protest

By April 25, the confrontation at Columbia University had become a two-sided spectacle. As the Gaza Solidarity Encampment entered its second week on the lawns inside campus, a large pro-Israel counter-rally gathered on Broadway outside the university’s gates — filling the street with Israeli and American flags under the watch of the NYPD. Seen from above, the scale of the counter-rally was unmistakable. The crowd stretched down Broadway from the university’s entrance, hemmed in by the stone and brick facades of Morningside Heights....

One week after the first mass arrests on Columbia’s campus, the protest had drawn the attention of the most powerful figure in the House of Representatives. On April 24, Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Morningside Heights and held a press conference on the steps of Low Library — just yards from the encampment he came to condemn. Johnson, flanked by Republican members of Congress, called on President Shafik to resign and suggested that the National Guard could be called in to restore order if the university could not....

While the Gaza Solidarity Encampment held its ground on Columbia’s lawns, the protest movement was spilling into the streets of Morningside Heights. Marchers carried their demands past the university’s perimeter, stopping outside Pulitzer Hall — home of the Columbia Journalism School — to display a banner aimed not at the university but at a different institution entirely. The banner read: “33,000+ Killed / 14,000+ Children / 450+ HCWs / 7 Months of Complicity from the American Med....

Less than 24 hours after the NYPD cleared the original Gaza Solidarity Encampment and arrested more than 100 students, Columbia protesters had already reoccupied the lawn in front of Butler Library. By dusk on April 19, the new encampment on West Butler Lawn was fully established. A large banner reading “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” stretched across its center, flanked by Palestinian flags. Handmade signs reading “Join Us,” “Stop Bombing,” and calls for the university to divest from companies tied to the war in Gaza were laid across the grass....

A column of NYPD officers marches across the intersection of Broadway and West 116th Street, directly outside Columbia University’s main gates, on the afternoon of April 18, 2024. Metal crowd-control barricades line the perimeter as onlookers, students, and members of the press watch from the sidewalk near Miller Theatre and the steps leading up to campus. Hundreds of students mass on the lawn in front of Butler Library earlier that day, the names of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and others inscribed on the facade above them....