Columbia University invests in defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Blackrock, who help perpetuate the genocide in Palestine that Israel is committing.

It is unconscionable to imagine a societal instrument like the university, one whose supposed intent is the cultivation of a positive public citizenry, investing in weapon manufacturers at all. To do so when they’re being used to commit genocide is a moral crime, which I’m not sure I’ll ever fully come to terms with.

I have spent the last week watching Columbia University students and faculty bravely take the stance that they do not want their names and dollars to be complicit in genocide. I spent the last couple hours of late April 30 and early May 1 watching NYPD bring in military-grade equipment to forcibly dispossess these students from their protest encampment. Later that night, I watched Zionist counter-protesters break barricades, shoot fireworks at protestors, and incite fights at the UCLA encampment while the police watched. I watched students at the University of South Florida huddle together while cops pointed military-grade weapons at them.

All the while, I watched and listened to every genocidal action Israel took and continues to take as they close in on Rafah.

I then had my intelligence debased by listening to President Biden insist in a national address that these protests were violent, that they were destroying property, and that the police were right to crush them.

In June 2020, following the summer of anti-cop protests, the same man said “We will not allow any President to quiet our voice. We won’t let those who see this as an opportunity to sow chaos throw up a smokescreen to distract us from the very real and legitimate grievances at the heart of these protests.” 

Frankly, fuck this guy. 

Every message about democracy being on the ballot in 2024 has been drowned out by police rioting against protesters in California and artillery shells in Palestine. At UNC, some frat dudes took down a Palestinian flag and raised the American flag. At Ole Miss, different frat guys mocked a Black pro-Palestine protestor as a monkey. 

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was sure to call the UNC frat’s actions  “admirable.” 

If Biden were president in 2017, I’m confident he would have echoed Trump’s statement about Charlottesville: he probably thinks there were fine people on both sides, too.

I feel a sincere and despicable helplessness as I watch my peers fight for a better future and be met with the unbridled violence of a police state. Originally, I wanted to write about what it would be like to watch Brownshirts get in street fights in Weimar Germany: to make a comparison between how the cops treat protestors in this country with how the Nazis treated their opposition on their rise to power. To explain how the administration in Columbia, the governors of states like New York, social media posts by the former president, and memos by the current president, all look like fascism.

However, more eloquent and educated people have made these comparisons. The only statement I want to make concerning this is that I never thought fascism would be so easily televised in my life: from Ferguson to Columbia, from Guantanamo to Gaza, I did not grow up thinking evil would be so readily viewable. 

The revolution may never be televised, but the counterrevolution surely is.

Then I saw the House pass its antisemitism bill, using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to include “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and I realized what I wanted to write was that this bill is horseshit. It is an attack on free speech so brazenly championed by the Christofascists and Zionists that claim to stand for free speech.

It’s a bill that will consider many of the discussions that occur in Jewish Studies programs across the country antisemitic. It erases nearly a century of diaspora Jewish struggle. I realized I wanted to write that the Israeli apartheid regime is a racist endeavor, going back at least as far as the Balfour Declaration in 1926, and certainly as far back as the Nakba in 1948. There’s a chance I won’t be given the legal chance to say this if that bill gets passed in full. 

Beyond this restriction on speech, I’m also frankly tired of being forced to listen to the opinions of pundits and politicians whose history of the Levant and Southwest Asia started with a Wikipedia dive on October 8. I wish my enemies were more moral, but I also wish they were smarter.

I am too aware that I am vulnerable to careerism, to a defense of the status quo in the hope that I don’t disqualify myself from some political job in the future that I may never get. So I wanted to put my values where my mouth is.

I wanted the last thing I write for ESU to be that I find the actions of students at universities like Cal State Humboldt, University of South Florida, City University of New York, and Columbia brave beyond measure. I wanted to write that I side with them, I side with Gaza, and in doing so I believe I side with a beautiful and liberatory humanity that is oppressed by its own government, by the Israeli apartheid state, and by the police.

I wanted to write this to stain my record in the hopes of keeping myself accountable.

I don’t have to fight off cops in riot gear at my own university. I don’t have to shelter my family from Israeli air strikes. But I must at least write that I support them, to say that a better world is possible, and I hope in equal parts that they can help make it and can enjoy its quiet bliss.

We’re not free until we’re all free. I have seen unimaginable evil carried out in my lifetime. My only hope is that, like the student protestors in the 70s against Rhodesia and in the 80s against apartheid in South Africa, I will see an end to another apartheid regime in my lifetime. 

I hope I can share that better future with the students who protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope I can share that future with the people of Palestine. We’re not free until we’re all free. 

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.