Reflections on Columbia, the Student Intifada and the Culture of Counterinsurgency
28 October 2024 – by Anonymous
“The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May.”
— The Urban Guerilla Concept, The Red Army Faction 1971
On 30 April 2024 — the 56th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia University mass arrests — the New York Pig Department besieged Harlem, locked down the entirety of Columbia’s campus, swept the Gaza solidarity encampment, and raided Hind’s Hall. This raid marked the end of the spring of the Student Intifada. Those of us who were at the barricades are still reeling from the experience. There are few moments in our lives where history opens its doors to us. Taking the leap through is disorienting, but the responsibility to make sense of this conjuncture falls squarely on those who take the leap.
Journalists and pundits have chimed in endlessly on the Student Intifada with a particular focus on Columbia University. Many of these pundits were nowhere near the action nor the partisans who made the action happen, thus they often get the basic facts of the action wrong. As one rebel once advised, “No investigation, no right to speak.” Additionally, the political orientation of the commentariat necessitated the silencing and erasure of the most radical flank of the movement. This flank played a vital role in not only the uprising at Columbia, but in the direction of the movement nationally. This essay is an attempt to both correct the record and offer up some political perspectives from a segment of this radical flank.
The next sequence of the Student Intifada remains elusive but it is important that interventions are made to push the movement in the correct direction. A minority with the correct revolutionary line is not a minority.
ARE WE REALLY PEACEFUL? WHO’S AFRAID OF OUTSIDE AGITATORS?
In the 13 days of protest on Butler Lawn, there was a pernicious narrative peddled by both sympathetic media and liberal student leadership: the narrative of the “peaceful protestors”. While this characterization was pushed by a portion of the encampment, it is not the whole story, and it is certainly not true of the minority group inside the camp who were essential to the initiation of the Student Intifada, and maintained influence over the politics and praxis of the protest until the sweep and raid.
Nonetheless, every official statement coming out of the encampment was padded with language about how peaceful, well-behaved, and non-threatening the action was. Those on the outside could have been tricked into thinking that we were all just a bunch of hippies braiding friendship bracelets in the grass.
There was a near-constant gesturing towards our right to peaceful assembly as citizens of the United States, paired with an incessant fear-mongering around the minority faction’s uncompromising support for armed resistance. This resulted in a de facto pacifist position that attempted to smother out the reality of what brought us to the lawn in the first place — a third world people’s war for national liberation — while also placing a ceiling on acceptable forms of action. To erase the armed resistance of Palestinians, which is supported by the entire Axis of Resistance, is to remove their world-making agency and reduce them to objects of pity. All this does is grease the wheels of the status quo and allow our rulers to continue the military and political targeting of the Axis without any internal dissent.
Any recourse to legality or peace was meant to win over moderates who belly ache over the sanctity of our “democracy” — the same “democracy” beheading infants in the tent camps of Rafah. These moderates are not our friends and many of them have gone back to their regularly scheduled programming after the installment of Kopmala as the Democratic presidential nominee. It is true that a portion of them have been won over to our side, and more will come as contradictions sharpen, but we do not tail the moderate line or play by their rules. This holds especially true when the moderate line throws militant factions under the bus, isolating us from the rest of the movement and exposing us to more repression from the genocidal state that everyone claims to be in opposition to.
There is a belief that these liberalizing rhetorical and strategic compromises, compromises that are fundamentally divisive and neutralizing, keep everyone safe.
Maybe we will protect ourselves if we speak the language of law-abiding pacifism and hide the radical faction from sight.
In practice, these compromises offered us no safety. The armed agents of the state viewed everyone on Butler Lawn as enemies in a war against their genocidal authority. In many ways, they were correct to view us as such. The collective demand for divestment from zionism undermines US hegemony and its military apparatus. There is nothing peaceful about this demand — regardless of how hard we try to contort ourselves in the name of respectability, or what tactics individuals choose to participate in. It is of no benefit to anyone to lie about the terrain on which we are fighting by papering over the stakes with flowery language. The enemy has a clear understanding of what they would lose if we were to win, so what’s our excuse? None of this is intended to promote recklessness, but our analysis must be unflinching in order to meet this moment. To be as radical as reality itself requires both discipline and fearlessness.
