It has been a year since the students at Columbia University pitched their tents and refused to be silent in the face of Israel's genocide in Gaza. A year since their chants for a free Palestine rang out across the campus, cutting through the silence of institutional complicity.
On this first anniversary of the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment - as students continue to face surveillance, suspension and arrest for speaking out - I write not only as a witness but as someone who has lived through this kind of repression before.
In 1987, I was a student at California State University, Long Beach, when the Reagan administration came after me. My only crime? Believing in the right of Palestinians to live free from foreign military occupation, exile and erasure.
For my thoughts, for my words, I was arrested.
I became one of the Los Angeles Eight - a group of seven Palestinian immigrants and one Kenyan, whose case became a landmark fight against the use of immigration law to suppress political speech. Our deportation case dragged on for 20 years, across four presidencies, as part of a broader effort to criminalise our dissent and activism.
They tried to silence us. They failed. And now, together, we rise again.
Today, I see the same tactics replayed under a new name, beneath different skies, but with the same cold hand of repression.
The Trump-era playbook of criminalising dissent has metastasised - empowering university administrators and city police to brutalise, suspend, arrest and exile students who dare to speak the truth about Palestine.
But these tactics are not new. They are merely the latest mask worn by an old and ugly system. The same racist, supremacist logic that gave rise to Nazism, colonialism, fascism, antisemitism and Zionism is alive in today's crackdowns.
It is a logic that insists power must be preserved at any cost, that those who resist must be silenced, and that entire peoples can be demonised, dispossessed and disappeared to maintain control and profit.
At Columbia, Palestinian student organisers like Mahmoud Khalil stood bravely against this machine. For that, they were handcuffed. Vilified. Suspended. Made into symbols by a system desperate to crush a movement it cannot contain.
The police in riot gear, the administrators issuing vague statements about safety, and the media spreading smears about antisemitism are all playing roles in a familiar drama. The targets change, the slogans evolve, but the foundation remains: the fear of the other, the drive to dominate, the willingness to sacrifice justice for power.
I see in Khalil the fire we carried in the 1980s, the same clarity that justice is not given by the oppressor but seized by the oppressed.
I remember the fear, the isolation, the attempts to paint us as threats, as radicals, as outsiders. But I also remember the love. The solidarity. The rallies and fundraisers, the letters and calls, the murals and music that said to us: you are not alone.
Just as the LA Eight case became a flashpoint in a broader struggle for Palestinian rights, the Columbia encampment ignited a wave of campus resistance to Israel's genocide in Gaza.
It marked the start of a student intifada - an uprising against genocide, complicity and the repression of pro-Palestine voices - that spread rapidly across universities in the US and around the world as students raised tents, occupied buildings and refused to be silent.
It was more than a protest - it was a declaration: a refusal to allow the machinery of genocide to grind on without resistance, an insistence that the blood of children in Gaza, the cries of refugees in the camps, the hopes of students in exile, matter more than donor cheques and diplomatic theatre.
It is also a rebuke to a world order built on selective humanity, where human rights are championed only when they serve empire, and justice is suspended whenever it challenges power.
These students are doing more than raising awareness - they are dismantling the myth that Palestine is a marginal issue. They are connecting the dots between Gaza and Ferguson, between refugee camps and ICE detention centres, between militarised policing on US campuses and the weapons tested on the bodies of Palestinians.
This is why the encampment resonates globally.
In South Africa, Chile, Lebanon, Ireland - and in refugee camps and exile communities - people watched the Columbia students and saw themselves.
They saw a generation no longer willing to accept silence. They saw courage that transcends borders. They saw that the student movement is not just about university policy but about refusing to let education serve empire. It is about reclaiming our institutions, our spaces, our futures.
This year, 17 April marks more than one anniversary.
As people reflect on the first anniversary of the Columbia encampment, Palestinians and their supporters around the world are also observing Palestinian Prisoners' Day - a day of resistance and remembrance for the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, many without charge or trial.
It is a day that exposes the machinery of colonial repression in its rawest form: the criminalisation of existence, the warehousing of resistance.
At the same time, crackdowns on student organising across the West have intensified - a chilling reminder of how resistance continues to be met with repression, both in Palestine and on university campuses.
From the cellblocks of Ashkelon to the campus lawns of Columbia, the message is the same: the fight for Palestine is a fight for freedom - freedom from walls, cages, checkpoints and systems designed to crush the will of a people.
The student tents symbolised both the steel bars of occupation and the unbreakable spirit of those who refuse to be caged. To those students, I say: you are walking a path paved by generations of resistance.
The weight you carry is not yours alone. It is shared by millions across the world who see in your tents a spark of dignity, who see in your arrests a badge of honour, who see in your struggle the beating heart of a global movement.
Columbia's legacy of student activism spans the 1968 anti-war and civil rights protests to the 1980s campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa. This encampment consciously tapped into that lineage, linking Palestinian liberation to a broader arc of anti-imperialist and anti-racist student resistance.
You are not starting something new - you are continuing something powerful. And that continuity gives strength.
Yes, they will try to isolate you. Yes, they will slander you. Yes, they will send their riot cops and level their legal threats. But if our case taught me anything, it is this: they can delay justice but they cannot defeat it.
We fought for 20 years. And we won.
And you, too, will win. Khalil will be free. The encampments will rise again. And Palestine will be free.
This movement is not a fleeting moment - it is a gathering wave. It is anchored in truth, driven by solidarity, sustained by an unbreakable faith in justice.
The tents may have come down and the headlines faded, but the students' courage has redrawn the moral compass of a nation.
These academic institutions were never meant to nurture liberation. They were built by a system designed to produce conformity - factories to manufacture obedience, not thought.
They train students to fit the needs of markets, not the needs of humanity. To follow, not to question. To obey, not to imagine. But when students rose - when they refused to be inhuman, when they refused to be complicit in the horrors unfolding in Palestine and Gaza - the illusion cracked.
The walls shook. And the institutions, built to control, panicked. Power panicked. It tried to reclaim the arena, to roll history backwards.
But history does not go back.
The movement for justice is here to stay. It will march forward - because the future belongs to the young. And it will be forged by their hands, shaped by their values, and lifted by their unshakable belief in freedom.
And here is the truth the powerful fear most: when we stay together, when we remain steadfast, when we refuse to be afraid and refuse to stand down - that is how we win.
That is how we overcome the forces of repression. Not with compromise, but with clarity. Not with silence, but with song. Not with retreat, but with relentless, collective defiance.
History will not mark this moment by the panic it stirred in boardrooms and presidential offices but by the hope it sparked in classrooms, city streets and occupied homelands.
From Columbia to California, from the rubble of Gaza to the avenues of New York, the flame is still alive.
It cannot be extinguished. It will not be extinguished. Because it is the fire of liberation - and it is lighting the way forward.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.