The Encampments: A portrait of a protest for Palestine that moved America

In the early hours of 17 April 2024, hundreds of students quietly set up an encampment in the main quad of Columbia University in Morningside, New York City.

Inspired by the actions of the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s, the students dubbed the lined tents on the lawns of the campus "The Liberated Zone."

Student demands were clear. They called for the disclosure of university investments in companies profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and called for divestment from these companies. 

Given its place as an incubator of American leadership, the student actions at Columbia incensed the political elite, wheeling Columbia University to the forefront in a war over public opinion on Palestine.

University condemnation of the action was swift. Within hours, administrators threatened to shut down what they saw as a carbuncle on the famous campus. On the evening of 18 April, police in riot gear were ushered in.

In unprecedented scenes, the removals were rough and thuggish as 100 students were dragged to jail.

Enraged by the turn of events at Columbia, encampments began mushrooming in universities around the country as students mobilised for a dramatic reversal in university and US foreign policy. 

When the students were bailed out of jail hours later, they walked out to a phenomenon.

The Encampments

A new documentary film, The Encampments, jointly produced by Watermelon Pictures and Breakthrough News, retells the making of the pro-Palestine student uprisings across campuses around the country.

For the better part of 2024, these student-led actions catapulted the question of Palestine and American university complicity in the war on Gaza into the public consciousness. 

As Israel continued to demolish Gaza, students of all stripes and backgrounds began organising and mobilising to pressure their administrations to halt ties with Israel and change track.

There was precedent, the students argued. There were universities that had divested from apartheid South Africa, as well as from fossil fuel companies, and recently from Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. Why not Israel, the students asked.

The Encampments follows student organisers such as Sueda Polat, Grant Miner and Naye Idriss as well as Mahmoud Khalil, whom audiences would recognise as the first student activist to have been taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and marked for deportation earlier in March.

Shot over the course of several months, directors Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman, offer a rare window into the encampments (and the student movement at large).

They do so not merely as a means to chronicle some of the brave, principled motivations of the student movement, but as a considered rejoinder to the hysterical mischaracterisations of the encampments as ridden with "radical", "extremist" and "antisemitic" elements. 

For months the student movement was berated with accusations of antisemitism from authorities, including university administrators, the mainstream media as well as political figures on both sides of the aisle. 

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The periodic doxxing, intimidation and harassment of pro-Palestine advocates - often with little opposition or recourse from the university - paved the way for the stripping of foreign student visas and the disappearances of even green card holders, like Khalil, who remain in detention in a small prison town in Louisana.

But as Pritsker's unprecedented access to some of the key characters at the encampments, as well as to the protests movements itself, shows, these were anything but rabid sites of hate or violence.

The student intifada, as it was dubbed, spanned more than 100 campuses around the US.

It inspired similar actions in the UK, India, South Africa, Australia, and parts of continental Europe, as a generation of young people leaned into the horror in Gaza to raise awareness of a world order that had spectacularly abandoned Palestinians and the world's oppressed.

Students linked the abysmal response of the world's political elite to Palestine to the climate and justice movement; to the rights of indigenous people; to wars of extraction and exploitation in places such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indian-occupied Kashmir.

Palestine was everywhere, they said. 

Life within the student movement

In these encampments, several of which I visited across the US, students held teach-ins, built libraries and created alternate curriculums with de-colonial scholars and teachers fashioning ideas that challenged the status quo.

They held poetry sessions, played music; Jews held sedars on Passover and Shabbat prayers on Friday evening, while Muslims held their daily prayers and special Friday noon sermons, at designated spots at the camps, too. 

For those Jewish students who led or participated in the encampments, the spectre of antisemitism actually came from pro-Israel Zionists, not from fellow protesters calling for the end of a genocide.

Pro-Israel discomfort with students of all races and backgrounds daring to clap back at Israeli atrocities against Palestinians was deliberately fabricated as a threat to Jewish life.

But there was none.

The film, deftly exposes this, too, showing how the accusation of antisemitism, long weaponised by supporters of Israel, became the state-approved cudgel to beat down on those opposing US foreign policy and university investments. 

That these claims of victimhood came from a community of students (and faculty) who came with the full backing of the university administration, the city's police force, the city government, the state government, as well as the White House, underlined the wilfully dishonest paranoid delusions of the Zionist projects itself.

The movement that began in early spring faced an immense crackdown from authorities, ultimately crashing by the summer.

