“The Encampments” and the American College Student

The institution has not neglected to commemorate the history of agitation against it. The year 2018 marked five decades since students occupied the halls of Columbia University, demanding that the school’s board sever ties to the defense industry during the Vietnam War, and also that it cease construction of a gymnasium—“Gym Crow”—which would have segregated access to Harlem residents. Columbia retaliated by shutting down the shutdown. With the help of officers from the New York Police Department, Columbia laid a brutal siege on its own student body: more than seven hundred arrested, more than one hundred injured. During the clash, the university functionally disowned its students. These were protesters, not pupils. And, over the years, these students, once exiled, have become students again. Their actions, having been “proved” righteous by history, now flow from the institution. For the anniversary of the demonstrations, some of the participants, now in their seventies, participated in tours of the Columbia campus. The university’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library held an exhibition memorializing the protests; a social-media feed produced, in real time, the facts of the escalation, almost like a digital vigil.

How will Columbia, over the next fifty years, gradually absorb the student occupation of 2024 into its branding? “The Encampments,” an indelible new documentary, is already making an appeal to posterity. The film is an on-the-ground accounting of twelve days last spring, when student activists, exhausted of stonewalling from the administration, set up tents on Butler Lawn, demanding that the university cease its investments in Israel and issue a call to end “the genocide in Gaza.” Encampments spread not only at Columbia but on campuses across the country, and then around the world. The documentary’s directors, Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman, embedded with protesters, resulting in footage of police in riot gear slicing their way through crowds; of confrontations between activists and unyielding administrators; of clashes between pro-Palestine Jewish students and Zionist counter-agitators. One of the film’s vexed visual motifs is a mirroring of the encampments at Columbia and the refugee tent cities in Palestine. The film sees the bravery of its student subjects—they are the segment of the citizenry that rejects apathy—but it is not so exceptionalist as to insinuate an equivalence here. Really, this is the source of the film’s inner anguish, captured in narrative form. The protests have ignited national politics, and yet the scale of violence means no action can ever be enough.

Distributed by Watermelon Pictures (a new independent company that promotes “Palestinian cinema and other voices that face repression”), “The Encampments” opened in late March. Students at the University of California, Los Angeles, organized a screening on their campus. One of the hosting organizations, Students for Justice for Palestine, had, like several of its chapters across the country, lost its privileges within the university; organizers tried to dodge the university’s policing eye by constantly moving locations in order to evade censure from the school. On April 30th, university police descended on the students who had gathered in the quad to watch the film, violently dispersed them, and literally confiscated their projection screen.

“The Encampments” is outdated, and it knows that. Repression of student protest has found new life under the Trump Administration; ICE has detained international students who were involved in pro-Palestine demonstrations, with no regard for their visa status. The release of the film was expedited following the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student in Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Khalil had been elected a negotiator for the mobilized students, and acted as a liaison between them, the university, and the media. But he became known to the world through surveillance footage of his ICE arrest on a Columbia residential property. His then pregnant wife, Noor Abdalla, in distress; Khalil forced into a cowered and dehumanized stance; the officers acting with impunity.

That Khalil, unsupported by the university, was arrested without due process, disappeared in Jena, Louisiana, and deemed deportable, sets the stakes for the viewers before the film begins. The nation has fixed its eye on the protests: the film’s opening sequence shows denunciations of the uprisings from both conservative and liberal news media. The condemnations run the gamut: accusations of antisemitism; accusations of outsider agitators; accusations charging the moral emptiness of the listless radical chic. That year, the American political apparatus stepped to the pulpit to denigrate the activists: Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Joe Biden, Eric Adams. The protests were meant to provoke a response; the obsessive smearing signals that the disruption is doing its work. Workman and Pritsker have as their narrators the spokespeople from the encampment, including Khalil; Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student and organizer who was expelled from the university in the days leading up to the film’s release; Sueda Polat, a graduate student who says, at the film’s outset, that she came to Columbia because the university offers one of the few human-rights programs in the U.S. Polat argues that Columbia’s endowment is tied up in companies that have profited from Israel’s military action in Gaza: “We do know that Columbia University has investments in General Electric, has ties to Lockheed Martin and other companies that either produce weapons or produce information technology for the occupation army.” The promise of an Ivy League education is the promise of the city on a hill: an enclosure. Polat speaks to the violence just outside of the wall.

