As three former 1980s student leaders at Columbia University, we applaud the courage and conviction of Palestine solidarity student activists in the eye of the storm. Despite the recent arrest of more than 100 protesters, they insist: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”
We defend their right to protest and affirm the righteousness of their demands: an end to Israel’s genocidal war against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and to the complicity of the US government and institutions in its apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The international court of justice’s recent ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians makes divestment a legal, not just ethical, obligation.
Young people are once again the conscience of the nation and the world. The current Columbia protests have been compared to those that shut down the campus in 1968 to protest against the Vietnam war. But there is another campus movement that is more recent and relevant.
In 1985, hundreds of Columbia students, led by the four-year-old Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), initiated a blockade of Hamilton Hall in the center of campus – the same hall peacefully occupied and renamed by students on Tuesday.
The protest lasted for three weeks, drawing worldwide support. The administration photographed, videotaped and threatened student activists with disciplinary charges and expulsion. Five months later, after years of dragging its feet, the university divested from companies implicated in apartheid South Africa.
In 2013 and 2014 a successful campaign by the Columbia Prison Divest students forced the university to divest from the private prison industry. Underlining the linkages of struggles, Students Against Mass Incarceration (Sami) sought the advice of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The three of us had very special connections to the struggle in 1985 and to the struggle against Israeli apartheid today. Barbara was a leader of CFSA from 1981 to 1984, along with Black Student Union leader, Danny Armstrong.
Tanaquil was a steering committee member of CFSA (which became the Coalition for a Free Southern Africa to call attention to other liberation struggles in the region, specifically Namibia) and one of the most prominent leaders of the movement during the blockade, along with Rob Jones, Whitney Tymas, Tony Glover and others.
Omar was a Palestinian student activist on campus at the time, supporting the Free South Africa Movement and highlighting striking similarities between the struggles in South Africa and Palestine to dismantle settler-colonialism and apartheid. Omar was deeply inspired by the divestment demand as a tactic to pressure a duplicitous and complicit institution. He later co-founded the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calling for ending international state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians. Both Barbara and Tanaquil have continued to support justice in Palestine over the past four decades. Barbara went on an Indigenous Women of Color Feminist delegation to Palestine in 2011.
From 1968 to the 1980s to 2024, the often intersecting issues of war, racism and colonialism, took center stage in Columbia justice movements, reflecting larger campus and international struggles raging at the time. Each of these periods was unique, but parallels are clear. One key recurring question is: who rules the university? The answer seems to be corporate trustees and wealthy alumni, rather than those who make the university run each day: students, workers and faculty. These protests also force another key question: what is the relationship of the university to its surrounding community and the world? Then and now, student protests were political bridges linking the local to the global.
The 1968 protest, an extension of the movement against the Vietnam war, was triggered by Columbia’s plans to build a gym in Harlem that excludes Black Harlem residents. In 1985, student blockaders directly supported Harlem tenants fighting eviction by Columbia. CFSA supported and was supported by the Harlem community and several unions, including district 65, which represented Columbia workers. Today, students are making links to the prison abolition movement, climate justice, and the plight of migrants and immigrants across the globe.
In the early 80s, in the wake of the heroic Soweto uprising in South Africa and the massacre by apartheid forces, there was a global resurgence of campus anti-apartheid movements. Columbia protests then exposed the paper-thin commitments of universities to democratic decision making. Faculty governance, academic freedom and students’ right to free expression were exposed as bogus in both the 80s and today.
In 1983, the university senate voted unanimously to divest from South Africa after a resolution by Ransby, then a student senator. The trustees balked. It was OK for faculty and students to weigh in on issues of minor importance, but investment policy was off-limits. The administration refused to respect the vote and instead put together a committee to study the issue, an obvious stall tactic. The flagrant disregard of democratic principles drove even faculty and students who had not fully supported divestment to join the protest ranks.
Columbia’s suspension last year of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) sparked the growth of the already existing divestment coalition, which now coordinates the encampment. Divestment from genocide and apartheid has become the rallying call of this student-led movement at Columbia and nationwide.