The little space that did exist to organise for Palestine under the Biden administration - despite its routine denunciation of the student movement as antisemitic, too - has since been harpooned by the new Trump administration.

Though much of the story of the student movement trails back to the encampment at Columbia itself, the film reminds audiences that censorship and the demonisation of pro-Palestine protesters predated the encampment itself.

Isolating anti-Zionist voices

Following the events of 7 October, also known Hamas' Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Columbia administrators had prevented protests and halted pro-Palestine events.

They also suspended the student chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for taking part in a walk-out.

At the time a Jewish student at Columbia told me the implication of suspending JVP on campus meant that only pro-Israel Jewish organisations were now welcome at the university.

In fact, the encampments launched at Columbia took place the same morning in which disgraced former Columbia president Minouche Shafik was scheduled to appear at a sham congressional hearing over accusations of antisemitism on the campus.

 A Jewish student at Columbia told me the implication of suspending JVP on campus meant that only pro-Israel Jewish organisations were now welcome at the university

The encampment was a response to these efforts to malign and censor as well as act as a strategic counteraction to force the university to pay attention to Palestine. And it did.

But given its deep entanglements with Israel, as well as its place in the American imagination as functioning as a pipeline to power, it leaned into a programme of course correction.

It turned on the students, imposed censorship, and turned the campus into a fortress. Police lined the main entrances like checkpoints.

“Through my conversations I just felt how detached the university was from reality," Mahmoud Khalil says in the film.

"What university in the world would want to invest in weapons manufacturers? Why would you do that? You are concerned with education, like we are literally giving you back the university to be a moral university,” Khalil adds.

If Columbia's reputation has been dragged through the mud in recent months, with hundreds of academics now vowing not to engage with the university, The Encampments showcases how it was at the alter of Israel that the last vestiges of academic credibility were disposed.

The question of resistance

For a documentary film on a protest movement, The Encampments is not just beautifully shot, it's a neat edit for what must have been thousands upon thousands of hours of footage. 

The journey of the camps and the student movement is immersive and moving. For the most part, it manages to accomplish this by keeping the story grounded, with the genocide in Gaza at its centre and core.

Scenes of the struggles of the students battling it out in the heart of the empire are interspersed with devastating visuals and interviews from Gaza itself. 

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The scenes of Gaza's destruction add a certain urgency and elucidate the students' demands as neither whimsical nor abominable.

Where the film does struggle, however, is in its sidestepping of the question of Palestinian resistance in Gaza itself that actually turned pro-Palestinian advocacy into a criminal offence on campuses and in America as a whole.

Though the encampments faced censure, vilification, and on several occasions, police brutality, and though the effort to demonise the encampments illuminated the hypocrisy of American academia and the complicity of American universities, the fight for the future of Palestine is not on the US campuses, but in Gaza itself.

Over the course of the spring in which these encampments took place, several student leaders went to lengths to emphasise this.

The film's careful depiction of law-abiding protesters who never stray from emphasising non-violent resistance, who stick religiously to politically correct language does have its limits.

This does present the danger of dividing pro-Palestine advocates into "good" and "bad" protesters based on this appeal to the liberal gaze.

And as the revocation of visas and the disappearances of students based on op-eds and and the attempted deportation of permanent residents shows, this appeal has never saved anyone.

Where the film admirably retells the unique story of Columbia's protests, its extraordinary impact on public opinion, it avoids painting a wider picture of the many different encampments across the country.

There were boisterously imaginative encampments, like Rutgers Newark, also known as one of the longest-running encampments, where students invited the city's homeless to live in the community as they dreamed up proposals of divestment from weapons companies into reinvestment in the local community. 

There were other encampments that were simply left alone by a begrudging administration that instead had students jump through endless bureaucratic loops to gently pass on the message that the protests were neither welcome nor likely to be heard.

Of course in a story of several twists and turns, the film steers clear of probing student strategy as well as the "easy" capitulation as it happened at several other campuses.

By the summer, the optimism of the early spring protests turned into a furnace of police brutality, arrest and suspension.

And whereas the encampments were never going to stop the genocide, how these encampments were stopped holds deeper lessons for the building of people power in America.

Perhaps this was beyond the remit of this film.

Perhaps the current moment requires a telling of the encampments that does not pose questions but rather provides a compelling narration of what it was and not what could have been.

And for that alone, The Encampments is necessary and urgent.