Maryam Alwan and the Rise and Fall of Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

The story of the encampments through the lens of one of their leaders.

By Eli Baum

Illustration by Em Bennett

This article was based on extensive interviews with Maryam Alwan, largely conducted shortly before she left New York in July, as well as nine campus activists who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

In 2011, Bashar al-Assad opened fire on protesters objecting to the detainment and torture of 15 students. Protests sprang up across the country, and Syria’s government responded with tanks and artillery. It turned into the Syrian Civil War. During that time, civilians seeking safety traveled north into Europe, through Greece or Turkey, hoping to reach the U.K. In a short stretch of land in France, right along the English Channel, a collection of refugees settled down in an unofficial refugee camp in Calais. It was demolished by the French government in 2015, but a few hundred people remained. 

In the summer of 2021, Maryam Alwan went to Calais. She was in between her first and second year at Columbia’s Sciences Po dual degree program, where students complete civic internships over the summer. Up to that point, her politics had simmered beneath the surface. If you ask about her childhood, she mentions that she was “bullied and called a terrorist and all that,” but she talks more about playing basketball and the “Destination Imagination” club (a group that fused engineering challenges with improv). Her dad had made her stay home from counterprotesting when the “Unite the Right” rally happened in her hometown, Charlottesville, VA.

But all of that changed in Calais. Barbed wire fences controlled the movement of refugees, and the police would periodically uproot their tents and take their belongings. Alwan describes meeting a young girl who had a skinned knee because the police had set their dogs on her. Unlike the other volunteers, Alwan was part Syrian, part Palestinian, and people asked her why she was wearing the volunteer vest. She had no real answer: “I guess I just have an American passport.”

If you want to understand what has happened at Columbia in the past two years, you can begin in a windowless room of Lerner or on the quad or maybe even in Gaza. But you can also begin in Calais. Because, a little over a year after being politicized, Alwan came to Columbia and became one of the main organizers in Students for Justice in Palestine. 

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It has taken you nine months to schedule a disciplinary hearing for an incident alleged to have occurred last April. Do you know what else takes nine months? Giving birth. In the time that it took you to set a date, millions of new lives have been brought to gestation. 

— Maryam Alwan, in an email to Cas Holloway, Jeanine D’Armiento, Dean Josef Sorett, The Office of the President, and about a dozen other administrators.

Here is an extremely brief history of the leadup to the encampment: Two days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Columbia SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace released a joint open letter saying they “stand in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance” and held a protest on Oct. 12. Many objected to the letter and found it offensive to be protesting immediately after the attack. Shai Davidai, then an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School, delivered a speech saying that SJP should be “eradicated” from campus, which the State of Israel posted on Twitter. A few weeks later, Columbia derecognized the two clubs, claiming that they had held an “unauthorized event.” The University blasted out the derecognition to the press, which led to members of the clubs being inundated with death threats and harassment. 

Alwan had previously kept a low profile. But in the days following Columbia’s public suspension of the clubs, she began to see things differently: If there were risks to speaking up, there were also risks to hiding. “We were getting so many media requests about suspension and we were denying them because we were too scared to show our identities,” Alwan said. “All of these completely false things were circulating as a result, [and] we weren’t able to counter that.” So, in November of 2023, Alwan decided to speak to the press. She went on 60 Minutes. She spoke to the New York Times and the Washington Post. With almost all other protesters keeping their identities hidden, Alwan became the de facto representative of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement in the months that followed. 

Those months saw everything escalate. Protests became a regular occurrence. For the first time, campus was routinely closed to non-CUID holders. University presidents were resigning one by one after testifying to Congress on campus antisemitism. And in the early morning before then-President Minouche Shafik’s testimony, Alwan went out with a pillow in her backpack as part of the first encampment. She monitored Sidechat, made vlogs, and lay in the grass while she haggled with the Columbia Daily Spectator over edits to an op-ed. The next day, the University called the NYPD, who began arresting the students one by one.

As she was getting arrested, Alwan saw her best friend in the crowd. With her hands cuffed behind her back, she couldn’t wave, so she smiled. At that moment, a photographer took one of the most famous photos of the encampment. When she travelled to Ireland the next summer, strangers recognized her from the photo. A man in Gaza would tell her, over Twitter, that he had set his lock screen to the picture of her smiling as she got arrested. 

Alwan had become a symbol. But being a symbol is strange. It only works when things are simple. Israel had just killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, and was continuing to do so. Columbia had called the police on its own students for the first time in decades. The protesters wanted the school to sever ties with Israel, disclose its investments, and divest. The movement was aligned. It wouldn’t last. 

