The New Yorker:

The university asked the N.Y.P.D. to arrest pro-Palestine student protesters. Was it a necessary step to protect Jewish students, or a dangerous encroachment on academic freedom? Extensive interviews with activists, professors, administrators, and many others—and reporting on scenes of conflict unfolding inside and outside the university’s gates—reveal a tense and divided community.

By Andrew Marantz

In the predawn hours of Wednesday, April 17th, more than a hundred student activists walked onto a lawn in front of the Butler Library, in the middle of Columbia University’s campus. The center of campus is usually open to city foot traffic, but, because of recent tensions, campus administrators had restricted access to Columbia I.D. holders; many of the activists, trying to stay anonymous, were careful not to swipe their I.D.s on the way in. They set up a few dozen green tents, a couple of Palestinian flags, and some handwritten signs (“columbia funds genocide”; “while you read, gaza bleeds”). One of the signs in the encampment read “liberated zone,” a reference to a wave of protests at Columbia in the late sixties. “We’re calling it an occupation,” Maryam Iqbal, a first-year Barnard College student wearing hoop earrings, told me. “We’ve been building up to this action for months.”

Since October 7th, Columbia, like many universities, has been roiled by protests and counter-protests. (“It’s basically the only thing anyone here can talk about,” one student told me.) Iqbal, an eighteen-year-old from Seattle, is a leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that was suspended in November, after administrators alleged that the group had “repeatedly violated University policies.” Next to the lawn, about a hundred more protesters marched in support of the encampment, though here the message discipline was more lax (“we will not be silent,” but also “globalize the intifada”). Eventually, some counter-protesters showed up, chanting “Am Yisrael chai” (“The people of Israel live”) and waving a huge Israeli flag.

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