THE ENCAMPMENTS (Kei Pritsker, William T. Workman 2025)

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SUEDA POLAT IN THE ENCAMPMENTS

KEI PRITSKER, MICHAEL T. WORKMAN: THE ENCAMPMENTS (2025)

Timely film about campus freedom and opposition to Israel

"DEMOCRACY"NOW" DISCUSSES THE FILM MAR. 28, 2025

From Justice Democrats we just received the news that less than a month after ICE agents arrested, detained, and threatened to deport Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil for protesting the genocide in Gaza, they have done the same thing again, kidnapping Tufts University doctoral student Runeysa Ozturk in an unmarked vehicle and transporting her to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. As with Khalil, there have been no charges. Secretary of State Marco Rubio states that Ozturk's visa has been revoked and plans are afoot to deport her for her pro-Palestinian student activism. Rubio claims he has now revoked over 300 visas from international students.

That makes this documentary, which reports on the wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Americn university campuses nationwide from the students' perspective, all the more timely and important, and a corrective to falsifications in the mainstream media. The movement began at Columbia University April 17, 2024. It started as a response to repression of demonstrations by calling in police. While Mahmoud Khalil is threatened with deportation, a US citizen leader of the Columbia demos, Grant Minor, who happens to be Jewish, has now been expelled from the university. Khalil, Ozturk, Minor, and the demonstrators did nothing illegal. All this amounts to repeated repressions of First Amendment rights that all Americans need to be aware of and up in arms about.

During the events they cover filmmakers Pritsker and Workman follow four Colulmbia University protest leaders, Sueda Polat, Grant Miner, Naye Idriss and Mahmoud Khalil, with Khalil the chief spokesman to the camera as he had been to the university administration. This film doesn't make all the issues as clear as it might. It doesn't fully provide the larger picture. But as coverage of a dramatic and important recent student movement whose wellspring was Colulmbia that's very relevant today, it's extremely good.

The fundamental error of administrators and politicians alike used as a false justification to repress demonstrators was to say that pro-Palestine means pro-Hamas, that Hamas means terrorism, and that being against Israeli policy means being anti-Semitic. This misapprehension, or lie, was exchanged between pro-Israel members of Congress and the then Columbia University president, Egyptian-born Minouche Shafik, who comes from wealthy Egyptian muslim parents who moved to the US when heir company was nationalized. Her summa cum laude from UMass, MS from the London School of Economics, and DPhil from Oxford did not make her smart enough to understand these basic distinctions or capable of standing up against them against bullying Congressional committee members bent on demonizing the sudent demonstrators when she was summoned to testify in Washington.

Shafik also didn't bother to inform herself well enough about the demonstrations at her own bailiwick, Columbia, to learn that, though F-words were occasionally used by some younger demonstrators, the gatherings were not a place where anti-Semitism flourished. Such a thing would have been impossible, because the demonstrations were open to everyone, including, and even especially, Jews. It is important to know that the major organizer of pro-Palestine demonstrations is the Jewish Voice for Peace. Opposition to the war-making of Israel is not remotely a form of anti-Semitism. Campus opposition to university support of oppressive and fascist regimes must be permitted. And specifically, Israel's repression and occupation of Palestinians must be strongly opposed everywhere.

The film begins with news media footage that calls the protestors "radical," "extreme," "disgusting," and worse. This is TV news, which influences the majority of the population and forms their views about any events, which it often gets wrong.

The activists speak of Palestine until it comes to seem perhaps for many an abstraction. In the struggle between student demonstrators and Columbia administrators, people tend almost to lose sight of the background events. As a reminder: The Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack from Gaza into Israeli territory killed perhaps 1,139 Israelis. The retaliation directed at the helpless confined area of Gaza, which is collective punishment, and has repeatedly targeted schools, universities, and children, by now has massacred an estimated 61,000 Palestinians. The Columbia demonstrations were in solidarity with the whole Gaza population that was under attack and remains so.

Even when the retribution is fifty-fold and indiscriminate, Americans seem to find it hard to understand that it is unjust. America has always been disproportionately in support of Israel, even when Israel has become a rogue nation causing havoc in the region. America's unquestioning support is backed by its supply to Israel of vast military aid of bombs and other weapons of war that have now been used to massacre the civilian population of Gaza. If the US cut off its military aid to Israel, the massacres could not go on. As mentioned in this film, the International Court of Justice decided that the Israeli bombing of Gaza could "plausibly" be considered genocide.

President Joe Biden's unquestining support of Israel's military assault caused him to be nicknamed "Genocide Joe." The awareness of these events among younger Americans lost the Democrats a substantial percentage of the youth vote in the presidential election.

These need to be known, but they are larger issues. The student Gaza solidarity demonstrations and encampments at Columbia sought primarily to pressure the university to divest from the US and Israeli weapons companies. This is analogous to the former student pressure on universities to divest from support of apartheid South Africa. And there is a connection: hence Bishop Desmond Tutu's visit to the Occupied Territories and his declaration 23 years ago that conditions there were "worse than apartheid."

The main issues that The Encampments bring out pertain to freedom of speech and assembly, and the film reviews footage of the 1968 student revolt at Columbia when, as this time, they eventually occupied Hamilton Hall. (This time they renamed it "Hind Hall," in memory of a young Palestinian girl openly murdered by IDF soldiers.) Universities all over the US attempted to repress the pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian student demonstrations and calls for divestment, and students on campuses throughout the country responded by the Columbia strategy of setting up tents, "encampments." Many of the administration's efforts to shut these down were unsuccessful. The film shows how resiliant and motivated the demonstrators were. The four leaders are remarkable for their unflappable calm. The fire is deep within.

THe Encampments bears witness to a surprising change: the educated younger generation has learned that there is a Palestinian people who have lived under occupation for over 75 years. Many are aware of Israeli repression and occupation of Palestinian land and the genocidal attack on the beleaguered and martyred people of Gaza, and more and more of the West Bank. That their advocates in America are demonized is obvious. This is an ongoing battle. But thanks to this film it's a battle more people may understand.

The Encampments, 81 mins., debuted Mar. 25, 2025 at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), hitting New York theaters via Watermelon Pictures (Angelika) Mar. 28, expanding to Los Angeles a week later.