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To anyone looking at Columbia from the outside, it seemed as though the conflict was simply between a crowd of pro-Palestinian students and the administration. This is wrong. From the very beginning, pro-Palestinian activism was driven by people from every corner of the University, with vastly different perspectives and who did not always agree on every issue. Everything hung together through Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of around eighty student clubs ranging from dance teams to political-advocacy groups. Representatives from each group formed committees (Art, Comms, Political Education, Direct Action, etc.) and SJP, JVP, and Jafra (the Palestinian contingent within CUAD) held a somewhat-undefined veto power. 

During the encampment, however, the structured coalition fell apart. Hundreds of new people were injected into the activist-ecosystem with little knowledge of the organization’s structure. Students occupied Hamilton Hall despite Jafra almost unanimously opposing the move. (Afterwards, Alwan found herself in the awkward position of publicly defending it anyway.) Over the summer, with many activists out of the city, CUAD became increasingly centralized. And when everyone returned to campus in the fall, many of the Hamilton Hall occupants remained involved with Columbia activism, despite being under interim suspension. They had been arrested by the NYPD, it was only a matter of time before they were expelled, and the University had not divested. It was a recipe for extremism.

Alwan had a prominent role in SJP, but she was not technically in the leadership of CUAD. For a long time, it didn’t really matter. SJP was a significant organization in its own right. But in the summer following the encampment, SJP’s account was banned from Instagram while CUAD’s remained active. (“Maybe the feds knew that SJP’s account was more effective than CUAD’s,” Alwan said.) This sounds like a small, technical issue, but Instagram is the main way that students communicate about protests. Even if SJP could technically send posts to the CUAD comms team, the fact that one account had been banned and the other stayed up changed the power dynamic between the two groups. SJP had lost their platform, and CUAD “sort of just became the thing around.”

Jafra began holding vigils for Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza. But whereas before, they might have attracted hundreds of people, they now struggled to gain traction. Alwan published her experience in an op-ed, many months later:

The vigil was held for nearly a whole month. As time passed, the group of students sitting under the sun all day often dwindled down to almost exclusively us: Palestinian students. It bothered me that reporters would seemingly flock the minute there was a sensational protest headline, but nobody seemed to pay attention to the pain of Palestinians … It took thirty minutes to read three double-sided pages out of a heavy and incomplete stack ... The blood drained from my face when we reached someone with the last name ‘Alwan.’ My throat tightened and I couldn’t look down.

There wasn’t much to be done. Spectator was not reporting on the vigils, and the SJP Instagram had been taken down. CUAD still had tens of thousands of followers that they could reach on Instagram, but the coalition had grown increasingly unaligned since the summer of 2024. 

“They started making these crazy-ass posts,” Alwan said, without elaborating. But it’s easy to see what she was talking about. “We are westerners fighting for the total eradication of western civilization,” read one August Instagram post. The CUAD newsletter, which had previously focused on things like divestment, later claimed that Elias Rodriguez, who killed two Israeli embassy staffers, was “subject to inflated charges and penalties, including vague accusations of ‘terrorism’ and ‘antisemitism’ in relation to [his] alleged actions.” And on Oct. 7, 2024, CUAD rescinded its apology for organizer Khymani James’s notorious statements “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” (Alwan considers Khymani James an “opp.”)

Alwan was in a difficult position. She was one of the key people who had built up the movement, and she was one of its main public faces. But now, she had no ability to control it. And so, on Oct. 19, 2024, she and a group of other Palestinian students published an op-ed in Spectator titled ‘Recentering Palestine, Reclaiming the Movement.’ “CUAD has shifted from a horizontally structured coalition founded on Palestinian liberation to a nebulous organization that is not led by the affinity group of Palestinian student organizers,” the op-ed read. “Palestinians deserve a movement focused on Palestine, with clear goals and demands from a University with extensive ties to the occupying state.” It included the boilerplate list of international laws that are usually used to justify the Palestinian “right to resist” but then: “we wholeheartedly disavow any violence outside of this context.”

To everybody who had seen the revocation of CUAD’s Khymani James apology, it was clear what this meant. People who had organized together and even been arrested together were at odds. Many of Alwan’s long-term friendships ruptured. Some people tried to straddle the divide. Others had to choose between CUAD’s militancy and the Palestinian students who had broken off of it (who now organized through the newly-formed Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition). Everything was made further complicated by the ambiguous authorship of the op-ed. It had been written by a group of Palestinian students, and it was an open secret that Alwan had been behind it, but who did it really represent? But then, after all of this change, who was CUAD?

