When memory becomes a threat

We are witnessing an assault not on active mobilization, but on the memory of it

On April 17, 2024, I went camping for the first time. It was an unconventional introduction to the outdoors, one that included 10 days under the sky, a parade of international news cameras, and an eight-hour stint in NYPD custody. But it was no ordinary camping trip; it was an act of Ivy League insurgency. 

I was among the 108 students arrested for the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment in April 2024. I was punished—not for the first nor last time—for daring to express solidarity with my people amid their ongoing genocide.

At the time, the sight of over 100 peaceful protesters dragged off campus in zip ties was such a shock to the conscience that it lit a fire of pro-Palestinian encampments worldwide. A year later, the genocide rages on, and whatever resistance remains is met with harsh repression. Pro-Palestinian immigrant students—some of whom are legal permanent U.S. residents—are getting taken off the streets and detained by the state, one by one. Two of them were my Palestinian peers at Columbia.

Friendly faces that once brightened a sea of multi-colored tents became inaccessible ghosts trapped behind bars, flickering across my TV screen. The world memorized their names before my university managed to utter them: Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. 

While Mohsen was released, Mahmoud, as of this writing, has been sitting in political imprisonment for two months. His son, born on April 21, 2025, has yet to properly meet his father.

I can picture Mahmoud clearly—not in mainstream media clips, but in memory, standing calm and articulate in front of a crowd of microphones one minute, and joyfully leading a dabke dance circle the next. I text him memes. “For when you get out,” I write, my heart sinking after I hit send. 

His portrayal in the news, reduced to slanderous White House press statements and “Shalom” mugshots, feels like a second disappearance.

What we created at Columbia was a community of care. We cultivated a consciousness of Palestine and the courage to defend it. That is precisely why the state decided to cage Mahmoud and Mohsen one full year later.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio first framed Mahmoud as a threat to America’s foreign policy interests, my immediate reaction was to laugh at the absurdity of inflating the importance of a college student. But when Rubio recycled Columbia’s discredited accusation of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Mohsen, I understood the truth: The students I shared protest megaphones and press conferences with were indeed threats—to the distorted perception of Palestinians among the American public. We were threats to the narrative that gives Israel cover to burn journalists alive, snipe children in the head, and dig mass grave after mass grave unimpeded.

At Columbia, the sight of a Palestinian flag draped over our symbolic Alma Mater statue was enough for the university to barricade it. The aerial footage of over 700 students chanting for a liberated Palestine on Oct. 12, 2023, provoked the university administration into closing our gates for the first time since 1968, violating a longstanding agreement with the city. The university repeated this every time we gathered in protest, from fall 2023 until the encampment.

When this visual danger to Columbia’s PR and America’s warmongering became ubiquitous during the encampment, the administration locked down campus altogether and fostered a perpetual fear of arrest. Even after the protests died down in fall 2024, the university kept the gates sealed permanently—simply because mobilization could resurface at any moment. 

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment was so powerful that Columbia issued a statement banning tents in the lead-up to the one-year anniversary. When the day came, the university held a full day of programming on the lawns, terrified that those sitting on the grass would otherwise be wearing keffiyehs. The staff blasted pop music, hoping it would silence the lingering echo of the NYPD’s Long Range Acoustic Device. But Columbia Public Safety officers shattered the carefully curated illusion of normalcy, conspicuously standing guard at every entrance to the lawns.

Since the historic climax of protest in April 2024, Columbia University was cemented as the epicenter of the nationwide proxy battleground between student activists and the federal government. Unfortunately, psychological warfare was far from the only unsavory part of the protester experience.

For a year after the encampment, congressional letters flooded in, propagating hysterical falsehoods and demanding disciplinary crackdowns. Zionism kept Columbia under the heat of its glare, successfully demanding an end to academic freedom, free speech, and faculty-and-student governance. When Trump returned to office, he moved swiftly to carry out a hit job that had long been progressing. Mahmoud and Mohsen were not detained for anything they did in 2025; they were punished for what they stood for in 2024.

The state learned from our peaceful solidarity. And it responded with the only language it understands: Force.

Louis Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher, wrote that when an institution’s ideological apparatus fails to shape people’s perceptions—when propaganda no longer works—those in power resort to the repressive apparatus of brute force to suppress dissent. 

We saw this phenomenon unfold when police across the country arrested and brutalized up to 3,000 students in April and May of 2024. And we are seeing it again now, as the federal government abducts our friends into unmarked cars for speaking to the press and writing op-eds during the previous calendar year. We are witnessing an assault not on active mobilization, but on the memory of it. 

The U.S. government wants us to forget that sustained opposition to its bloodstained partnership with Israel is possible. It wants the fear to settle into our bones and freeze us in place. It wants us to look over our shoulders when we enter and exit our homes. It wants us desensitized to what was once unfathomable: From locked gates and ID checkpoints, to student group derecognitions, to mass arrests and suspensions, to expulsions, to forced disappearances. This is how fascism creeps in—by convincing us there is no alternative.

But if authoritarianism relies upon collective amnesia, then the only antidote is remembrance.

I want to remember that the night before we set up tents on April 17, 2024, there was, ironically, a massive lawn party in the same location. 

