On April 17, 2024, students at Columbia University established an encampment on their campus to protest Columbia’s treatment of the war in Gaza. A day later, NYPD was brought onto Columbia University Campus to disband the encampment, arresting students en masse and sparking a national (eventually international) movement of protest among university students. Since April, classes and commencements have been canceled, encampments continue to spread, and aggregate arrests number in the thousands across the world as students persist in calls for their schools to “divest” from Israel in light of the war in Gaza. The situation is complex and rapidly evolving; this explainer is by no means an exhaustive guide to all the nuances of this issue. As always, responsible readers are encouraged to do further research with this article as a starting point (the linked sources are a good next step). That said, below is a brief overview of the information needed to understand the protesters’ demands, the range of responses they have received, and the broader implications of the encampment movement on international treatment of the Israel-Hamas War. 

What …

… is the Israel-Hamas War?

Beginning with Hamas’ (the Islamist military and political authority governing the Gaza Strip) October 7th surprise attack on Israel, fighting in the Israel-Hamas war has occurred primarily in the dense urban environment of the Gaza Strip, with the Israeli government vowing to destroy Hamas and rescue the surviving Israeli hostages taken to Gaza on October 7th. The war has been characterized by brutal urban fighting, destructive bombing campaigns, and frequent civilian deaths, with around 36,000 deaths on the Palestinian side of the conflict many of them civilians. It is further estimated that around 2,000,000 Gazans have been displaced by the conflict. Additional factors such as food shortages in the region have contributed to fears that Israeli action in Gaza may amount to (or result in) genocide. As of May 20, 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has received applications for arrest warrants on the grounds of war crimes and crimes against humanity for top officials in the governments of Israel and Gaza. The Gaza Campus Protests are focused on critiquing Israeli action in Gaza.

… is Divestment?

At a basic level, the act of divesting involves selling privately held assets (stocks) in a particular sector or company. Typically, divestment would be decided upon by a school’s Board of Directors, which controls endowment allocations with the guidance of investment firms. Divestment often cannot occur immediately, even if assented to by the investing party, as many large-scale investments have a “lock-in” period in which the school is obligated to fulfill its investment for a set number of years. In the context of protests around the Israel-Hamas War, student demonstrators are advocating for their schools to not only make their investment portfolios public but also to immediately divest from assets that benefit the state of Israel and its military (weapons manufacturers contracted by Israel, for example); the sentiment is that the students do not want the university they attend to be financially supporting Israeli action in Gaza. 

Divestment is not a tactic novel to these student protests. In the past, students at UCLA in the 1960s protested the university’s ties to the Dow Chemical Company, contracted by the US military to produce napalm for the war in Vietnam. More recently, students at Cornell University pushed for the school’s divestment from fossil fuel companies, citing concerns about the university’s role in exacerbating climate change through its investment in unsustainable energy. 

“Divestment” as it relates to ther campus protests also exists within the context of a the international “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement, which seeks to impose economic pressure on Israel as a result of their treatment of the Palestinian people. 

… is an Encampment?

Encampment is a form of protest that involves pitching tents or other temporary shelters to occupy a particular area for the purpose of demonstration. In and of themselves, encampments are a nonviolent form of protest that typically rely on highly visible disruption (due to the “attention-grabbing” nature of a pitched encampment) to draw attention to or prevent what is being protested. In other instances, an encampment may be established as a means of physically obstructing a particular process (literally blocking something from happening by way of placing an encampment in the way), but this is largely not applicable to the current protestors considering the nature of the issue they are focused on. The majority of the Gaza campus protests have been peaceful, with most altercations occurring as a result of police intervention, except for UCLA, which saw violence break out between demonstrators and counter-protesters in April. 

Legally speaking, an encampment protest on university grounds is legal if it adheres to the school’s “Time, Place, and Manner” (TPM) code of conduct, established to ensure demonstrations do not cause undue harm or disruption in a manner that extends beyond first amendment protections. Due to their disruptive nature, encampment protests are generally not considered First Amendment-protected speech, and rather constitute a form of civil disobedience, the voluntary breaking of laws, typically with ready acceptance of the consequences as a form of protest. Common examples of civil disobedience include civil rights era sit-ins to protest lunch counter segregation or refusal to pay one’s taxes as a way to protest military spending. It is estimated that around 3,000 students across hundreds of encampments have been arrested in the United States alone, with additional encampments being established in the wake of Israel’s May 6 Rafah offensive in Gaza. Encampments have been established in the UK, Australia, and the Netherlands among other nations. Notably, some protests such as those at Columbia and UPenn have escalated beyond impermanent encampment structures, with some students occupying campus buildings as a form of demonstration. 

… has Been the Response to the Protests? 

The student encampment protests have received a range of responses both from the universities they attend and the larger global community. Some schools were somewhat receptive to hearing the demands of the protesters, with Brown being the first to reach an agreement with student protest leaders allowing them to make the case for divestment to the School’s Board of Directors. Several other universities such as Northwestern and Rutgers have reached agreements along a variety of conditions (Rutgers, for example, has agreed to fully fund the education of 10 students displaced by the war in Gaza, while other schools have simply agreed to grant amnesty to previously punished students), typically in exchange for the encampments being disbanded. The vast majority of schools have offered considerably more pushback to the protest movement, with many universities requesting external police presence on campus to help disband the encampments. Beyond arrest, students have been punished by universities themselves in a variety of ways, from suspension and mandatory leave to “reflection papers” at N.Y.U. Beyond individual punishment, various universities have responded to the disruption caused by the encampments more broadly, with Columbia making all classes virtual for the remainder of the school year and Columbia and USC canceling their commencement ceremonies. 

The campus protests have additionally received a variety of responses beyond the university setting, with prominent national figures such as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton, who is currently a professor at Columbia University, critiquing the protests. Criticisms of the protests range from deeming them intellectually irresponsible at best, due to a perceived myopathy in ignoring the role Hamas has played in escalating the crisis in Gaza, and blatantly antisemitic at worst, with many pointing to various slogans employed by the protesters as an indication that the movement is (intentionally or not) aimed more so at undermining the state of Israel and Jewish safety than aiding the Palestinian cause. Others have rallied behind the protesters, painting them as morally principled advocates even in the face of punishment, citing past student protest movements and growing concerns around genocide in Gaza stemming from ongoing International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court action against Israel as an indication that the concerns raised by the demonstrators ought be taken seriously.

… is Next for the Encampment Protests and the War in Gaza? 

As schools release their students for summer break, some students have vowed to continue their protests movements. On a broader scale, the attention generated by the protests has, in part, reinforced national attention on Israel’s action in Gaza and the U.S.’s role in supporting them in a manner that extends beyond the university setting heading into the coming Presidential election season. Recent Pew Research polling suggests that Americans are more likely to disapprove of than approve of President Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, with many respectively criticizing him for either doing too little to support Israel or not sufficiently pressuring the Israeli government to cease military action. Biden’s top Republican rival, Donald Trump, has taken a staunchly pro-Israel stance and criticizes his opponent for his lack of support for the Israeli government while rallying much of the conservative vote behind Israel. Israel’s movement into Rafah City in southern Gaza marks a continuation of the Israel-Hamas war which, alongside concerns of mass starvation across the region, has exacerbated international concerns around, and consequently protest against, Israeli action in the Gaza Strip.