Here all along: How Palestine revealed the empire at home

A movement forged in solidarity with Palestine exposed the machinery of empire not abroad, but on campus in America. Now, amid repression, comes the reckoning.

In the early days, we, as organizers, thought we could survive solely on principle alone. But when Columbia suspended our chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in November 2023, we learned a truth that would shape everything that followed: The repression we faced could not be met alone. If our movement were to survive, we needed a broader base—one willing to stand with us unapologetically.

It was a Palestinian friend—one who has given more than any of us could comprehend—who first said it out loud. He urged us to widen our frame: Human rights, justice, freedom. If we said “Palestine” too loudly, he warned, we would lose potential student allies, whose solidarity we needed most. 

I understood before he finished speaking. The tightness in my chest was old, familiar. It was the grief I had carried for Kashmir all my life. 

He wasn't speaking from cowardice or compromise. He was speaking from something far worse: Exhaustion. The kind that sinks into your bones when you are forgotten long enough. An ache of watching the world avert its gaze, year after year. He had been taught, again and again, that to speak about Palestine with clarity was to be left behind. 

Still, I told him—and myself—that something had changed. 

I told him that for me, even as a non-Palestinian, Palestine had always been my north star, the fire at the center of my moral compass. And I knew I wasn’t alone in that. I knew others felt it, too. The spark on our campus had turned to flame, and it could no longer be contained. Palestine could no longer be ignored. We had made it unavoidable.

Weeks later, over 100 student organizations had joined the coalition at Columbia—not despite Palestine, but because of it. People often ask what it was about Columbia—what put a private university at the forefront of a global uprising for Palestine? 

You hear the slogans everywhere now: Palestine is a feminist issue, a racial justice issue, a labor issue, an immigration issue. It’s true. It’s always been true. Organizers, scholars, and activists spent decades weaving the connections, laying them out patiently, like threads they hoped would finally be picked up. 

But slogans are rarely enough. And statistics don’t shake people the way violence does. You can tell someone that Palestine is connected to their struggle, but something shifts only when that connection is no longer abstract, when the issue presses against their own body, their rights, their community. When the violence finally comes home.

At Columbia, it did. 

When doxxing trucks carrying towering digital billboards displaying names and faces of students accused of “antisemitism” for supporting Palestine first appeared outside Columbia in October 2023, they didn’t feature the actual organizers of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). At the time, we had taken precautions to remain anonymous. So instead, they targeted the Arab Students Association and the Muslim Students Association, the nearest proxies they could come up with. This was no mistake.

In the United States, Palestine isn’t just criminalized—it’s racialized. Islamophobia is the primary vehicle through which that criminalization is enforced. The people behind the doxxing trucks didn’t invent this logic, but they made it clear a racist playbook was in use. 

When Zionist students called for the NYPD to be brought onto campus under the claim that they “felt unsafe,” they unleashed a force that endangered every Black and brown student in sight. The lines sharpened instantly. One group aligned itself with the machinery of the state, confident it would be protected. The rest—those who were surveilled, followed, brutalized—realized they had been marked long before they ever held a protest sign. 

Even students who had never attended a protest—who considered themselves apolitical—found themselves watched, questioned, and treated like intruders on their campus. There were no neutral bodies. Not in that landscape. Not when the state answered the call. The NYPD didn’t distinguish between activists and bystanders. To the state, they were already part of the “other” group. 

When male Zionist students stood on campus and openly wished sexual violence upon female organizers—after weeks of weaponizing atrocity propaganda about sexual violence abroad—it stripped the pretense bare. Their concern for women had never been real. 

In the early days of October 2023, Muslim women had their hijabs ripped off by Zionists in broad daylight. And months later, I stood in zip ties in a jail cell—exhausted, dissociating, still reeling from being groped by an NYPD officer—watching as those same violations were carried out again, this time by the state. Hijabs were torn from the heads of my friends by the very police force sent to protect “safety.” The same violence, but in uniform.

Palestine didn’t expose the hypocrisy of Western liberal feminism through theory. It did it through the bodies of Muslim women, brutalized in public view. No academic critique could have revealed it more completely to the students who bore witness. 

When Israel Occupation Force (IOF) soldiers studying at Columbia used a chemical agent—a weapon designed in the laboratories of occupation and used on Palestinians—to attack students on campus, it was initially treated by the university as an isolated incident. But there was nothing anomalous about it. One of those soldiers had been photographed before, harassing Armenian Christians in Jerusalem. Later, when they sued the university for “discrimination,” after being suspended, Columbia ended the suspension and settled—quietly, generously—for $395,000. 

