This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.
“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 April 30, 2024—the 56th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia University mass arrests—the NYPD besieged Morningside Heights, 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 the conjuncture falls squarely on the people who took 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 or the players who made the action happen, thus they often got the basic facts of the situation 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 the perspective of this radical faction.
The character of 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?
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 correct for a portion of the encampment, it is not the whole story, and it is certainly not true of the minority group inside of the camp that initiated the Student Intifada and maintained influence over the politics and praxis of the action 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 benign hippies braiding friendship bracelets in the grass.
In a similar vein, there was a near constant gesturing towards our “right” to free speech and peaceful assembly without any acknowledgement of the fact that the farce we call “constitutional rights” is the foundation of the genocidal regime that brought us onto Butler Lawn in the first place. In the process of attempting to legitimize our resistance through this civil liberties framework, we were subordinated to the very logic of the ruling class that we seek to overthrow. The state repression of our movement is not hypocritical, and this empire is not bumbling. The machine is running exactly how it was built to run. When the pigs showed up with military grade bearcats and stun grenades, they made clear that these so-called rights are merely privileges awarded to those who want to play ball with empire—the humanity of the people of Palestine and their resistance makes this game impossible.
There is a belief that these narrative strategies, strategies that are fundamentally dishonest, 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, this dishonesty offered us no safety. The armed agents of the state made no distinctions between us, they treated everyone on Butler Lawn as enemies in a war against their genocidal authority and they were correct to do so. Our demand for divestment undermines US hegemony and its military apparatus, there is nothing peaceful about this regardless of our rhetoric or what tactics individuals choose to participate in. It is of no benefit to us to lie about the terrain on which we are fighting by papering over the stakes with defanged language. The enemy has a clear understanding of what they would lose if we were to win, so, what’s our excuse? I say none of this to promote recklessness that would do unnecessary harm to the movement, but our analysis must be unflinching in order to meet this moment. To be as radical as reality itself requires 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 and 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. This division between peaceful insider and dangerous outsider became central to our criminal cases after we were raided at Hind’s Hall. Those of us who aren’t students were framed as violent, unhinged terrorists who invaded the protest and brainwashed the otherwise peaceful student activists. The state deemed the “outsiders” criminals, and the “insiders” innocent—but in actuality we were a single body made equal by our complicity in this holocaust as US residents and, most importantly, we were unified in our resistance against this complicity.
Any recourse to legality or peace was meant to win over the moderates who belly ache over free speech and 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 small portion of them have been won over to our side, but we do not bow to the moderate line or play by their rules. When it comes to the question of US imperialism, there can be no compromises.
These attempts to sanitize the revolutionary political will at the heart of the Student Intifada constitute the culture of liberal counterinsurgency. This opportunism is the water we swim in. Not the exception, but the rule.
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 .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 assume that the other 99.34% would reveal an unfathomable level of complicity 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 responses to the encampments and Hind’s Hall were so violent and militarized. They ordered a standing army to attack us because our demand undermines the foundation of the institution itself, not because they are simply mean and unfair. While 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 US empire, 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 US imperialism and the Zionist settler-colonial client state is a revolutionary desire couched in a seemingly reformist demand. In order to pursue this political objective, one that is worthy of every ounce of our effort and tenacity, we would need to shift our political orientation from one of mere institutional reform to one of revolutionary upheaval.
As an apparatus of the state, the university answers to only two things: capital and organized force from below, most of which is classified as violent by settler-colonial legality. 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. 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. Above board action that appeals to the morality of the state is incapable of stopping a 13.6-billion-dollar war profiteering endowment in its tracks. Columbia University is an elite socio-cultural appendage of the USA 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.
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 organizations, 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 US empire, then we must also divest from the lies that they sell us.
