everyone participating in the protests had a very different experience than the one described by mainstream media. While 97% of the protests were peaceful, a small percentage of protests turned violent after the police clashed with the protesters. According to ACLED (2024), 10% of campus protests featured clashes with the police and/or arrests, while only 12% of these protests with police confrontations turned violent, including incidents like UCLA’s encampment, where pro-Israel counter-protestors attacked the Gaza encampment at night, and the police lagged in intervening to protect the protestors (Anguiano 2024). And yet, mainstream media continued to report on the encampments with hostility, reminiscing of the way it described the anti-war and civil rights student movements.
Unlike their predecessors, though, the current protests must deal with the dangerous accusation of antisemitism, which was often brought up in relation to Jewish students’ reports of feeling “uncomfortable” on campuses protesting Israel. Most politicians, and the media, “smeared these peaceful, anti-war student protesters, many of whom were Jewish, as violent, antisemitic mobs” in what Palestine Legal has called “an unprecedented, McCarthyite campaign of anti-Palestinian repression across the United States since the Gaza genocide began” (JVP 2024).
These smear campaigns have deliberately conflated anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in dangerous ways that made any critique of the state of Israel potentially antisemitic, and arguably, further entrenched antisemitism in the US by falsely equating Zionism with Judaism (JVP and PARCEO 2023). At the same time, the mainstream media is becoming increasingly irrelevant to Gen Z and their decisions; After all, if they had relied exclusively on mainstream media, would they have protested and set up encampments in the thousands across the nation?
Unlike the Vietnam War, most university students are not protesting their draft to a war they view as unjust. Instead, they are protesting a well-documented genocidal war that they are exposed to through social media. Despite the "systemic censorship" of Palestinian content on Meta's Facebook and Instagram, as reported by Human Rights Watch (2023), young Americans still use Meta and TikTok to directly follow journalists and content creators in Gaza. Through these platforms, they witness Israel's killings and injuries of journalists, the heartbreaking scenes of Palestinians carrying their dead babies, children taking care of younger siblings after their parents have been killed, civilians searching for their families under the rubble, and the terror of entire refugee camps being destroyed in single airstrikes. Students also have the opportunity to watch Netanyahu's and Israel's genocidal and dehumanizing narratives live, allowing them to form their own opinions about the gaps, biases, and omissions in mainstream media reporting.
Surely, the power of social media in providing first-hand knowledge and education to a generation of young Americans on Israel’s Genocidal war on Gaza was felt by the politicians, leading President Biden to sign a bill that would “force Chinese-owned TikTok to be sold to a US company or be banned in the US” in a clear violation of free speech (Clark 2024).
The Echoing Chants: “Disclose, Divest... We will not stop… We will not rest”
Campus protests and achievements
The campus protests that took place across the United States started to wind down in June as the Spring semester came to an end. Despite this, the pro-Palestine student movement achieved significant victories. They successfully organized hundreds of students on each campus, demonstrated democracy, diversity, and respect, and even accomplished some of their goals.
While the media primarily focused on Columbia University and its violent crackdown on student activism, as well as the cancellation of graduation due to fear of student organizing, other universities experienced different outcomes. At several universities, students voluntarily ended their encampments after their universities agreed to meet some or all of their demands. These universities include Rutgers University, UC Riverside, Northwestern University, Brown University, University of Minnesota, Evergreen State College, Goldsmiths University, and Thompson Rivers University (Shamim 2024).
On the other hand, some universities, such as Columbia and Washington University in Saint Louis, the University of Texas Austin, and the University of California Los Angeles, along with Emory University, resorted to brutal crackdowns and arrests by the police to disband the encampments. However, protests continued to emerge even into the month of June (Rigdon 2024).
Divestment demands and political climate
The divestment demands made by students are typically well defined and often target weapons manufacturers that heavily invest in the Israeli Apartheid, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. However, today's political climate differs from the anti-apartheid divestment movement in the 1980s. Currently, 35 states in the US have anti-BDS laws that restrict public institutions from supporting efforts to "isolate Israel," through boycotts and divestment tactics (Moody 2024).
Many civil rights organizations have accused these anti-BDS laws of being unconstitutional and infringing on the First Amendment of the US Constitution (CCR 2016). The disregard for First Amendment protections of protest and free speech came amidst a series of Congressional hearings, where house members questioned Presidents of prestigious universities on antisemitism and campus activism, leading to several resignations of university Presidents (Kim 2023).
One notable exchange occurred when Republican representative Rick Allen asked Columbia University's president, Shafik, if he was familiar with Genesis 12:3, a biblical covenant between God and Abraham. Allen stated, "If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you... Do you consider that a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?" Shafik responded, "Definitely not" (Quilantan and Wilkes 2024).
Despite facing a crackdown and media hostility, student protestors persisted in focusing on Gaza and the genocidal war carried out by Israel. On university quads, prominent signs reiterated the message of "All Eyes on Gaza" and "All Eyes on Rafah." Activist leaders emphasized to the media that their protest and the police response should not be the main focus. Instead, they urged the media to center Palestinians in Gaza (The Take 2024), who are often overshadowed by mainstream media in the USA (North 2023).
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