The lesson was unmistakable: Violence could cross borders. It could change uniforms. And it would be rewarded.  

In March 2025, when Columbia expelled the president of its student union for protesting the genocide in Gaza and swiftly canceled the union’s scheduled negotiations, another mask slipped. 

Even labor organizers, it turned out, were expendable if they refused to toe the Zionist line. The protections of labor law, like so many other rights, were quickly violated when they were used to oppose genocide. Submitting to the stated priorities of President Donald Trump's administration, Columbia has wasted no time in revoking the visas of international student workers. Some were evicted from university housing with barely a notice. Columbia complied—efficiently, coldly—with request after request. It became undeniable: The labor movement wasn’t merely adjacent to Palestine. It was structurally bound to it. 

When Mahmoud Khalil was detained by federal immigration authorities, multiple students of color had their visas revoked or found themselves facing deportation in the weeks that followed. The truth became impossible to ignore: The struggle for Palestine is inseparable from the fight for immigration justice, for prison abolition, for liberation from surveillance, detention, and displacement. These are not parallel struggles. They are the same battle, refracted through different borders, enforced by the same machinery.

What happened revealed a truth many had not yet faced: The very same forces that defend Zionist violence abroad—militaries, police, surveillance networks—are the ones expanding their reach through brutality right here at home. The occupation was never just “over there.” It had already begun to arrive.

Palestine ceased to be an abstraction. It became a confrontation, visceral and immediate. A glimpse of empire's violence, no longer distant, now re-imported and deployed on our campuses, against our bodies. This wasn’t unprecedented. Empire has always turned inward when threatened—from COINTELPRO’s surveillance, infiltration, and assassination of Black Panther leaders, to the National Guard’s massacre of anti–Vietnam War students at Kent State University, to the brutal crackdowns on striking workers across industries. Now, Palestine has become the flashpoint—the site where imperial power and domestic repression converge, exposing the architecture of empire in full view.

And yet, I remember feeling something else last year, something I still carry, something I continue to resent: The painful truth that this was what it took. That only when Palestine became personal, when it pierced through the illusion of distance, did many begin to care. 

Why must we prove to you that Palestine affects you too? 

All of last year, the number of protesters would swell and shrink, only rising again when student repression was too visible to ignore. Why did the crowds grow not after a massacre in Rafah, but after Columbia suspended SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)? Why did people show up not when Al-Shifa Hospital was under siege, but when a chemical attack happened on campus?

It took hundreds of American students in zip ties, dragged across the campus lawn in broad daylight, for hundreds more to finally join a movement they had watched—and hesitated to enter—for months. 

Why was the genocide of Palestinians not reason enough? 

For many students, repression was still an occasional tremor. A doxxing truck here, disciplinary action there. Outrage would crest, then recede. Memory on campus was a fragile thing. Every two weeks, it reset itself. Every new outrage brought a brief flood of solidarity—a vigil, a statement, a crowd. Then it ebbed, receding into classes and midterms, into parties and weekend trips. 

For organizers, there was no ebb. We lived inside the tide. It left me wondering: What happens to a movement sustained not by enduring belief, but by a rhythm of violence that is just potent enough to awaken yet not devastating enough to destroy?

Over a year later, as our coalition no longer exists, I’m starting to get some answers.

After months of unrelenting repression, the movement has fractured, splintered in the very ways the state has always hoped it would. We went from a student body unafraid, moving boldly and together, to one gripped by fear. The stakes have risen, and with them came a silence—not out of indifference, but out of survival.  

We are at a crossroads now. And it would be dishonest to pretend we are still winning. 

April 17 2025 marked one year since we launched the encampment on Columbia’s campus. We gathered again on that same day, across that lawn, now to rally against the abduction of our peers, Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, the latter of whom has since been released from federal detention.

Across from us, the university hosted an event titled “Fun & Games on the Lawn.” We chanted, “The students united will never be defeated.” Just feet away, as students spoke through tears about their disappeared friends, Chappell Roan’s “HOT TO GO!” blasted from loudspeakers.  

As we chanted, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” a single bubble blown from their celebration drifted over to us, brushing the tip of my finger like a ghost. Behind a student holding a banner with the face of Hind Rajab, a child killed by Israel in 2024, someone tossed a Frisbee.

