My arrest at Columbia should never have happened
The night of Tuesday, April 30, two dozen Columbia University students linked arms in front of the student-occupied Hamilton Hall at dusk. I was one of them.
We sang with broken yet mighty voices, “Your people are my people, your people are mine; your people are my people, our struggles align.” We were a group of activists of differing faiths and none, friends and strangers united, linking arms with one another and, in spirit, with the generations of courageous students who came before us. Electricity crackled through the air from the growing protests echoing just beyond the university gates — gates I had just moments ago slipped through and sprinted from like a bat out of hell.
We knew we were likely to be arrested for being on campus despite the university-mandated shelter-in-place order, but we chose to run into the fire anyway.
As a human chain, draped in keffiyehs and shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, we sang with hushed tones and breathed deeply as hundreds of New York police officers armed with flash grenades and pepper spray marched toward us like a military parade.
As they approached from multiple directions, we sang with frail and cracking voices, “This love that I have, the world didn’t give it to me; the world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away,” as officers threatened student journalists with arrest, presumably to ensure minimal coverage of the aggression they were about to exert.
Students in dorms craned their necks and shakily stretched their iPhones out windows to observe the impending attack.
We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.
Police officers at Columbia were anything but professional
Once we were dispersed, I held my hands up to show I was neither resisting nor armed. In response, I was handled brutally by police alongside other students being shoved down concrete steps, saying with shameless condescension, “Watch your step.” We were arrested, bound and shuttled to 1 Police Plaza, where the New York Police Department had a pizza party prepared for arresting officers.
They threw us in cells like animals — cells where the only toilets women could use lacked any privacy and where our naked bodies were in plain sight to throngs of male officers.
During a news conference hours later, New York Mayor Eric Adams said there were no incidents of violence. This is an abhorrent lie. Later on Wednesday, in an email sent to the entire university community, Columbia President Minouche Shafik thanked the NYPD for its “professionalism.” This supposed professionalism is also a lie.
What is nonviolent and professional about seizing a compliant 120-pound student with her hands up and slamming her to the concrete ground? What is nonviolent and professional about treating students so brutally? What is professional about removing a woman’s hijab during police bookings and refusing to return it — yet offering me, a nonMuslim, my vest because the jail cell was cold? What is professional about forcing women to expose their genitalia to male officers in order to use the toilet because we “trespassed” on our own university?
We sang “Like a tree planted by the waters, we shall not be moved” as our bodies were seized — but we would not be moved.
Protesters aren’t antisemitic. Our hearts are with innocent Gazans.
Our hearts are with Gaza, our resolve is stronger than ever, and we hope the world sees the brutality of the police against peaceful protesters, at the behest of our own university president.
But make no mistake, we are not the heroes of this story — that honor belongs to those in Gaza; those whose families have been starved, whose cities have been bombed, whose children have been slaughtered; and those who did not have the privilege of choosing arrest or offering their bodies up as a public relations sacrifice.
Nor are we villains — those are the perpetrators of slaughter, such as Minouche Shafik and the board of trustees who would rather beat and arrest students than divest from a foreign government committing genocide.
On a Saturday in April, I hosted a Passover Seder at my cramped Manhattan apartment for many of my closest friends. Representing many faiths and none, we broke bread together and celebrated the Jewish liberation from slavery and a broken, unjust system of oppression.
On the next Tuesday, I was shackled and arrested as part of the campus movement that many in the news media are calling “antisemitic.” It isn’t.
Critically, our Jewish fellow students are not the villains in this story. They are our friends, our family, our blood, our fellow foot soldiers. Like us, they bleed, they crack, they bruise, they feel. At no point have the student organizers called for or promoted violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters. We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.
I chose to risk arrest because — unlike many of my classmates and friends — I’m privileged enough not to face deportation; because my potential suspension — and any other consequences that may befall me — does not even register on the scale of suffering experienced by those for whom we sing, whose lives have been taken, whose children have been slaughtered, whose families are being starved and tortured — those whom Columbia University is complicit in killing.
We are not the heroes, nor are we the villains — the latter category belongs to Columbia and the broken system it refuses to heal.
Allie Wong is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University. She holds a master of arts degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, an M.A. in international affairs from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and a bachelor’s degree in human rights, peace and nonviolent activism from New York University.