Honouring one year of courage: The world order students refuse to inherit

It was 4am at Columbia University’s Morningside campus this time last year, the sky above mostly veiled and the grass jeweling under receding campus lamplights. The trees stood stiff and dark, their branches like ribs cracked open to expose nothing at all. 

Over sixty students had grabbed seventy green tents, rolled tight and uniform, and tucked them into bundles that sagged in their arms. With little but their backpacks and faith, they marched straight towards East Butler Lawn. They felt compelled to move not through the confidence of victory but the soundless screams of moral reckoning. Come sunrise, this would only mark the beginning of the longest and most painstaking road there ever was. 

While the students chanted below banners of Palestinian liberation, former President Minouche Shafik walked the marbled corridors of Capitol Hill, pulled into Congress to answer for accusations of antisemitism within her university walls.

Many who thought themselves wise in the ways of the world already had their fair share of input by April, “Nothing will ever change, and some of these demands are just too unrealistic,” I’d heard time and again.

Our students still wondered. They didn’t have much time to talk. They were daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Still, they told the hopeless to hold out. Because what else is the act of wonder but a liberation practice? One that asks: what inevitably becomes of each of us beyond our degrees, suppers and paychecks, if deprived of the God-given right to imagine more? Or to cling to the audacity of love in a world full of ill will?

By April 18, as students held out on East Butler lawn, I remember today how over a hundred of my peers were manhandled and persecuted; dragged by their forearms and heels in a purely vile power-show by riot-clad N.Y.P.D officers. 

It was the great higher-education irony: universities designed and sponsored to churn out brilliance by the barrel are yet so very shocked when those barrels break free, roll over and decide to think for themselves.

But the masses of students were always right to fight racial segregation in the 1950s. In 1968, they too, were right to oppose the American war-for-profit system that rendered human lives expendable. They were right on April 17, 2024. And they are right, right now. The students protesting bloodshed are always right; to bruise, cry and question how the value of a human life could possibly be diminished to the colour or origin of one’s skin.

Columbia’s arrests were only the opening act. Weekly correspondences came with a follow-up of threats promising the clatter of national guards’ boots on campus. Columbia was quaking, utterly terrified it seemed, of a generation far more interested in social justice and revolution than graduation.

Unaware of their own magnitude, Columbia’s students had sliced open the can of lies that prop and blanket institutional prestige – many banking off Israel’s military onslaught and war crimes across Palestine. 

NYU’s students joined the fight in no time, turning Washington Square Park into a stomping ground for dissent before claiming Gould Plaza as their Liberated Zone — a defiant rejection of capital and a space that was all theirs. Across the boroughs, CUNY campuses erupted into constellations of resistance with Palestine placards cleaving the air. 

As April bled into May, the movement had burst free of its New York origins. 

Harvard’s ivory towers soon roared too with chants of transparency and divestment ricocheting off its storied walls. Inspired, UCLA, UC Berkeley’s Sprout Hall and the University of San Francisco, California students erected their own people’s university beneath sprawling oaks. Yale, a few hours later, blocked the streets at College and Grove. The intersection was clogged with bodies. Students remember how nothing moved. Not the cars. Not the time. Not the world.

By May 6, over 140 U.S. college campuses were burning with outrage. 

No longer confined to the Ivy League or the sunlit quads of American campuses, student marches pounded the streets of global universities – from Turkey’s Bogazici University to Paris’ Sorbonne, the students’ message was universal: “Reject Normalisation.”

Campus sit-ins took place, in their hundreds, and across historically-charged halls where tired voices crackled with insurmountable fury and grief through megaphones. The students yelled in magnetic anthems, ones that screamed of anti-war, “Un-American” disobedience, and a vigour that still echoes across continents and historic dimensions. 

With the inconceivable scale of the calamity in Gaza akin to over two atomic detonations, the only ever righteous retort was disruption. It was unfiltered rage personified, disgust unchained, and a space that held all things love and wonder at its core. 

Thousands of students swarmed across universities in Bangladesh, demanding justice for the over 60,000 Palestinian martyrs last May. By July, it was students, again, who had successfully masterminded a nationwide revolt, toppling their Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, the longest-serving leader of the South Asian country.

Just a few weeks ago, thousands more Bangladeshi’s skipped class to take to the streets of Dhaka and call for a permanent end to Israel’s relentless carnage, after joining a global strike in solidarity with Palestine. 

The suspensions and arrests came swiftly, though — over 3,100 made across American campuses, in less than a week. No one was exempt. Not professors, graduate students, undergraduates or researchers. Many got dragged away like illegal fugitives, with their wrists strangled in plastic zip-ties and their cries for justice devoured by the steel coldness of police-state vans.

But the nylon tents never fell. They only ever multiplied, stretching and ascending with each rising sun.

Under President Trump’s leadership, officers are rewarded and praised for catching as many “national security threats” as possible. Of course, that would be left to their natural instincts, likely assessed with the same level of care that sparked the Muslim Ban discussions.

It’s a new world order where Western domestic policy rationale stretches thinner by the day; where student abductions, total halts to open discourse, and the systematic “catch and revoke” of, thus far, over 800 student visas are all manifestations of President Trump’s package deal from day one.

Today, I think of Mahmoud Khalil, only 30 years old, who was snatched by plain-clothed and warrantless Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers within the lobby of his Columbia-allocated housing, just over a month ago. A home Mahmoud shared with his pregnant wife, Noor, who will now bring her child into a world prematurely made unlivable. The expected father, husband and friend has now spent over one month isolated,  awaiting his sentencing in a LaSalle Detention Centre in Jena, Louisiana. 