“The Encampments” is a very conventional documentary on purpose. It mounts its argument with little flare and with muted aestheticization, all to dispel the hysteria surrounding its subject. The film is in a defensive posture, feeling itself ensnared in the media’s bogeyman narrative and responding strenuously to every swipe. This is also a New York City film. One of the many things the directors wanted to emphasize was the atmosphere of peace at the encampments. Local restaurants send food. Students sing. Students of different religions participate in Shabbat on the lawn. The film shows footage of counter-protesters coming onto campus, slinging epithets. An agitator, face blurred, taunts, “I hope they rape you.” Miner, especially, dispatches himself, and his bona fides—his Jewishness, his disillusionment with Zionism having led him to a deeper engagement with his faith and with the cause of Palestinian liberation—to ameliorate more moderate criticisms. If there were internal conflicts among the demonstrators, “The Encampments” doesn’t show them; the conflict at hand is the David-and-Goliath fight between the students and the university. Another point of emphasis is how the mobilization develops. “The Encampments” is a process documentary, spotlighting the gradual and intentional strategy to set up first on the lawn, and then to occupy Hamilton Hall—which the students rename Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces—an extraordinary action met with extraordinary force by the N.Y.P.D.

The film interpolates archival footage from the 1968 Vietnam War protests and interviews with Jamal Joseph, who participated in the first Hamilton Hall occupation. Following those demonstrations, Columbia recognized that siccing the N.Y.P.D. on its students had been a mistake. “You simply do not bring police onto a campus,” the former university president Lee Bollinger said in 2008. When the police are brought in once again, in 2024, “The Encampments” frames it as a betrayal, the ultimate death of ideals, the loop of militarized suppression.

Told entirely from the perspective of the protesters, “The Encampments” is a counternarrative. “We’re literally giving you back the university to be a moral university,” Khalil says at one point in the film. His placidity, in the talking-head setup, fills the screen. He has the poise and the speech of a diplomat. Khalil was born in a camp in Syria; neither he nor his parents, children of the 1948 Nakba, the continued expulsion of Palestinians from their land, have ever set foot in Palestine. Khalil is the bridge through which the film makes its arguments about the hypocrisy of élite liberal education, which feeds on ideals of free inquiry and free speech and abdicates its responsibility in freeing people. The University needs—and does, in fact, tolerate—a degree of internal dissent; dissenters make the educational enterprise seem, in that romantic retrospect, legitimate. The film has a fragility that is almost too much to bear. “The Encampments” is compelled to exist in order to rescue the reputation of the protests, and, evidently, this school and the idea of school. But all of this, as the protesters know, and as the film knows, risks a derailment from the cause at hand. Archival footage of Palestine, circa the Nakba, as well as present-day footage from Gaza, strains to make impact in the film, to not become background; we hear the voice of Hind Rajab, whose entire family has just been killed while attempting to flee Gaza. She pleads with an emergency worker to save her as she finds herself surrounded by I.D.F. forces. The screen is black; no image can meet her terror. The students are in an existential battle, too, of both exploiting and shedding their protagonist status. Bisan Owda, a journalist in her twenties from Gaza who has put her body on the line since the war began, says emotionally, “I didn’t miss a single video of the students who talk about Palestine, educate others about the Palestinian cause, with true political and historical knowledge.”

“The Encampments” plays like a gadfly alarm. A year later, Columbia is an icon of capitulation. Its leadership has made concessions to the Trump Administration’s defunding threats, eroding its reputation with little to show for it. Peer institutions tenuously, and then more forcefully, banded together to challenge the incursions; so did small schools in red states, such as Millsaps College, in Mississippi, and Talladega College, in Alabama, for whom cuts represent real financial peril. A union representing Columbia professors is suing the Trump Administration; Yunseo Chung, a twenty-one-year-old junior who has been targeted for deportation because she participated in the protests, is suing Trump himself. Chung was granted a temporary restraining order, which blocks ICE from detaining her. On May 21st, Columbia will hold its commencement ceremonies. Three days before, on May 18th, some students will hold a counter-ceremony, The People’s Graduation, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. They will honor Khalil, who completed his studies in December, who missed the birth of his first child, and who was set to walk in May. ♦