Palestine is the Vanguard for Our Liberation: Insights from the Students’ Intifada at Columbia University

Abstract

This essay, written by members and friends of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Palestine solidarity group founded at Columbia in November 2023—brings forth an analysis of our movement. We begin by describing the steps that led to CUAD’s formation, and then its historical continuity with Columbia’s legacy of student activism. We discuss our approach to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the research that informs our demands, and two of our methods for accomplishing them: an encampment and building occupation. By contextualizing ourselves in Columbia’s student protest history, we hope to explain the lessons we have learned about the content and form of struggle. By explaining our demands, we hope to focus attention to our points of unity, often overlooked or misunderstood, even by our supporters. Finally, by describing our own experience of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and Hind’s Hall occupation, we hope to situate the protests for which most readers know us in our own political, strategic, and practical framework. We analyze our movement through the principal lens of anti-imperialism, while situating ourselves in the context of the US imperialist core, from which we remain auxiliary to the liberation movement in Palestine.