It should go without saying that many of the details and the planning of our work require an element of secrecy because of the nature of surveillance under the bourgeois-settler dictatorship. Not all work is done in the light of day, but we should never be dishonest about the content of our politics and what it would take to really win — both with the masses and ourselves. The reality of the matter is that we are engaged in class struggle against the most powerful empire in human history. The radical partisans in the encampment understood fully that our aims can only be attained through force and that these aims are righteous. This understanding is not shameful or reckless. It is a matter of fact.
The emphasis placed on how allegedly docile the protest was played right into the hands of the outside agitator trope that was pushed by racist commentators. Anyone perceived as “non-peaceful” was classified as a foreign threat to the pristine Ivy League finishing school. The more uncompromising edge within the encampment — comprised of students, alumni, faculty and non-students alike — were framed as unhinged “terrorists” who invaded the protest and brainwashed the otherwise “peaceful and good” student activists.
This division, that carries with it racial and class dimensions, is proving itself to be an essential component of the opposition’s strategy for crushing the movement. It became central to the criminal cases of the Hind’s Hall defendants. Students and affiliates had their cases immediately dropped and non-students were dragged through a months-long court and ACD process which included a state mandated “rapid reset program” led by a zionist organization, during which we were subjected to hours of racist drivel about the israeli right to unlimited genocide and the Palestinian right to die quietly.
This line of demarcation was also trotted out by none other than the premier raging war hawk, Hillary Clinton, who went as far as claiming that the “nefarious outsiders” were funded by foreign entities. On 22 September she went live with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to speak about the Student Intifada and said, “There were already existing groups within our country and particularly on certain campuses, like Columbia, who had talking points. They had a plan for protest and disruption, and I watched it morph into something that was not student-led…There was something else going on here that was very troubling. We now have evidence of, obviously foreign money, foreign influence, the algorithms on TikTok which were anti-Israel right off the bat.”
Here, Clinton lays out a piece of the opposition’s long-term strategy for repression and counterinsurgency — manufacturing conspiracies alleging direct ties to state-designated foreign “terrorist” organizations (FTOs). These conspiratorial fictions can serve a multitude of functions, and fully unpacking them all is outside the scope of this piece, but for our purposes, two of these functions are immediately important: they lay the groundwork for lawfare in the form of material support for terrorism (MST) lawsuits and they manufacture consent for lethal violence against the movement in the core. In the case of the former, most of these lawsuits won’t stick, but this isn’t necessarily the point — the point is to demobilize the sector of the movement that poses the most danger to the status quo, and to make pariahs out of the factions within it who insist on the necessity of militant resistance against empire, both in the core and the periphery. The aim here is to criminalize solidarity with the resistance forces at the vanguard of anti-colonial class struggle, and to instill fear in the movement to deter necessary support for these resistance forces, while isolating the radical edge that is eager to escalate.
In the case of the latter, the US government and the zionist entity have spent the past year committing countless massacres against an entire people under the pretense of their ties to these resistance organizations that are designated by the west as “terrorists.” The US-zionist genocide of Gaza is a mass counter-insurgency campaign that seeks to destroy the popular cradle of resistance, the terrorist designation creates the state of exception that makes this mass slaughter acceptable. Our enemy is champing at the bit to apply this state of exception to dissidents in the core, and they are building dozens of cop cities across the country to make good on cracking down on domestic “terror”. As our struggle here intensifies and internationalist solidarity grows, they will not hesitate to put a bullet in any one of us, and they are laying the groundwork to do this with as much support from the backward Amerikan public as possible.