Near the Low Library steps, NYPD officers lounged next to a pop-up stand, which blared "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga at full volume. Light blue graduation gowns dotted the steps, cameras flashing as students posed for their photoshoots. The sun broke through the clouds for the first time in weeks. People sprawled out on the grass, laughing and letting the warmth erase whatever they didn’t want to see. 

It was as if the world was conspiring to pretend this was normal, as if joy could be scheduled, and grief confined to our corner of campus. Our protest felt like a strange exhibit, another spectacle for students passing by, desperate to preserve their comfort.

And for a moment, I missed the days when the Zionist counter protesters would scream at us, calling us terrorists to our faces. Even hatred felt more honest than this polished indifference. At least then, someone was looking us in the eye.

All 2024, we searched for new ways to protest the ongoing annihilation of the Palestinian people. We rallied hundreds of students weekly—sometimes more frequently. We built art installations and held vigils in the rain, our umbrellas clustered at the heart of campus. We organized teach-ins, disrupted events, launched boycotts, staged sit-ins. We wrote Rafah into the snow in red, a wound carved into winter. We pitched tents on the lawn and kept them standing for two weeks, even as students were dragged away in zip ties. We occupied buildings. We read the names of our martyrs for days, voices breaking but resilient.

In 2025, almost a year after we renamed that building Hind’s Hall, we held a vigil for Hind Rajab. Where once there had been a sea of students, there were now only a handful, standing in the echo of what had been. 

I hope the student body has not forgotten. I hope our movement was not a spark that flickered and died. I hope fear has not settled into our bones, silencing what once roared. I hope this quiet is not surrender, but the breath before the next storm. I hope the encampment was not our final breath, but a beginning disguised as a climax. And if it was our peak, I hope we climb again—higher, toward something greater. But hope alone is not enough. 

I wanted the anniversary of the encampment to be a moment of pride, of purpose, not a day heavy with grief and dissonance. Not a day when we watch the movement splinter, as friends disappear, as genocide rages on, as the world spins forward as if none of it were happening. 

Framing Palestine through the language of collective liberation was always necessary. It helped people see their own humanity at stake, making it harder for them to look away. But now, we are at a dangerous crossroads. Too many have begun to believe that silence might save them, that if they keep their heads down, they might slip through untouched. What they fail to see is that we are entering a new era, one that echoes the darkest chapters of the very histories we were taught about. An era in which fascism feeds on fear, in which silence is not safety, but surrender. What they take next will not be someone else's future—it will be yours. 

Inch by inch, rights disappear. Inch by inch, the ground shifts. Until one day you wake up and realize there is no inch left to give. We will be swallowed by the very empire we were too afraid to name. 

My grief for Kashmir and Palestine was born together, twin wounds I carried from the beginning. But it was through Palestine that my grief found direction. One taught me what it means to be forgotten; the other taught me how to fight to be remembered. And I have come to understand remembrance is not passive. It is not nostalgia. It is not mourning for its own sake. 

To remember is to keep something alive when the world wants it buried, to refuse erasure. It means holding close what we built, while studying what made it possible: The conditions, the choices, the contradictions, the costs.

To remember is to ask the questions that hurt, to face not only what was done to us, but what we failed to do for each other. Remembrance is not the end of a movement. It is how we learn to begin again. 

I do not write this in despair. I write it as a record, an unvarnished reflection, not a polished narrative meant to keep morale high.  

I was there—from the earliest meetings to the front of the marches, from the nights on the lawn to the hours in jail, from the moments of unimaginable unity to the silences that followed. I gave everything I could to this movement. And I watched it fracture, not only under repression, but under exhaustion, ego, fear, and the unbearable pressure placed on a student movement that the world expected to be unbreakable.

And still, I keep coming back to the encampment. 

Not out of nostalgia. Not to chase a ghost. But because in those days, for one brief, undeniable moment, we moved as one. We named the genocide. We shattered the illusion of normal. We made the empire look—and tremble. They sent every machine of discrediting and suppression they had.

And now, even a year later, they are still terrified it might happen again. Because what we showed then was not just a protest. It was a glimpse of what they cannot afford us to imagine: A world built on our terms, governed by our principles, sustained by a love for our people in defiance of an empire that exists to crush us.

And once you have seen that world, even for a moment, you can never go back.