I want to remember singing “The Wheels on the Bus” in the NYPD corrections van, unable to move for half an hour because hundreds of people blocked the street, hoping to delay our transport to jail.

I want to remember that my most memorable birthday was spent dancing to Taylor Swift’s “22”, surrounded by tents and friends, the day after my first live TV interview.

I will never forget the electricity in the air as I was escorted in zip ties in front of thousands of onlookers. I was smiling; I had a gut feeling that something had irrevocably shifted. 

When I was released from jail eight hours later, the first words shouted to me were, “The students took over the second lawn!” 

I spent that night back on the grass with puffy pink wrists and an exhausted grin, listening to my friends recount their fear and adrenaline as they spontaneously jumped the fence to the other lawn and sat with linked arms. The circle expanded until it became a massive spiral. 

They had no idea if they would be arrested next. At that moment, it didn’t matter. 

For the first time since the relentless bombardment of Gaza began, my faith in empathy and humanity was restored. For the first time in history, we had set off a domino chain of pro-Palestinian mass mobilization, permanently shifting global consciousness. And people in Gaza noticed. They reached out with messages spray-painted on their tents, thanking us for ours.

No matter how long it takes to implement the will of the student body, nothing can undo what we have already accomplished: Reshaping national political discourse and re-introducing the word “divestment” into international vocabulary for the first time since the fight against apartheid South Africa.

No amount of routine ID checks can erase the community that emerged last spring: The trust of leaving my belongings on the lawn and returning hours later to find them untouched; falling asleep in the open air, only to wake up to students covering everyone with tarps to protect us from the rain; watching the sunrise next to some of my closest friends; meeting new people every single day.

When I look at the locked gates today, I see the hands of suspended Jewish students passing challah through the bars during Shabbat. My favorite sweatshirts remind me of the donated pile that grew, night after night, to ward off the bone-chilling cold. The lawns conjure memories of cultural dances, teach-ins with renowned speakers, and Palestinian-flag-clad puppies racing past children’s drawings of watermelons. In my heart, I carry the solidarity and the fading yellow patches that lingered in the aftermath of the encampment’s attempted erasure.

The biggest threat to Zionist ideology is the intergenerational memory of a multi-faith land prior to ethnonationalist settler colonialism. It is the Palestinian grandparents who cling to the keys of their stolen homes from 1948 and 1967, longing to return to their olive groves. It is their grandchildren, and future leaders of all backgrounds, on American college campuses advocating for the latest generation of Nakba survivors.

Mahmoud Khalil is terrifying to Zionism—not because of his individual actions, but because he reminds the world that Palestinians are still here, still speaking, still refusing erasure. 

Recognizing our power does not mean romanticizing the trauma that came with it. Memory is a double-edged sword.

When Mahmoud and Mohsen were taken, I felt myself thrust right back into the slowly shrinking circle of students on the lawn, waiting and clutching the arms of the people next to me. Then and now, adrenaline blurs my vision as I watch those around me get picked off by the police one by one, singing and screaming: “Where you go, I will go, my friend. Your people are my people.” 

I read Mahmoud’s op-eds about the illusion of rights and re-live staring at a sign through the bars in jail that stated, “Water will be made available upon request,” while listening to someone in an adjacent cell scream for water for hours. It makes me nauseous to stretch my brief discomfort—eight hours in custody—across the scale of Mahmoud’s time in federal detention. 

Last April and May, the two of us stood in front of cameras in an attempt to humanize Gaza to national news outlets, forced to explain our identities and justify our collective grief over and over. Now, I am forced to humanize him. My friend. The Palestinian student I used to laugh with at press conferences and crowded dinner tables. 

But when I feel myself slipping into despair, I remind myself of the sheer desperation required for the state to resort to political imprisonment. The state will cage what it cannot control.

I remind myself that the repression is already backfiring, re-amplifying our narrative and exposing the colonial boomerang imperiling everyone in this country. Even the outlets that smeared us now use the word Nakba when mentioning how Mahmoud’s family was ethnically cleansed by the creation of Israel—alongside 750,000 other Palestinians. 

Israel now has the lowest approval rating among the American public in its 77-year history. It is only a matter of time before the Israeli apartheid regime falls; the tide is turning against its cruelty. Its desperate actions now—reminiscent of dying colonies throughout history—are an unattainable attempt to halt what has already been set in motion.

The authorities tore down the encampment. But they couldn’t tear down what it had sparked. They unlawfully abducted Mahmoud Khalil. But they couldn’t stop his words from escaping between the detention center bars and echoing around the world: “Who has the right to have rights?” 

As had occurred with the encampment, people from Gaza sent their empathy when Mahmoud was taken, despite their own unbearable pain. Yet again, we overcame the imaginary divide imposed between us and them.

One year ago, I went camping for the first time, and despite the cages and the cost, I would do it all again. I have a feeling Mahmoud would, too.

Because it was never just a protest. It was a reclamation of space, narrative, and belonging. It was a refusal to be silenced in the face of genocide, and a declaration that we will never forget. 

The encampment may be gone, but its spirit survives in every act of ongoing state vengeance it provokes, in every memory we refuse to let die, and in every student who dares to pitch a tent in its wake.