 woke up early on Wednesday, April 24, to alarming rumors of Columbia University summoning the National Guard. The NYPD had already raided the first Gaza Solidarity Encampment, set up on the campus’s South Lawn on April 17, arresting 108 students the following day.

Columbia’s students helped spark a worldwide student movement, with tents cropping up at universities across the U.S. and then the globe — all with the common goals of demanding academic institutions divest from Israel and holding them accountable for profiting from an apartheid regime and a genocide. These students and their allies prioritized amplifying Palestinian voices and calling for liberation, risking their academic and professional careers and their safety.

It was my first trek up to campus since teaching in the fall. I rushed out of my Brooklyn apartment, making the schlep to the Upper West Side, constantly refreshing my Instagram page to see if the rumors were true.

I arrived to a quiet encampment still slumbering (or strategizing) on a beautifully sunny spring day.

Laila and her daughter, Amina, at the encampment.

Relieved, I took a seat on a bench to recenter. I saw a few reporters, even though I was told the media wasn’t allowed on campus until 2 p.m. But otherwise the campus was mostly as I remembered it — aside from a field of tents.

I heard Arabic music playing nearby. On the bench to my right was a man wrapped in a keffiyeh, feeding a baby in a stroller. I walked over and introduced myself to the man, Bassem, and his 9-month-old daughter, Amina. I asked if he was also Palestinian. He told me he was an Egyptian student at Teachers College.

My camera wasn’t out just yet. Instead of documenting, I began engaging — or, more specifically, entertaining — Amina, bouncing my curly hair from side to side for the simple reward of her radiant smile. She had a striking resemblance to my cousin Amanie’s daughter, who was only a couple of months younger.

Bassem fed his daughter potato and eggs, a common Arab breakfast. It all felt so lovingly familiar.

I went on my way before running into them again. This time Amina was playing on the ground with her mother, Laila, a Columbia alumna. She, too, is Egyptian and was wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh that matched her daughter’s tights. This moment was too tender to pass up, and it became one of my favorite photos.

The intergenerational element of this particular social justice struggle has stayed with me. My mother recently pointed out to me that her grandparents lived under the Ottoman Empire, her parents under the British occupation, and her and my generation under Zionism. I grew up seeing pictures of friends and family at Palestinian protests.

“Amina has been going to protests ever since she was 3 months old,” Laila told me. “I felt so much hope being at the encampment and a lot of joy, especially because it was way more diverse than I thought it would be. There were people of all cultures, races, religions — it gave me hope for Falasteen [Palestine].”

There was something sweet and intimate about a communal space that welcomed people from all backgrounds, though joy can feel jarring at a time like this. Yet as a Palestinian, I also know that joy can be a form of resistance. Joy is what conveys our humanity when we’re reduced to victims or villains, numbers without names. Here was a moment of happiness during a time of endless grief.

The Low Memorial Library seen through a tent at the 
Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

The images of student encampments looping on cable news and filling our social media feeds were scenes of violence, with destroyed property and police brutality. But the reality was a stark contrast to the coverage I’d been seeing. There was no shattered glass or NYPD officers brutalizing Columbia’s community at the behest of President Minouche Shafik and billionaire donors. The encampment was safe enough for a mother to bring her infant daughter. It’s like someone turned on a light, and I saw and felt what had been lost in the chaos of the night.

“I made the decision to report and to try and get the story out, because we saw from the first encampment that major media publications have already decided what the encampment was about, and that’s antisemitism. And that just wasn’t the reality,” Jude Taha, a Palestinian student journalist who graduated from Columbia in May, told me when we talked after the encampment had been dismantled. Her master’s project is about Palestinian mobilization in New York City, so covering the developments at Columbia for the student newspaper was a natural progression. “It was really important for me to be there and document the stories of these people that I’ve spent months getting to know, seeing them in their element and creating a reimagination of what resistance and liberation would look like.”

I met Basil Rodriguez, a first-year graduate student studying mental health care in the American Studies Department, shortly after meeting Laila during my first visit to the encampment. Basil’s mother is Palestinian Colombian, and their father is Mexican. The former was a member of the first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter in the U.S. Her cousin Shireen Abu Akleh, a beloved Palestinian American journalist, was killed by Israel in 2022 while reporting in the West Bank. “The media itself is also complicit in justifying the ongoing genocide,” Basil told me. “American media specifically has portrayed us as terrorists.”

They added, “All of my Palestinian elders are storytellers. I was always taught how to speak up about Palestine and to advocate for Palestinian liberation, [so that] people understand that the mainstream narrative we’re told is propaganda and is used to justify violence against our community.”

Protesters gather outside a campus entrance. On April 30, 2024, Columbia restricted access to the Morningside Heights campus to people living on campus and essential personnel.

I told Laila that when I think of Gaza, I think of the suffering of children. With a staggering death toll of more than 45,000 Palestinians killed, surely a gross undercount, the genocide over these past seven months in Gaza is devastating one of the youngest populations in the world, where the median age was only 18 in 2020. (It has crept up to 19.) These students’ actions were aimed at centering the conversation on Gaza, yet their message was distorted time and time again.

Some, like Laila, feel the message is too crucial — particularly to future generations — to lose. “It’s so important, even if she won’t remember it, for Amina to be present in those spaces, so inshallah when she grows up and she sees a picture of herself in a protest or encampment, she’d be curious about it and ask questions,” Laila told me. At Columbia’s encampment, I finally found something I hadn’t while teaching in past semesters or alone in my Brooklyn apartment. I found community. And, even more unexpectedly, I found hope.

“It was so beautiful to be surrounded in the encampments by people of conscience,” Laila said. “And I would love Amina to one day be a person of conscience.”

A protester wearing a keffiyeh at the campus entrance at 116th Street and Amsterdam Ave. The keffiyeh is a traditional Arab headdress that represents Arab culture and heritage and the struggle for Palestinian liberation.


Hammer&Hope

Kholood Eid

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The Beauty of the Gaza Encampment at Columbia

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