‘The Encampments’ REVIEW: Inside Columbia’s Gaza Protests
‘The Encampments’ REVIEW: Inside Columbia’s Gaza Protests
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) just killed five Al-Jazeera journalists in a strike on a press tent outside al-Shifa Hospital. Their attacks came on the heels of the recent announcement that the Israeli Security Cabinet has approved a plan to militarily take over Gaza City. These journalists would have been there to witness and report on it. Without them, the impending destruction of Gaza may be shrouded in a black box. According to UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, at least 242 journalists have been killed there so far. Human Rights Watch describes their enforced mass displacement and starvation as an ethnic cleansing and a genocide. Even the citizens of Israel's main benefactor, the U.S., are increasingly upset. According to a Gallup poll conducted in July, only 32% of Americans approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, a new low, while for those between the ages of 18-34, only 9% do.
Some credit for the spread of youth support for the Palestinian cause goes to the university students who continue to loudly protest on their campuses. The Encampments is the first documentary to chronicle these, focusing on the development of the protest movement in Columbia University that started it all. They are particularly critical of their university’s financial investments in companies that profit off of the Israeli state’s mass violence towards Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The students demand that Columbia divest from companies that have ties to the Israeli government, especially those in the weapons and information technology industries, such as General Electric and Lockheed Martin, as well as any others that have not been made public. They argue that if the university could easily divest from private prisons and Russian businesses (after their invasion of Ukraine), why can’t they do so in this case as well? And because most of the university’s investments are hidden from the public, the protestors also call for full transparency regarding all its direct and indirect investments. They chant: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!” The university heads turn a deaf ear.
The documentary is not meant for those who do not know anything about the situations in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s not the kind of film that tries to lay out the flaws of the Zionist worldview. It doesn’t attempt to change anyone’s minds on these issues. It primarily presents the concerns of these students and their difficulties in getting their voices heard by the university’s upper administration. They’re frustrated. We witness negotiation after negotiation fall apart as the university refuses to budge on any of their demands. It comes to a point that the university allows police officers to violently disband their encampment despite it being within the campus’s supposed protest zone. Tear gas and rubber bullets galore. It looks like a scene from a war movie. Or news clips from the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. In fact, in 1968, Columbia University students occupied several buildings on campus to protest the university’s involvement in financing the Vietnam War. They proudly protest in the same spirit of their predecessors.
Formally, the film is conventional and straight to the point. There are scenes from the protests, talking head interviews with its leaders, insider info from a university-affiliated whistleblower, news reports denouncing the protestors, as well as some clips of the carnage in Gaza. It’s an accessible film for the general public, especially for those who are not familiar with what went on at Columbia outside of what they’ve heard on the news. It doesn’t try to do anything new. It’s here to capture an important moment in time. It documents the passion and sincerity of these protestors and shows us that the desire for moral uprightness still exists among us, that many of the younger generation still care enough about the world to want to make a change in it through peaceful means.
Its most moving moment is when they tell the story of the killing of 6-year old Hind Rajab, who was shot to death in a car with her whole family, along with the two paramedics who tried to come to her rescue. When the protestors occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, they decided to rename it Hind's Hall in her memory. Their actions also inspired rapper Macklemore to release a protest song with the same name. He later signed on to be an executive producer for this documentary.
The main reservation I have for the film is that its attempt to appeal to a broader audience seems to have negatively impacted its substantive depth. Stylistically, it’s quite by-the-numbers, with the rhythmic quality of a clock. Making it so stylistically accessible, while good to a certain degree, fails to make it an interesting documentary formally. And in my opinion, this loss of potential blunts the emotional impact that the film could have had if it had pushed itself out of the box and matched the intensity of their protests to the film’s style and form.
It’s all so well-oiled it comes off structured more like a news report than a verité account of the encampments, unlike a film like No Other Land, for example, which is so gripping exactly because of how it situates the audience at the center of the action. I would have loved a Wiseman-style doc on it. I suspect that this has to do with the desire to show the brightest sides of the movement, to show primarily footage of people singing and passing around food, as opposed to the more emotionally charged calls for action that may be construed as too aggressive. It’s unfortunate that we don’t get to see a lot of the anger and fervor of these protestors, some of whom have family in Palestine. We only see their vitriol when the police arrive. And so, for this film, there always seems to be a certain distance from the events; we are always more observers than participants.
It was also unfortunate that the explanation of how the university supports the Israeli military zips by within the first five minutes, and most of the focus ends up on the experiences of the protestors themselves. Of course it’s important to hear their voices and to see the solidarity amongst the student population, especially from some of its Jewish members, but I think more time should have been spent taking the audience through the systemic mechanisms that they are valiantly protesting against. It would have been good to hear more of the defense of the university as well, so that we can more easily follow what the arguments are on paper. How does an educational institution defend financing weapons of destruction? All we see from the film is that they falsely decry the protests as anti-semitic. Is that really all they have to say? Even the exact things that they are negotiating for with the university are not clear in the film.
The importance of considering these things is to give the film greater universal applicability— in a sense, to make it more accessible to the public by making its lessons more universal. This is as opposed to reaching for mass accessibility only through structural and narrative form. Instead of the easy takeaway, “these students are so passionate they’re even willing to risk expulsion,” the takeaway could further be, “the structures of society that this film reveals applies to my local situation as well in x and y ways.” It needs to be more actionable. How can other students organize effectively to protest their universities? How should they deal with the threats of expulsion or how can these fears be mitigated? The seeds of this kind of realization are there, but the film doesn’t spend enough time nurturing it.
These flaws are understandable, however, because the movement is still ongoing. Perhaps they just don’t have clear answers yet. They still haven’t had any major victories. Maybe at this point, the best they can do is to just capture the moment and continue to remind others that they must not look away from the destruction that their own tax paying dollars are funding.
Overall, as a record of the Columbia protests, The Encampments succeeds in showing the courage and persistence of students who refuse to let their voices be buried under administrative stonewalling and state repression. It places them within a longer history of campus resistance and captures the moral urgency that has spread amongst the youth on the topic of Israel-Palestine. The wave of university protests that started in Columbia played an important part in all of this. Although these initial protests targeted Columbia University, it has galvanized students from around the world to stand up in broader solidarity with Gaza and the West Bank. According to the film, around 300 encampments have been set up globally, and they’ve been met with varying degrees of hostility by both university administrators and local police, with 3,100 students and faculty arrested in the U.S. alone as of the film’s release. Just this past July, 80 more students were suspended or expelled from Columbia University for their involvement in the protests.
One of the Columbia protest movement’s lead negotiators, Mahmoud Khalil, who is heavily featured in the documentary, is being targeted by the U.S. government with deportation. Earlier this year he was forcibly detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for 104 days, despite being a lawful permanent resident. He described it as an abduction. He was released in June after a federal judge ruled that his detention was unconstitutional, but the government has appealed the ruling and still seeks to exile him from the country.
The struggle continues on. But the cracks are showing. Sooner or later, with enough global pressure, the whole edifice will fall apart. There is a generational tidal wave of support for it. And when it does, The Encampments will stand as an enduring record of these necessary first steps towards our collective emancipation. It’s inevitable, for the liberation of our conscience and the liberation of the world are inseparable.
The Encampments is distributed by Watermelon Pictures and it is available online on their streaming service Watermelon +, as well as on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Vimeo.
