A Love Letter to the Student Movement
Repression of the Palestine movement is now here, so what must be done? Four practical steps for the next phase.
Carrie Zaremba
In January, Gaza took its first tenuous breath of stillness in more than a year. It is a moment of clarity, a reminder that our work is far from done. For the student movement, this is a call to recalibrate and push forward. We cannot mistake temporary stillness for resolution, nor recognition for accomplishment. Nothing short of full liberation can be our goal.
By now, you know that universities have nothing to offer us but spectacle and scorn. The U.S. ruling class has spent decades perfecting its support of Zionism, with universities as central pipelines for research, propaganda and profit. For 467 days, while every university in Gaza was reduced to rubble and its hospitals were running out of room for the dead, U.S. higher education upheld these partnerships with military contractors, surveillance tech firms and Zionist think tanks disguised as cultural exchange programs.
The Student Intifada has not only exposed higher education’s entrenchment in the global military-industrial complex, but the lengths universities will go to repress threats to their blood money.
You spoke; they surveilled. You marched; they mobilized riot cops. You wrote boycott resolution drafts in camping tents; their administrators drafted emails warning trustees of learning disruptions.
You did not flinch.
There is danger that visibility might breed inertia, that temporary relief might be mistaken for resolution, that moments of pause will tempt us to confuse recognition with victory.
Recognition alone does not sustain movements. If anything, recognition often marks the beginning of a more insidious phase of repression. Universities and their backers know that student movements rarely dissolve in outright defeat; they erode under the weight of exhaustion, surveillance and pacifying incremental concessions.
After 15 months of rapid response organizing, fatigue is setting in. While students regroup and recover, Zionists remain unyielding, actively reshaping the political terrain to make future protests even more costly.
This escalation is not theoretical. At numerous campuses, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) members are facing disciplinary charges, surveillance and harassment. In the current academic year alone, SJP chapters have been suspended at the University of Michigan, UCLA, Brown, Rowan, George Mason, Tufts, the University of Georgia, Temple and the University of Illinois. This does not include schools that have outright barred the establishment of SJP or those that already banned SJP.
The question is not whether repression will continue, but how we will respond. Within our movement, necessary debates over goals, strategies and tactics persist. Repression is not waiting for our consensus. It is unfolding now, and our response must be immediate.
The recent abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian recent graduate of Columbia University and a lead encampment negotiator, marks a dangerous escalation and a warning. Khalil was snatched outside of his apartment on the eighth night of Ramadan, disappeared without a printed warrant, without a charge, without the bureaucratic courtesy of pretense. More than thirty-six hours later, he was transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a private ICE facility in Louisiana notorious for its rampant abuse of detainees. The White House claims that Khalil poses a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” for taking a staunch stance against genocide.
His arrest arrived just days after the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced its revocation of $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia as punishment for not cracking down hard enough on Palestine activism. Now colluding with federal law enforcement and immigration officials, the same campus who’s provost said they wouldn’t allow ICE on campus without a warrant during Trump’s first term–leading to some designating it a “sanctuary campus” – has pivoted from posturing to persecution. They will pretend they have no say as federal agencies turn the campus into a staging area for repression. This compliance is not an aberration but a calculated defense of its investments, its donors, and its role in upholding U.S. hegemony.
Repression here is not separate from the genocide in Gaza. The same Democrats and liberal Zionists who championed the genocide in Gaza now feign outrage over his detention, treating it as an isolated incident rather than a continuation of the repression he was fighting against. They will not fight for Mahmoud the way they should, just as they never fought for the students expelled, the workers fired, the organizations banned, or the Palestinians in Gaza suffocating under siege.
We must not fall into the trap of allowing the state to dictate the terms of our fight. Without continuous mass support for Mahmoud, without an unapologetic confrontation with the institutions that enabled his abduction, we risk a future where students and community members are dragged from their homes, disappeared into detention centers, and it won’t even make the news.
Divestment is essential, but it is the bare minimum. The structural realities of imperialism and Zionism within higher education demand more than symbolic gestures or fleeting victories. To dismantle and rebuild these spaces requires a coordinated, sustained and collective confrontation with the systems that universities uphold and profit from, which is a task that reaches far beyond the bounds of any single group or campus. The cease-fire is not a signal to pause, but an invitation to sharpen our organizing.
If our long-term task is nothing short of dismantling U.S. empire — and, with it, the imperial university — then what must be done? Here are a few immediate offerings:
1. Develop an Anti-Repression and Counter-Repression Strategy
We must anticipate, not just react. This means building legal defense funds, strengthening security culture and preparing for disciplinary and legal attacks. We must be as relentless in shaping our narrative as we are in defending it.
2. Support the Trials of Student Intifada Participants
From the CUNY 8 to the U-M Encampment 7, we must stand with those facing legal repercussions for organizing. In places like Pittsburgh, the police continue to escalate by pressing new charges from actions in June 2024. Supporting our comrades through legal defense funds, court solidarity actions and sustained public pressure is crucial.
3. Investigative Research
Dig into the financial and administrative connections between your university and imperialism. Take a page from UCLA SJP’s repression report and file Freedom of Information Act requests to find out how much your local police department spends to quell your encampments. During the 1968 Columbia University uprising, a group of researchers from the North American Congress on Latin America produced the pamphlet “Who Rules Columbia?” The team, including Columbia graduate student Michael Klare, sifted through public records, financial magazines and Pentagon documents to uncover the university’s ties to the military-industrial complex. You hold the keys to databases, archives and institutional records. Use them.
4. Support the Reconstruction of Higher Education in Gaza
If we are serious about supporting Gaza, we must help resource the reconstruction of its academic institutions. This can include material aid, academic partnerships, research collaborations and student sponsorship. We must commit to supporting Palestinian education beyond the cease-fire.
This is a love letter to every student who organizes, disrupts and resists. Your efforts matter. Your sacrifices matter. Your efforts may seem small — a sit-in that fades, a rally that barely turns heads — but they are part of something larger. Look to the Palestinian youth in Gaza, standing tall amid the rubble. We must meet their resolve with our own.
Universities have made their choice. The state has made its choice. We must make ours.
Between submission and struggle, we choose struggle. And the struggle continues.
The path ahead for the Student Intifada is clear: Sharpen your strategies, deepen your solidarities and prepare for the long road. Until Palestine is free, we will not stop, we will not rest.
CARRIE ZAREMBA is a writer and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY, who served on the National Students For Justice in Palestine Steering Committee from 2021 – 2025.
