By LENA WANG
“The Encampments” (directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, 2025) documents the surge of Palestine solidarity activism at Columbia University and beyond in the spring of 2024. The film faithfully captures the political mindset, resolve, and self-sacrifice of the Columbia student organizations protesting for their school to divest from Israel. While timely, informative, and emotionally moving, however, the film ultimately prioritizes the symbolic actions of the morally conscious few over the organization of the masses.
It is true that the Columbia encampment—and the spectacle of its repression—sparked a remarkable wave of protests using similar tactics across college campuses. Some of the film’s strongest moments depict the hypocrisy, callousness, and Zionist sympathies of Columbia University administrators, who regularly justified their unflagging support for Israel under the guise of “defending Jewish students’ safety.” Notably, it was this kind of rhetoric that then-University President Minouche Shafik used when she called upon the NYPD to brutalize and arrest student protesters, many of whom were themselves Jewish.
However, since the filmmakers were embedded in student organizations at Columbia, they created a misleading picture of Columbia students as the vanguard, rather than a wing, of the movement—a perspective that sidelines the role of working-class and community organization. For instance, there is very little reference to the massive rallies and marches against the genocide prior to spring 2024, or the decades of Palestine solidarity work that came before.
As it makes protagonists out of Ivy League students and heroic spectacles out of footage of their arrests, the film erases the primacy of the working-class struggle. It pays no attention to the local forces in the New York City community that so quickly mobilized huge defensive rallies and resources for the Columbia students. It ignores the kind of work done by the many organizations that have been mobilizing alongside student activists; one is Labor for Palestine, a group built in 2004 to push working-class solidarity with Palestine, which opposes Israel through BDS resolutions in union locals.
The film attempts to historicize the encampments in another way: by interspersing the students’ acts of civil disobedience in 2024 with footage of antiwar student protests from 1968. A current Columbia student shares his takeaways from the history of the civil rights movement, alleging that you need to be prepared to be beaten and gassed to fight for the causes you believe in. But the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements weren’t inspiring because they were repressed, but because they mobilized millions in the working class and oppressed nationalities, and won.
Following the ICE kidnapping of one of the film’s interviewees, the Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the producers decided to speed up the film’s release. The urgency was due to a sense of duty to inform the public about Khalil and his role as the encampment’s negotiator with the university administration. The film notes the news of Khalil’s arrest in its closing cards, and ends on its ultimately shortsighted thesis—“instead of defeating the movement for Palestine, repression has reignited it.”
This idea has been manifested in many encampments and occupations nationwide, that is, where activists engage in direct actions that purposefully instigate repression. Proponents of such ultra-left tactics, including many chapters of the Palestinian Youth Movement and Students for Justice in Palestine, often use two lines of reasoning—first, that “escalating” their “disruptive” actions will “put pressure” on institutions to heed their demands, and second, that their heroic sacrifices will reveal the barbarity of the administration and the state, therefore inspiring others into action. We saw this logic present when organizers of the encampment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst declared “victory” after being raided by the police, leading to over 130 arrests of activists and bystanders.
As Peter Camejo described in the pamphlet “Liberalism, Ultraleftism or Mass Action” (an abridged transcript of his 1970 speech to the Young Socialist Alliance), many ultra-leftists often believe that the ruling class will “listen” to activists if they’re rowdy enough. Their actions, as attempts “to affect the moral conscience of the ruling class,” still hold the liberal assumption that the ruling class has a moral conscience at all. More anarchistic ultra-leftists intend that their small actions will “escalate” into larger ones over time. But rather than sparking a mass revolution, direct action activists often find themselves isolated, burnt out, or jailed after a wave of repression. The working class will not be mobilized spontaneously by “the propaganda of the deed” but by a strategy of independent mass action.
To quote Camejo again, “We’re not interested in moving 20 or 200 or several hundred community organizers to engage in some sort of civil disobedience, window trashing, or whatever. We say that is a dead end, because it doesn’t relate to the power that can stop the war—the masses. You can’t ask the 15 million trade unionists to sit in at a congressman’s office. There just isn’t enough room. Of course, the ultralefts know that 15 million workers aren’t going to do that, so that call is clearly not aimed at involving workers.”
To be clear, we do not oppose encampment as a tactic. Workers’ Voice members have participated in encampments—and especially those more oriented towards mass action. Notably, at San Francisco State University, the Students for Gaza were able to leverage the power of their student and faculty unions to beat back repression and used the camp space as a hub to organize mass rallies. Within two weeks, through open bargaining—as opposed to the negotiations behind closed doors that occurred on many other campuses—they forced the administration to commit to divestment.
As we reach the one-year anniversary of the encampments, the film has been screened across college campuses as outdoor and building occupations have cropped up again, though they have been even more short-lived this year than last, and have led to immediate police repression. Rather than catering to our own morale with stories of heroism, we must reflect on the victories and failures of our tactics. As civil rights are under attack in the U.S., and Gaza continues to burn, we must focus our energy on reaching the broadest possible layers of the masses to form a united front to demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel and an end to deportations. The students alone cannot defeat the U.S.-Israeli war machine, let alone a small band of student radicals; only a united working class has the power to truly “shut it down.”
“The Encampments” is a timely and relevant film for today’s Palestine movement, albeit a flawed one. We recommend that our readers screen the film in their communities, share how it reflects or departs from their recent experiences on the ground, and discuss how to strategize in the movement going forward.
Photo: Makhmud Khalil speaks at Columbia University (a scene in the film “The Encampments”).