So much of the work that is classified as “leftist” now is predicated on the hyper-visibility and commodification of the individual. This phenomenon is intimately connected to the professionalization of the left through the NGO sphere and the proliferation of armchair Marxist public intellectuals. More than anything, this is a liability. It exposes us to heightened surveillance, network mapping and repression from the police state that we seek to dismantle. The task is to become comfortable with being one of the many, swimming amongst the people like a fish in the sea. Not to borough under, not yet, but to blend—to hide in plain sight. This runs contrary to every habit instilled and beaten into us and to every financial incentive associated with the liberal-left, it problematizes our use of the internet and the impulse to share obsessively. On this front, our exit must be total if we are to survive.
A shift away from the need to be perceived as individuals will change our tactics and our engagement with the creation and dissemination of propaganda—it will deepen our ties to collective organizing and help sow the seeds for party formations. Our engagement with more high-risk activity can shift away from spectacular one-off actions and into sustained long-term resistance. Through this practice we can build out capacity and infrastructure. But so much of these long-term visions and the success of the Student Intifada hinges on an exit from this cult of visibility.
If we are to continue on the trajectory laid out before us and carry this momentum into sustained struggle, we will need to undergo deep cultural transformation that goes against the grain of our western subjectivity. 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.
FROM NEGOTIATION TO ESCALATION: THE SEIZURE OF HAMILTON HALL
The campus was on strict lockdown and anyone without a CUID couldn’t enter or exit. There was no sex, no drugs and no taking photos without each other’s consent, we were encouraged to cover our faces. During the days 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 Humboldt, CA or Cop City or Basel Al-Araj from Al-Walaja were suddenly saturated in the politics from these regions. The radical partisans took control of political education—teach-ins about the revolutionary struggle of the Korean people, Leila Khaled and how to build barricades took place in between calls to prayer.
Day in and day out, the administration dragged a representative from the camp into hours long negotiating meetings where they would give him the run around and offer bread crumb concessions to pacify the unruly mass festering on their lawn. This representative 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 entirety of the 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 reactionary fearmongering 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 Israel could be won through conversations with power and peaceful means alone.
The encampment was not threatening enough on its own to force the hand of the administration but after the first round of mass arrests and the 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 tents, in basements, under churches, in empty offices and sunken gardens. The plan: seize Hamilton Hall. Just like ’68 except this time, a surgical operation planned down to the minute. We would not be spontaneous, we would be disciplined cadre.
Negotiations continued to go nowhere. Columbia attempted to fake us out with a loose threat to call in the National Guard. A group of three freshmen asked me what Kent State was. I told them, they were frightened but said they would make their own sling shots out of sticks. The camp didn’t move an inch. On multiple occasions false alarms about imminent police raids spread through the camp. The rads with the most experience demanded that everyone remain calm. Nobody moved an inch.
At the nightly camp wide meetings, young students began to demand transparency and accountability about the negotiation process. They were dissatisfied with what we all understood as attempts at containment from the clique who was negotiating on everyone’s behalf behind closed doors. The radical partisans continued to plan. We smuggled in crow bars, chain, angle grinders, bolt cutters, hammers. Pockets of inexperienced protestors got curious about the possibility of taking a building. We started gathering our numbers inside the camp. A Barnard grad made an announcement that we needed to break open the gates and let all of Harlem inside, she was promptly recruited.
As time wore on, the culture of the entire encampment shifted away from one of compromise and negotiation to one of resolve and militancy. 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. We did multiple undercover passes of the inside of Hamilton and the tunnels that ran 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.
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 them relentlessly and fought hard for unity because it was important to us that our militancy was not articulated as 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 1968 occupation when hundreds flooded Hamilton.
We had one comrade hide in a janitors closet for hours and after midnight, when the building was already closed, they ran down to let the rest of us into the building. At the same time and on the other side of the campus, we staged a faint to distract and confuse public safety and thin them out. All 46 of us invaded the building and the camera team covered all the security cameras immediately.
After 9pm on April 30 the NYPD besieged Morningside Heights, 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 onto the second story with guns drawn and a shot was fired. Those of us defending the barricades had stun grenades thrown at us and were badly beaten with fists and sticks. Bones were broken, protestors were thrown down stairs and journalists were locked inside the Pulitzer building so nobody would see what they did to us.