None of this should lead to compromises or demobilization, as it is but a fraction of what Palestinians in Gaza are enduring, but it is also perfectly natural to feel fear in the face of these realities. That said, fear cannot take the wheel. We have a historical duty to continue to throw our bodies on the gears of the imperial machinery. Those who are not able to do so themselves cannot waver in their solidarity with those who continue to do what must be done.
In the face of the opposition’s attempts to divide our movement between the good ones and the bad ones, between the peaceful insiders and the nefarious outside agitators, it is imperative that we are steadfast in rejecting these distinctions wholesale — no matter what level of activity an individual or organization participates in. This necessarily entails rejecting the colonizer’s language of peace and replacing it with the language of liberation. Fascism is here, alive and well, growing stronger by the minute. That said, this cannot be a peace movement, and if we are to fight and survive, it is high time we reckon with that.
A NEW FRONT, THE ARROW AND THE BULLSEYE
“I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.”
— Che Guevara
Based off the 0.66% of Columbia’s investments that are publicly available, we know that it grew its 13.6-billion-dollar endowment in part through investing in corporations like Raytheon, Alphabet, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, General Dynamics and Airbnb, all of which deal in the business of colonial genocide and land theft. If this is what less than 1% of their investment portfolio looks like, we could safely assume that the other 99.34% would reveal just how economically and culturally bound up the university is in not only the apocalyptic zionist war on Gaza, but the plunder of the entire global south. There is a reason why the university is hellbent on refusing the demand to disclose all their portfolio, and it is not because they have nothing to hide.
The demand for Columbia to divest from zionism is, when understood in its totality, a call for the university to divest from imperialism altogether, which is why the police siege on Hind’s Hall was so violent and militarized. They ordered a standing army to attack us not because they are simply mean or irrational, but because this demand, and our willingness to exert force on them to obtain it, undermines the foundation of the institution itself. Divestment is a feasible reform and display of symbolic solidarity at a handful of small liberal arts colleges with less of a monetary and ideological investment in the US empire, but divestment from zionism at Columbia or any of the major universities would necessitate the total restructuring of these institutions and the entire university system.
Calling on Columbia University, a war-profiteering Ivy League, to divest from the zionist project forces them into a position that reveals the institution’s deeply embedded relationship with the global imperialist order and throws it into crisis. There is a revolutionary orientation here couched in a seemingly reformist demand. To pursue this political objective, one that is worthy of every ounce of our effort and tenacity, we would need to expand our political horizon from one of mere institutional reform to one of revolutionary upheaval.
Columbia University is an elite socio-cultural appendage of the US and its war machine. There is no reason to believe that the university has the ethical capacity to bend towards “justice” on the issue of genocidal zionism, even if only to save face. As an apparatus of the empire, the university answers to only two things: capital and organized force from below, most of which is classified as violent and illegal by settler-colonial legality. This was on full display when the Amerikan soft power media complex went into propaganda overdrive to condemn the seizure of Hamilton Hall as an act of violent escalation, even though no humans were injured during the action. What was violent for them was the window bashing and property destruction. For the enemy, property is sacrosanct — to destroy it or to violate their property relations is tantamount to committing acts of violence on the settler class.
When understood in its proper context within the US, legal action has limitations that we cannot respect without condemning ourselves to defeat. Above board action that appeals to the state’s morality is incapable of stopping a 13.6-billion-dollar war profiteering endowment in its tracks. This is to say nothing of the fact that the state will continue to ruthlessly criminalize and repress the movement, and, as this happens, more and more forms of action that were once considered above board will now be pushed into realms of extra-legality. I am not suggesting that everyone must participate in all levels of activity at this time, but the fetishization of legality is a direct impediment to victory and, indeed, being effective in any capacity.
If the radical flank of the Student Intifada is to advance to the level of struggle that is necessary to win, there will need to be a profound shift in our cultural values and how those values relate to our strategy and tactics. In other words, a cultural revolution is in order, and the changes that are required of us will throw a wrench in the gears of our own subjectivity. If our demand is that the universities divest from the US empire, then we must also divest from the lies that they sell us.
