From Taos, support for protesters
Like many in our community, I’ve been captivated by the ongoing protests at Columbia University supporting the Palestinian cause and subsequent efforts made by the university’s administration to forcefully end the demonstrations.
The stand that the students are making at the school is quite remarkable. Hundreds have occupied the main quad of the campus, establishing a micro-community of tents with the intention of staying put until the university meets their demands, which include among other things divesting the university’s endowment — which stands at a whopping $13.6 billion dollars as of June 2023 — from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
These demonstrations are of particular importance to me as a Palestinian, who graduated from Columbia University almost three years ago to the day. While I couldn’t have predicted that our campus would become a microcosm of a national discourse that is increasingly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, I can’t say that I’m surprised. After all, Columbia has been home to some of the most prolific Palestinian scholars in modern history, with professors like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi — whose writings on the legacy of Western colonization of Arab lands are typically required reading for Columbia students — exposing what they see as the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine for decades.
Columbia students of all faiths and backgrounds are aware of this history, which is partially why they made the decision to challenge their own university for its complicity in the current Israeli war in Palestine. If we hold the traditional perspective of so-called “academic freedom” and freedom of speech, then we should support these protests, especially since they have been largely nonviolent. However, in exchange for exercising their First Amendment rights and advocating against war, these students have instead been placed at the mercy of the New York Police Department, which has forcibly arrested over 100 student protesters. Furthermore, the university has suspended over 50 of its students, evicting many of them from university housing and barring them from entering any buildings on campus.
In an email sent university-wide, Columbia president Minouche Shafik stated that she took the “extraordinary” step of enlisting local police because the protests “severely violate campus life, and create a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.”
If a few hundred students chanting, praying and studying together on well-manicured lawns on Manhattan’s luxurious Upper West Side is a “harassing and intimidating environment,” then what should we call Gaza, where Israel has displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians under an endless barrage of bombs and missiles? How does it make sense to arrest student protesters for “restricting” movement within a college campus while simultaneously backing limitless military and diplomatic support for an Israeli regime that is murdering Palestinians and restricting their access to food, water, and shelter? The short answer: It doesn’t.
I’m proud of the students at Columbia for continuing the tradition of nonviolent protest that defines the history of social progress in this country. It reminds me of our Indigenous sisters and brothers here in New Mexico who continue to fight against the ongoing colonization of their lands and who refuse to let power step on them without fighting back. We must remember that from Taos to Palestine and everywhere in between, the struggle of colonized peoples is largely the same, and we must staunchly support those like the student protesters at Columbia who put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of our collective struggle.