On the one-year commemoration of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, I remember too that the inboxes of Columbia’s administration sit heavy with Mahmoud, among many other vulnerable students’, unanswered cries for help. Emails sent just days before he was disappeared sit frozen in a digital gravity vault – explicitly outlining the administration’s shamefully unprofessional and morally depraved ways..

Just days ago, a friend of Mahmoud’s and Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, who, too, had sought housing protection from the only institution he was enrolled in, was handcuffed right outside a Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field office during what he thought was his naturalisation interview in Colchester, Vermont. 

Mohsen is a Palestinian-born legal U.S resident, who was just weeks away from graduating from Columbia’s School of General Studies with a degree in Philosophy.  A generous peer to all, even those who did not view his own people as equal. His kindness was so deeply felt and equally revolutionary. 

After ten years of waiting, Mohsen had naturally entered the USCIS room, sceptical but also buoyed by the potential thrill of what he assumed was the final step in his U.S citizenship process. Only to discover he was merely another name and a check off the Administration’s unconstitutionally poisonous scouting list.

Out of the 20 biggest immigration detention sites across the country, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi house 14 of the most inhumane lockdown hubs — instruments of bipartisan cruelty that only swell larger with each passing day under Trump’s iron grip.

In Massachusetts, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts University on a college visa, was met with the same fate as Mahmoud when I.C.E. agents, masked and brazen, ambushed her off a Boston street. No warrant or explanation. 

​​Since her arrest, from Louisiana’s southern rural I.C.E facility, where she was checked into alongside Mahmoud, Rumeysa outlined her conditions: A week without sunlight, a hijab removed without consent, barely sufficient meals, and irregular asthma treatments. A damning portrait of a site where man-made suffering is the modus operandi. 

As Trump’s deportation dragnet zeroes in on international students and scholars, including green card holders, employment-based visa holders, and just about anyone who dared fill out an immigration form, academics like postdoctoral fellow and Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri, who was seized mid-lecture at Georgetown, are neither spared. 

The liberation of thought and mere whispers of societal enlightenment to global tragedies, especially in Palestine, is now a foreign policy liability and federal offence on American soil —never mind students’ scholarship, civic contributions, or peaceful protests. 

Because a brilliance like theirs does not sit quietly while the world weeps, it becomes its own kind of threat. It is no longer a test, cloaked in policy, that assumes Americans have neither the wit nor the will to notice a burning world. Such pseudo-bylaws are now just a direct insult to American intelligence, firmly doubting their fervour for wokeness and outrage at mass extermination.

The details of the growing number of student visa revocations and unlawful detentions are easy enough to find online with the click of a button. By now, they’re seared into the public record. Every week adds another name and face to the list of stolen futures lost in the grind of a litany of hearings that mock due process, court filings devoid of any legitimate legal foundations, and undated memos belonging to a system that will inevitably collapse under its own contradictions.

But I would be remiss to dwell on them when I know deep in my bones, this would only add injury to these students’ incredibly ‘savage consciousness’, many of whom would no doubt be reminding you today even from within their prison cells and exiled homes: 

Look east, to Gaza, they’d say, where the living count their blessings in breaths; where the skies are always alight, never by stars or the celestial wonder of nature, but by the red glow of unrelenting American-born missile flashes raining down on the millions without pause. Look east to Gaza, where over 350,000 Palestinians are now classified into Phase 5 Famine, where no sustenance of life has entered for 45 days straight. Look east to Gaza, they’d tell you, where human beings just want to live. 

“And so too do we believe it is the honour of our lives to struggle for this cause of Palestinian liberation,” Mahmoud dictated to his lawyer over the phone from his Louisiana detention cell, “History will redeem us.”

Many like Mahmoud wanted simply enough to grieve the full extent of their sadness and  guard with sacred resolve the infinite worth of each and every Palestinian life. They were catapulted as warriors and heroes in the process. To call a group of people strong or brave sounds loving, but, if in reality they feel like horses being trailed to death and simultaneously praised for their speed and elegance, then there exists a cruelty to it.

Students globally have inherited the mad ruins of a world with a clarity and passion that should absolutely shame the powerful. They see the current world older as nothing more than a spiralling dumpster fire, but still have enough gut to will a new one into existence – even as their non-refundable “fortresses of defense” have abandoned them outright, driving them instead straight down to their ultimate betrayal. And even when every single odd has long been stacked against them. 

I’m reminded of Barnard student and my dear friend, Maryam Iqbal’s words. She, and students like her, who teach me where the strength of man and woman really stems from, what takes many a lifetime, sometimes never, to realise in motion.

“Palestine has always been my north star,” Maryam wrote to me, “People ask why we’ve sacrificed our education, careers and reputations. But my question is: how can we not?”

Today marks one year since Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began —and the administration’s response is a mockery: “Fun & Games on the Lawn,” students’ inboxes stacked, paired with a closing ceremony for the annual Columbia Food Drive. A perfectly fitting reflection of the administration’s loss of the plot entirely.

Because whenever the students’ tears come, hot and endless, we must always bear in mind that they are for us too; for the emotionally growing child becoming an adult too soon and for the disturbing wave of cyber attacks, digital onslaught and ruthless harassment entering their worlds without so much as even the bare decency to knock first. 

As for the future of the movement, students will not go anywhere. Wherever one of them is illegally marshalled off to, the fire in another’s veins will only multiply with greater and greater precision. 

Because for all those who believe that sanity in a moment of genocide will keep any one of us safe, there are a hundred more “outside agitators” that could not think of anything more existentially repulsive.