Too much of the work being done in the NGO-ified Left is predicated on the hyper-visibility and commodification of the individual: activist as influencer as brand. Of all the masters of this form, AOC is the most famous and repugnant by a long shot, but this problem permeates even the most radical spaces. It is intimately connected to the petit-bourgeois class position of most US leftists, who are bred into a striver ideology where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, and every personality quirk is a small business opportunity. More than anything, all of this individualism is a serious liability and should be left behind. It exposes us to heightened surveillance, risk of doxxing, network mapping, and repression from the extremely powerful police state that we are trying to dismantle.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have public-facing leaders — our movement needs leaders with charisma who can present radical ideas to the masses and agitate them into organization. But this leadership and public-facing work must be cultivated and disciplined through revolutionary organization — not through the knee-jerk individualism that is a direct impediment to collective action. The task for many of us is to become comfortable with being one of the many — swimming amongst the people like fish in the sea. Not to burrow under, not yet, but to blend — to hide in plain sight. This task runs contrary to every habit instilled and beaten into us, to every financial incentive associated with the liberal left. It problematizes our use of social media — where unfortunately much of the left idles along and runs their mouths — and the impulse to share obsessively. The cult of online hyper-visibility is a powerful tool in the hands of the repressive forces of the state, who use these platforms as sites of extraction and surveillance. Imagine every tweet is talking directly into the recording device of your enemy — is it really worth it? Will how much you’re revealing to your enemy jeopardize the real work and your ability to carry it out?
A shift away from this individualism, which is ultimately linked to professional aspiration, will change how we approach organizing altogether. The fact of the matter is that we do not yet have the organizational capacity to sustain long-term militancy, and the default liberal self-centeredness instilled in us as youth in the core is a massive impediment to building out that capacity. If we want to escalate, we must advance on the level of organization, which will require us to rewire the way we have been choreographed to approach this work. If we want our engagement with high-risk activity to shift away from spectacular one-off actions and into sustained, protracted resistance, then we need clandestine cadre formations, infrastructure to sustain them, discipline and commitment. This will require us to give up the trappings of “the good life” and release any ideas of this work being a career option.
The Gaza solidarity encampment opened up the space and time needed to experiment with this cultural transformation, and it led us to the discipline required to seize Hamilton Hall with only 46 people.
THE ENCAMPMENT AND THE SEIZURE OF HAMILTON HALL
The campus was on strict lockdown with 24/7 NYPD presence surrounding the campus and 24/7 public safety presence inside of the gates. Anyone without a CUID couldn’t enter or exit. There were no sex, drugs, or alcohol allowed in the camp, and no taking photos without each other’s consent. We were encouraged to cover our faces. During the daytime, comrades on the outside would print out and smuggle in boxes of radical literature from different encampments and movements across the world — students who had never heard of the Cal Poly Humboldt occupation or Stop Cop City or Basel Al-Araj from Al-Walaja were suddenly saturated in their politics. The radical partisans took control of political education. Teach-ins about the revolutionary struggle of the Korean people, the PFLP and Leila Khaled, the global uprisings of ‘68, and how to build barricades took place in between calls to prayer.
Day in and day out, the administration dragged representatives from the camp into hours-long negotiating meetings where they would give them the runaround and offer breadcrumb concessions to pacify the unruly mass festering on their lawn. The representatives would then go back to a very small, unelected, group of students in the camp to relay the news and strategize. This ad hoc group attempted to dictate the will of the entire encampment with very little accountability to anyone outside of their circle.
It became clear that Columbia was trying to tire us out and buy us off. Escalation was the word on everyone’s minds, and this was met with fear-mongering from the negotiating group. They were scared that if we rubbed university authorities the wrong way, it would cause them to give us a bad deal in negotiations — as if Shafik and Co. were ever coming to the table in good faith anyway. Out of either naïveté or opportunism, they seemed to believe that a demand as audacious as full divestment from zionism could be won through conversations with power and peaceful means alone.