Unlike the Palestine solidarity activists today, CFSA did not have a full-fledged encampment – nor the advent of social media. Instead, it built a symbolic shantytown on campus resembling the subpar housing of most Black South Africans under apartheid. There were rallies, teach-ins and debates that fired up the campus. The four-yearcampaign culminated in the blockade, which at its height included nearly 2,000 people, with some faculty.
Celebrities – from poet Audre Lorde, and Pete Seeger, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu –showed up to express support. Inspired by the hunger strike of the IRA leader Bobby Sands, which drew world attention to the plight of Catholics in the north of Ireland, a dozen or so Columbia students went on a hunger strike for divestment. Then the African National Congress (ANC) president, Oliver Tambo, praised the Columbia students for their solidarity and sacrifice.
The 1980s Columbia protests against South African apartheid and the 2024 encampment against the Gaza genocide have many parallels, but they also have intersections. Many Black students came to the anti-apartheid struggle because apartheid was such a flagrant example of structural racism. Black students in South Africa were relegated to substandard schools in remote areas called Bantustans (homelands). Black South Africans had to carry special passes (comparable to Israel’s color-coded ID cards used to discriminate against Palestinians today), and society was racially segregated.
Many student leaders in the US at the time learned about Palestine from ANC leaders living in exile whom we invited to speak. Cognizant of the partnership between the Israeli and South African apartheid regimes, students wore keffiyehs in solidarity, and “Free Palestine”, and “Zionism equals Apartheid”, were two of the banners displayed at the blockade.
CFSA’s critique of the Israeli policies had obviously nothing to do with animus for Jewish people. Many Jewish activists were in our movement, as are in the forefront of the protests today, reiterating that criticizing Israel or Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As Omar repeatedly says: “There is nothing Jewish about occupation, ethnic cleansing, siege, apartheid or genocide.” Not all Zionists are Jewish, and certainly not all Jewish people are Zionists. The Indigenous people of Palestine includes Muslims, Christians, Jewish people and others. Conflating opposition to apartheid Israel or its Zionist ideology with anti-Jewish racism or hate not only reduces Jewish people to a monolith, which is clearly antisemitic, but also implies that they are accountable for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
Then and now, the false narrative of creating “safety” for some students, implying that other students are an inherent threat because of their identity or their demands, has been a consistent trope used to exacerbate repression and securitization as a means to suppress calls for justice, making campuses far less safe.
Today, creative, fearless and selfless Palestine-solidarity students at Columbia and elsewhere are part of this bright history of speaking truth to power in a self-perceived ivory tower. Palestinians are not asking Columbia and other complicit institutions for charity. Omar insists: “We do not even expect their solidarity. But we demand an end to their shameful complicity. Do no harm, at the very least.”
Other than being inspired by the tactics of previous student struggles, Palestine solidarity activists today have learned from history that what seems impossible at a time of unspeakable pain and grief becomes possible through principled, strategic, inclusive and ethically consistent praxis. The three of us, despite our different roles, will always cherish that we were part of a righteous struggle that contributed to dismantling political apartheid in South Africa, triumphing against a seemingly invincible regime of oppression.
Struggle is on a continuum. Tactics are emulated, revised and molded into form for new struggles in new contexts. We learn lessons and draw inspiration across issues, generations, culture and geographic sites of resistance. Whether in Vietnam, South Africa or Palestine, and across the global south, people resisting Euro-American colonialism, settler-colonialism and neo-colonialism have always been the primary bodies in danger, the frontline victims of war and empire, as well as the racial capitalism and military industries that fuel both.
Student organizers then and now have been eloquent, principled and clear, and our/their actions and demands irreproachable. From our diverse yet intersecting experiences and from what we are witnessing today, the world ultimately listens. We shall overcome, and justice and emancipation shall prevail.
Barbara Ransby is professor, historian, writer and activist in Chicago
Tanaquil Jones is an educator living in Harlem, New York
Omar Barghouti is a founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, based in Palestine