Maximalist rhetoric made the ultimate confrontation inevitable.
Yesterday afternoon, Columbia University’s campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their “liberated zone”—an encampment of about 80 tents—and Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their “liberated building.” At midnight yesterday morning, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive sound.
And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia University, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was “guilty of abetting genocide” and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.
As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On the campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.
Hearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protester’s words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possible—that two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.
No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power, and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.
