Progressive Political News

The propagandistic framing of opposition to the war in Gaza as “antisemitic” and “pro-terrorist” is exposed as a lie in the new documentary The Encampments. This sweeping eighty-one-minute film focuses on the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment which began in April 2024, sparking a tidal wave of pro-Palestine, pro-peace protests at hundreds of college campuses across the United States and around the world. 

Co-directors Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman go behind the barricades and inside the encampments, empowering protesters who have been vilified as “anti-Jewish” and “pro-Hamas” to share their points of view. Among the leaders included in the film is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp and a graduate student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who was a lead negotiator between campus activists and the university’s administration during the protests.

On March 8, when Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents kidnapped Khalil in front of his pregnant wife, he became the first pro-Palestine dissenter to face deportation proceedings under the administration of Donald Trump, who denounced the green card holder as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” 

Another key interview subject who appears throughout The Encampments is Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia who is studying Hebrew medieval literature. Through interviews with Miner, along with anti-war members of the group Jewish Voice for Peace, the film disproves the claim that opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza are antisemitic. Jewish participants in the encampments are shown worshipping and observing Jewish religious ceremonies inside their homemade campsite.

Like Khalil—who was transported from New York to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana—Miner has suffered from reprisals and was expelled from Columbia for his activities, which included occupying a university building. In addition to the encampments, comprised of tents and other makeshift shelters on the university campus, the film chronicles the student-led occupations of university buildings, in particular the takeover of Hamilton Hall.

The Encampments uses archival footage to show the connection of the Columbia student strike of 1968, which was largely motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War, to today’s pro-Palestine dissidents. In April 1968, students occupied Hamilton Hall, which pro-Palestine protesters again seized in 2024, renaming the building Hind’s Hall after a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was murdered in Gaza while desperately calling emergency responders. Historical clips of Students for a Democratic Society spokesperson Mark Rudd and other radicals at Columbia reinforce the sense of the continuity of these causes more than half a century later. 

The Encampments also takes viewers across the country, with images of pro-Palestine protests at campsites on campuses nationwide, as well as abroad in Europe, Asia, and beyond. One of the other universities featured in the film is the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where the encampment came under attack by violent counter protesters while security did nothing to protect the occupiers, who were forcibly evicted by law enforcement shortly afterwards using flash bang grenades, rubber bullets, batons, and tear gas. Although there may have been some property damage—such as the defacing of buildings with graffiti and or the breaking of windows by protesters—the demonstrators disparaged as “pro-Hamas terrorists” are not seen perpetrating any violence against people, but rather are the victims of violence wrought by vigilantes and police who are sometimes armed to the teeth, who also caused property damage, as well as bodily harm to some protesters. 

Other protagonists appearing in The Encampments include Turkish-born Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student studying human rights, and Beirut-born Naye Idriss, an alumna who returned to the campus to support the struggle. Although the documentary’s pro-Palestine activists are anti-Zionists who oppose the Israeli government’s policies and the military actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), they’re never shown on screen as being anti-Jewish. 

The film is strongest when it counters the popular narrative of the encampments being hateful and criminal. The Encampments’ countervailing narrative is that these occupiers are not antisemitic terrorists; rather, they are students who oppose genocide and the mass murder of thousands of children and other unarmed civilians. They are pro-peace advocates for Palestinian human rights who want the dreadful massacres to stop—and are willing to put themselves into harm’s way to try and achieve this.  

The Encampments also ponders what the tent setups and the disruptions to the daily routines on the campuses actually accomplished. In a telling sequence, the film provides footage of schools in Gaza, including one of its universities, bombarded to smithereens. In a sense, the response of their fellow students at Columbia and beyond was an act of scholarly solidarity, of people at far-flung educational institutions expressing support for and unity with the besieged pupils of Palestine.

Despite a temporary ceasefire earlier this year, Israel has resumed its bombardments of Gaza,  even after one of the most massive waves of student resistance in U.S. history. Was it all for naught? Toward the end, The Encampments shows why the campus uprisings were important: The response of the children and others in Gaza to the protests at Columbia and beyond. The Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia, UCLA, and elsewhere showed the children of Gaza, who have been killed in the tens of thousands since October 7, 2023, that they are not alone, and that others around the world care about them. The hardships suffered by these protesting college students are, of course, small in comparison to the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians, but it did bring hope to the latter that, in the midst of appalling mass suffering, they are not forgotten.

Co-director Kei Pritsker is a BreakThrough News journalist with Jewish heritage, while award-winning documentarian Michael T. Workman teaches nonfiction film production at the University of San Francisco. The Encampments is executive produced by Grammy Award-winning rapper Macklemore, who wrote and performed the song “Hind’s Hall.”  

The film was made by Watermelon Pictures, a Palestinian-owned distribution and production company. Watermelon Pictures also made Israelism, The Teacher, and No Other Land, the latter of which won the Best Documentary Oscar earlier this year.

The Encampments, which captures the heroism and solidarity of the pro-Palestine protesters, is inspiring, essential viewing that debunks the lie that these students are “antisemitic terrorists.” In 1969, Columbia University student James Simon Kunen published The Strawberry Statement, his account of the student protests there. The following year, Hollywood adapted Kunen’s book for the big screen. In that tradition of ongoing cinematic activism, The Encampments could be called 2025’s “The Watermelon Statement.”

Information on screenings of The Encampments is available here.

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