Cameron Jones

The story of the student movement, from Columbia JVP’s biggest diva.

By Maya Lerman

Illustration by Selin Ho

If you’ve been tuned in to Columbia’s activism scene the past two years, you’ve probably seen Cameron Jones. Maybe in person, wearing a brightly colored crop-top and keffiyeh, wielding a megaphone at protests outside the campus gates. Maybe on the news—NBC, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!—or speaking confidently to the camera on your Instagram feed. Or maybe you’ve seen his face paraded on doxxing trucks, posted on Twitter by accounts like @DocumentingJewHatred, or used as the stand-in for the plague of ‘wokeness,’ ‘jihadism,’ or any other vaguely scary affliction that has apparently befallen American college students. 

To whatever extent Cameron’s whirlwind of a college career has affected him, it doesn’t show on first glance. I meet Cameron in his dimly-lit Watt corner room (dubbed “Gay Palace”). It looks like a typical dorm—except for the heaps of signs, banners, and protest art materials that have found an archival home beneath his bed. A paper-mâché tree from the Olive Harvest Festival of November 2025 stands by the door. A Roar-ee the Lion head worn by a faculty member arrested for protesting ICE is tucked under his table. Maryam Alwan is asleep on his couch. 

To many, the pro-Palestine protest movement on campus has faded into near obscurity (as Cameron puts it, “the vibes are dead”). But in Gay Palace, the activist spirit feels very much alive, well-tended by its enthusiastic and irreverent keeper. 

If you Google Cameron’s name, the results will identify him as a member of Columbia/Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace—a student chapter of a national advocacy organization that played a pivotal role in Columbia’s protest movement for Palestine. Yet, for such a thoroughly scrutinized, sanctioned, and sued organization, Columbia JVP’s origins are mundane. When Cameron came to Columbia, JVP consisted of one member. It was then revived by Cameron and two friends, who hosted Shabbat dinners in his grandparents’ apartment and fostered conversations about Jewish anti-Zionism. “The last event we did before Oct. 7 was actually a rally for the ‘Not On Our Dime’ Bill that was introduced by then-Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani,” Cameron notes.

On Oct. 6, 2023, Columbia JVP was a handful of students gathered for Friday night services, and their partner group, Students for Justice in Palestine, was essentially a “book club.” The next day, everything changed. The first protest hosted jointly by SJP and JVP brought scores of student supporters. It also brought criticism, even from allies. “The night before the Oct. 12 protest, JVP National calls us, and they’re like, ‘you can’t do the protest. Hamas committed war crimes,’” Cameron tells me. Columbia JVP did it anyway. “I don’t fuck with JVP National. Feel free to put that in the story.”

And thus, Cameron—19 at the time—and other student leaders found themselves at the vanguard of a national debate over US support for Israeli occupation, without backing from the University, NGOs, or public opinion. Yet according to Cam, student leaders, at least at first, attempted to toe a delicate political line. “We were tactfully being less ‘sensational.’ So like we were making the choice not to chant ‘intifada,’ which, looking back, I don’t think we should have done that.” Intentionally or not, the students soon learned that sensationalism sticks. “The first time we chanted ‘intifada’ was by accident,” Cameron reveals. “One of [the organizers] just did it, and they recognized that it was a mistake, because you could see on their face.” Immediately, Israel’s official Twitter account posted the video as evidence of extremism on university campuses; from then on, the students embraced the chant as a call for Palestinian liberation. Still, it was a lesson in the influence of broader political and media forces on the student movement.

Contrary to the belief that student leaders maliciously used the movement for personal gain, Cameron becoming a public figure was similarly accidental. At the time, no one knew how big the protests would get. “I wore a mask and a crop top for the first protest, you could clearly see who I was. So I don't think we were thinking about doxxing, because it didn’t exist as a concept before.” I ask Cam about his decision to take on public-facing press appearances; he tells me it wasn’t a decision at all. “Someone had to do it. And I didn’t mind. It just is what happened.”

For his friends, this is characteristic Cameron Jones behavior: flippancy, humor, and, in his words, “not GAF-ing.” Like many pro-Palestine activists, Cam was not treated kindly by the internet. He tells me that, “The comments would be 50% about being gay, or people being like, ‘he doesn’t look Jewish.’” Cameron, a Black Jew, describes comment sections filled with racist imagery of monkeys, blackface, or nooses. 