The encampment was not threatening enough on its own to force divestment from the administration, but after the first round of mass arrests and subsequent backlash from the broader public, the university wasn’t ready to come in with a second raid. We were at a stalemate. The radical partisans began to meet in secrecy across the campus. In hidden corners and blindspots, away from the view of cameras and cops. The plan: seize Hamilton Hall. Just like ’68, except this time, our operation would be surgical and planned down to the minute. We would not be spontaneous; we would be disciplined cadre.
Negotiations continued to go nowhere but some members of the negotiating group thought otherwise. Regardless, this process was massively politicizing for less experienced students who still had faith in the ethical integrity of Columbia. It sharpened the contradictions between the more advanced cadre and liberals in the camp, and it bought us time to agitate, educate, and train.
Columbia attempted to fake us out with a loose threat to call in the National Guard. Choppers swarmed overhead but we didn’t move an inch that night. On multiple occasions, false alarms about imminent police raids spread through the camp. The experienced rads advised that everyone remain calm. Nobody flinched.
At the nightly camp-wide meetings, young students demanded transparency and accountability about the negotiation process. We were dissatisfied with what we all understood as attempts at containment from the administration and the clique negotiating on everyone’s behalf behind closed doors. The radical partisans continued to plan. We smuggled in barricading supplies under the noses of the pigs guarding the campus entrances. Crow bars, chains, angle grinders, bolt cutters, hammers, bike locks, ratchet straps, duct tape, epoxy, zip ties. We smuggled in 50 extra tents in under an hour. As time wore on, the entire encampment’s culture shifted away from one of compromise and negotiation to one of resolve and militancy. Groups of inexperienced protestors got curious about the possibility of taking a building. We started gathering our numbers inside the camp. When a Barnard grad announced that we needed to break open the gates and let all of Harlem inside, she was promptly recruited.
The partisans decided we would all wear head-to-toe Columbia merchandise and ski masks as our black bloc. The CU merch was a big “fuck you” from the outside agitators. In the days leading up to the action, we did multiple undercover passes of Hamilton Hall’s inside and the tunnel system that runs beneath it. Every camera was accounted for, every door drawn out, every floor of the building mapped with an inventory of exact numbers of useable furniture items for barricades. My comrade smuggled me a copy of the selected writings of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker by Ben Morea. They were the outsider rads from the Lower East Side SDS chapter who took Columbia’s mathematics building in ‘68. Their occupation was notoriously the most militant.
We continued to put pressure on the ad hoc negotiating group to get the green light to move forward with our escalation. They rejected and rejected and rejected. They too were trying to tire us out. In a situation like this, never back down, no matter who they are. We struggled the de-escalators relentlessly, but also fought hard for unity, because it was important to us that our militancy was not articulated as just undisciplined people “doing whatever they want.” In our minds, the only legitimate escalation was one that moved the way the resistance moved.
On April 29, we woke up to a threat of a sweep from the administration. We decided we would go through with the plan that night, no matter what. Our numbers were small — only 46 as opposed to the spontaneous ’68 occupation when hundreds flooded Hamilton. But we had been training and we were tightly organized. Better fewer, but better.
We had one comrade hide in a janitor’s closet for hours and after midnight, when the Hall was already closed, they ran down to let the rest of us into the building. At the same time, on the other side of the campus, a smaller crew staged a feint to distract and confuse public safety. While public safety was thinned out, the Hind’s Hall 46 invaded the building and the camera team immediately took care of all the security cameras.
