Letter from the editor: The Encampment Edition
Some stories don't just unfold in front of you. They pull you under, hold your breath, ask you to choose who you are before you speak.
How do you cover the most important story of your life?
When tents were first pitched on the South Lawn of Columbia University’s campus on April 17, 2024, I came running in my pajamas, camera swinging from my neck, the sky still barely blue. It was 6 a.m., and there I found the two girls who had first welcomed me into the community on Oct. 8, 2023. The Maryams, I call them. Their testimonies—their warmth, fire, and laughter—live in these pages. I remember knocking gently on their tent and asking if I could take a photo, just a quick one, of them smiling.
It was the first photo I took of the encampment. That was the first moment it hit me. I wasn’t just documenting a movement; I was witnessing my people, my community, taking a stand. I didn’t know then that it would be the beginning of something far greater than I could’ve imagined. What followed on campuses across the U.S. was not just a wave of student protests. It was a national, physical refusal of genocide and occupation. A collective scream against complicity. A refusal to let mass death be normalized, narrated away, or neatly tucked into news cycles. These were spaces built on the audacity to care—loudly, inconveniently, insistently, together.
That morning, I was asked by others—but mostly by myself—to make a decision: Do I cover this story as a journalist, or do I participate in it as a Palestinian?
But that question was never neutral. It is a question born of empire. It was born of the myth that detachment equals integrity, that distance ensures truth. As Palestinian historian Edward Said wrote, “No one today is purely one thing.” To be Palestinian is to carry your story in your bones. The very idea that I could be separate from the story—when it lived in my lineage, my body, my rage—was a fiction. I did not have the privilege of distance. The tension between the two is not a conflict; it is a convergence. And at that moment, I realized the most honest thing I could do was to stand inside the story. My job was to document from within, to insist that witnessing is participation, too.
This Palestine in America Encampment Edition is not just a record of protest. It is a chronicle of memory, of struggle, of defiance. It is a gathering of voices that are often forgotten or misrepresented, of voices that still insist on being heard in a world bent on silencing them. It is also a love letter to Palestine, to the people who risked everything to say her name, and to the kind of journalism that dares to stand beside them.
Read Jude Taha’s full letter by downloading the edition, ordering a print copy or becoming a subscriber today!