During the encampments, Cameron was parodied by Eretz Nehederet (sometimes referred to as the “Israeli SNL”), with an actor playing a hypersensitive, homophobic caricature called by Cameron’s name. Cameron tells me about a man with a young child on the street who yelled “is that you, belly button jihadi?” (Zionist Twitter’s nickname for Cameron) from across the sidewalk. “I’m like, in front of your kid? That’s so embarrassing for you.”

If you ask Cameron how he copes with all of this, he insists that, “I actually don’t really GAF that much about it. I find it kind of funny.” Cameron was first doxxed on Canary Mission, an anonymous and dubiously funded website dedicated to ‘documenting’ pro-Palestine students and professors. “The gag is, they put a really bad picture of me. So I had one of my friends email Canary Mission and be like, ‘the picture you put is too blurry. Here’s a clearer picture.’ They changed the picture immediately.” With a laugh, he explains, “I can’t have an ugly picture on Canary!”

I get the sense that Cameron would rather talk about the movement for Palestine than harassment from Zionists. So I listen as he lists off a series of events that followed: vigils, statements, rallies, negotiations with admin, all pre-encampment. Thinking back, this is the era Cameron is most proud of. “I was very young, and none of us had experience doing what we were doing, and I think we were able to adapt and to learn the skills we needed to give the movement at Columbia the first push that it needed to become what it became.”

The suspensions of JVP and SJP in November 2023 came as a surprise. Cameron tells me of the resulting rebirth of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition (“those meetings were so annoying”), and the emergence of a more moderate Jewish group, Jews for Ceasefire (“luckily, they didn’t do anything of importance”). Cameron and Maryam Alwan, representing JVP and SJP, respectively, partnered with the NYCLU and Palestine Legal to sue Columbia over their groups’ suspensions. They lost, but Cameron maintains that the judge misunderstood their case—“they thought it was a free speech thing,” he says; in reality, the lawsuit held that the University violated its own disciplinary procedures in the suspensions. 

Cameron’s mistrust of University officials runs deep. In an attempt to remedy student discontent, then-President Minouche Shafik held listening tables available by sign-up. A very angry Cameron Jones was in attendance. He questioned her about the JVP/SJP suspension; in response, Shafik told him that “saying intifada could be as bad as saying the n-word.” Cameron was appalled. “That’s just a dumb thing to say. Also, she doesn’t even believe it,” he says. “And to say that to a Black gay Jew? Like, you’re funny.”

On April 17, 2024, CUAD voted to launch the encampment (according to Cameron, the motion passed by a single vote). In the weeks that followed, Cameron was essentially doing press full-time. He recounts this era as chaotic, but less labor-intensive than before (now that the “normies” were contributing to the work of organizing). 

I’ve heard the story of the raid on Hind’s Hall countless times, but Cameron describes it with his characteristic flair. “The police are coming, and it’s like, Stormtrooper vibe. And the gag is, a bunch of the freshmen dorms are on campus, so all the freshmen are running away screaming.” Cameron, with many others, was barricaded inside John Jay Hall, and took live interviews from ABC and Al Jazeera from a random hallway. “I was like, ‘the police are brutalizing my peers,’ … [the news anchor] was like, ‘Well, we haven’t seen footage of people being brutalized.’ No, no, I saw it with my eyes. The reason why I’m on the air is because I’m here. Lock the fuck in!”

As the encampments died down, and most protesters returned to some sense of normalcy, Cameron was dealing with legal troubles. He was named in two lawsuits. “The first lawsuit was me, Maryam [Alwan], Mahmoud [Khalil], Nerdeen [Kiswani], Grant Miner, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Joe Howley, they tossed everyone in there. It was just about antisemitism. Like, okay, you want a cookie?”

The second was more egregious: It alleged that he, and a handful of other activists, “knew about Oct. 7 before it happened, and that we are the propaganda arm of Hamas in the US.” Cameron describes this as a Zionist attempt to use money and resources to crush dissent. Even if the lawsuit is frivolous, Cameron’s name will be forever attached to this accusation. But Cameron remains unfazed; in fact, he tells me “I didn’t even read the whole thing.”