After 9pm on 30 April, the NYPD besieged Harlem, locked down the entirety of Columbia’s campus, swept the Gaza solidarity encampment, and raided Hind’s Hall. A military-grade Bearcat was used during the raid — pigs entered the building’s second story with guns drawn, and a shot was fired. The pigs threw stun grenades at those of us defending the barricades, we were badly beaten with fists and sticks. Bones were broken, protestors were thrown down flights of stairs, and journalists were locked inside the Pulitzer building so nobody could see what the pigs did to us.
MOTHER COUNTRY RADICALS
“Have you grasped the significance of the backlash? It has stung the fascist. The people are in foment, all of them, of all persuasion. They don’t dig midnight or dawn raiding parties, bullets with steel jackets, cowardly pigs perched upon their roofs, the same gases manufactured for use against the Vietnamese Liberators blowing back into their faces: Repression. Do you see the effect it has on the uncommitted? Comrade, repression exposes. By drawing violence from the beast, the vanguard party is demonstrating for the world to examine just exactly what terms their rule is predicated on — their power to organize violence, our acquiescence.”
— Blood in My Eye, Jonathan Jackson in a letter to George Jackson
Following the raid of Hind’s Hall, the NYPD swept all the other NYC campuses in less than a week. Many liberals blamed us for the police violence, negating the fact that violence is the only language the pigs know. There was much debate and naysaying around the militancy of Hind’s Hall. A common refrain was: “Oh, all Hind’s Hall did was get people hurt and get everyone swept! And it didn’t even win divestment!”
I will settle the score now and say that a substantial portion of the partisans who took Hind’s Hall knew for a fact that the seizure of a building would not exert enough pressure to win divestment, and neither would continuing to camp on the lawn. With the threat of a sweep looming over our heads, we knew what we had to do regardless of whether it would end in an immediate win. The demand of divestment was not the sole motivating force of the action — our vision and strategy were more expansive than this. Hind’s Hall was an attempt to move outside the bounds of listing demands and into a terrain of direct confrontation with the state committing a holocaust — one of many in Amerika’s sordid history. The radical faction wanted to raise the ceiling of militancy in the movement as a whole and reveal to the world that the question of Palestinian national liberation had brought the reality of anti-imperialist class war to the heart of the metropole.
Our enemy — whose front line is the NYPD — perceives this as a violent struggle to protect their status quo at all costs, and they will use any means at their disposal to do it. And so, when enough force was exerted onto the institution, they were forced to reveal the iron fist inside their velvet glove. The tanks came rolling down Amsterdam Avenue, and the militarized pigs were deployed on the Amerikan Ivy League youth, the very people who are supposed to be training to keep this machine running.
The morning after 30 April, Rebecca Weiner — the head of NYPD counterterrorism and their “Tel Aviv” office, also a Columbia professor — spoke at a press conference about how she was responsible for orchestrating the militarized raid. Her involvement laid bare the lethal web that connects Columbia, the NYPD, and the zionist entity. It proved that Columbia is not just economically invested in imperialism — its complicity runs much deeper than mere economic transaction. Columbia also serves as its own factory of racist state violence and is home to one of its chief stewards in post-9/11 NYC.
Comrade, repression exposes.
It is the duty of the radical to sharpen contradictions, to make it impossible to deny the contours of our situation, to expose the violent machinations of the imperial state in all of its brutal intensity, and to do it here, in the guts of Babylon. The struggle being waged by the resistance in the periphery is existential. It is a war for the future of humanity itself. Our resistance here in the core is an extension of that struggle, no matter how small or relatively underdeveloped it is. And it is to the Palestinian resistance that we owe our ability to mobilize here in a way unseen since the anti-imperialist movement of the late 1960s.
Hind’s Hall and the contradictions it exposed were registered by the masses in Yemen, who have shown us all what solidarity looks like through their unwavering, militant fidelity to the people of Gaza. At a weekly million-person popular demonstration in Sanaa, they held massive banners with images of the liberation of Hind’s Hall and the NYPD tanks on Amsterdam Avenue. Written on one of these Yemeni banners was a quote from Che Guevara: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”