I ask Cameron what he would say to students who feel uncomfortable or targeted by student protest. I feel a bit guilty asking—like one of those annoying neoliberal newshosts. He smirks: “I think that they are the propaganda arm for the Zionist entity.” To Cameron, the debate around antisemitism is a “smoke screen” distracting from the genocide of Palestinians. 

Whether on live TV or in his own family, Cameron is constantly battling accusations of being not Jewish enough. “I hear from my mom or my family being like, ‘Don’t forget you’re Jewish.’ and I’m like, ‘I’m doing more Jewish stuff that you.’” Being outspokenly anti-Zionist has isolated Cameron from the broader Jewish community—a few weeks ago, he was “uninvited” from his family’s Passover seder. But he’s found Jewish community at JVP and feels more in touch with his Judaism than ever.

Cameron spent the 2024-2025 academic year abroad, bringing his political convictions with him. In Paris, Cameron and the Science Po SJP tried to host an event with Rima Hassan, a Palestinian member of the European Parliament from France. But Science Po refused, citing security concerns. “I’m like, ‘Girl, bye.’ So we sued them.” 

At the Leipzig encampment in Germany, Cameron glimpsed a very different organizing community. Columbia’s encampment was “there for the cameras”; Leipzig, in contrast, felt more “grounded in community,” without a separation between students and community members, and with many more Palestinians from Palestine in attendance. 

In Leipzig, Cameron met a cousin of Hind Rajab—the 6-year-old girl murdered by the Israeli military for whom Columbia’s “Hind’s Hall” was named. “The Leipzig encampment was ending because people were burnt out, and the school year was ending also. So we had a celebration with music and dancing. But Hind’s cousin was very upset, because he was like ‘why are we celebrating? We haven’t won anything, my people are still being genocided.’” Cameron returns to this moment to keep him in perspective. “Some people are like, ‘you should feel so proud of the work you’ve done. And I’m like no, there’s still genocide.’”

That’s the enigma of Cameron Jones: For someone so seemingly unfazed about the drama unfolding around him, he is able to hold an immeasurable care and compassion for the suffering of people thousands of miles away. It’s that empathy that imbues him with a profound sense of responsibility. “I think it’s really important that as Ivy League students, as Americans, as Jews, that we wake up and go to sleep with immense guilt about what is happening in Palestine. And I’m concerned as to why more people don’t have immense guilt.” 

When Cameron returned to campus, Columbia looked very different. Cameron still plans protests, attends organizing meetings, and tries to make it to one or two Palestinian cultural events per week. But many of the faces who once organized alongside him have disappeared, scared off by Columbia’s intense repression. Cameron attributes this to some other factors as well—toxicity in organizing culture, real or perceived Federal infiltration, and a new student body without first-hand memories of the encampments. He doesn’t sugar coat his pessimism about the future of Columbia’s student activist scene, but he resists calling the movement a failure. The most important win, according to Cameron, was educational—that the movement brought awareness of Palestinian oppression to an otherwise apathetic student body and national consciousness. And despite a lull in protest activity, the fight isn’t over. “People frame it as like, ‘we’re not gonna get divestment.’ But I think in reality, it’s important to recognize that these social movements take decades.”

In the meantime, Cameron’s student life goes on. He spends his Wednesday nights at the Woods, his Friday nights holding small but mighty JVP Shabbats, and his weekend nights playing DnD. He just submitted his senior thesis in Urban Studies, looking at the role of women and queer people in the Palestine solidarity movement in the West. He’s on disciplinary probation—for holding a sign reading “Some of your classmates were IOF criminals committing genocide in Palestine”—but he’s set to graduate this month. 

Reflecting on his time at Columbia, I ask Cameron what made him such an effective activist. His political knowledge? His charisma? His resilience to harassment? His bravery? All of those things are true, but Cameron holds that he has “no special qualities.” “I think I’m able to show that being an activist and being engaged is possible for anyone. There’s no handbook, there’s no class. I think lots of my experiences and the skills I’ve attained have been simply through just doing.”