“When a lot of people realized that CUAD wasn’t necessarily reformable from the inside and left, it just made CUAD problems worse, because anyone who could’ve talked them down was gone,” Alwan said. In the months that followed, CUAD tried to flush concrete down the toilets of the International Affairs Building, disrupted a class taught by an Israeli professor by handing out fliers reading “Crush Zionism” with a boot stomping on a Jewish star, and organized the Butler Library disruption in May 2025. Their actions became so erratic that people on campus increasingly believed that they had been infiltrated by the feds. And despite the fact that Alwan and others had written their op-ed in Spectator, to anyone outside of Columbia, it wasn’t entirely clear that there was any real fissure in the movement. The op-ed had been written in such coded language that you had to be tapped into the protest scene to really understand what was being said. CUAD, then, continued to represent the Palestinian cause to those who were not mired in Columbia’s internal politics, despite losing many of its Palestinian leaders.

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But campus activists were not the only ones who read the op-ed. A little over a month earlier, Columbia had established the Office of Institutional Equity, which combined Title IX, Equal Opportunity Compliance, Protection of Minors, and Recruitment HERC offices into one body. For a while, it was treated as a step forward. Spectator called it “part of the University’s latest initiative to advance inclusivity in the community,” and no one really took a second look. But about two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the OIE sent out dozens of case notices to students who had put up anti-trustee stickers, “Condemn Israel” posters, and Instagram posts in support of Palestinians. For Alwan, they opened an investigation into her ‘Recentering Palestine’ op-ed, claiming that it “may have created or contributed to a hostile working, learning, or campus living environment.”

It did not matter that the op-ed was about breaking away from CUAD and, if anything, was specifically disagreeing with the activists’ extreme behavior that had become divorced from the situation in Gaza. Alwan was the symbol. And since she had not been publicly involved in activism since the formation of the OIE, if Columbia wanted to prosecute her, this was the way to do it. The op-ed had ended by calling on the movement to focus, once more, on divesting from weapons manufacturers, cancelling the opening of the Tel Aviv global center, ceasing the dual degree partnership with Tel Aviv University, and ending the School of General Studies’ “pipeline of Israeli soldiers.” The OIE alleged that writing these demands in an op-ed amounted to Discriminatory Harassment. “It really got to me because I wasn’t doing anything anymore,” Alwan said. “If I’ve left and you’re still going to scapegoat me and go after me, then what solution or escape is there?”

In the weeks that followed, Alwan’s sleeping and eating deteriorated. She lost weight. “It just felt like psychological warfare,” she said. “I freaked out.” At the time, the OIE was a new office, and it was unclear what they might be able to do. Alwan had just finished her hearings over the first encampment, and she was now confronted with a new set of charges. “I couldn’t focus on my classes because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to graduate,” Alwan said. “It [was] putting my life on hold.”

There was, however, at least one person who challenged the OIE during those first few months of its inception. The OIE told him he could only see the evidence that they had brought against him if he signed an NDA; he refused to sign. In response, the University put a hold on his transcript and threatened to block his graduation. He had to appeal the decision through a lawyer. Two days after all of this came out in the Associated Press, he was arrested. His name was Mahmoud Khalil.

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Alwan found out that the government had seized Khalil the night it happened. “It felt like we were being hunted,” she said. “It was unconstitutional … Even as a U.S. citizen, I was scared because it felt like we had exited the realm of law and logic.” She didn’t leave her apartment for a week. “I was paralyzed out of depression,” Alwan said. She had been close friends with Khalil. But Alwan felt there was work to be done: “I just immediately, like instinctually, went right back to writing and doing press.” Later, she chained herself to the gate outside of Earl Hall. After almost a year of internal battles and University investigations, she felt the situation required her to once again take on the symbolic role she had played during the encampment. 

During this period, Alwan received a multi-million dollar lawsuit accusing her of knowing about the Oct. 7 attack in advance. “You’re like, what the hell is this?” Alwan said. But being in the line of fire after Khalil’s detention was scary, no matter how absurd the claim was. “It felt like they were picking us off one by one in different ways that they could,” she said. The lawsuit had obvious typos and used an edited Instagram screenshot, according to Alwan. If the plaintiffs had not included hostage families themselves, it might have been ignored entirely. But in certain spheres of the media, it mattered. The New York Post called it a “bombshell suit.” FOX News, The Forward, and The Free Press all picked it up. The Jerusalem Post ran articles with headlines like “Anti-Israel groups aided Hamas on campus, knew of attack beforehand, Oct. 7 victims say in lawsuit.” This was the flipside of being a symbol: the idea that a college student somehow knew about a terrorist attack in advance was turned into a plausible claim for an audience of readers.

As everything piled up, Alwan increasingly took on a sort of desperate humor. She started sending emails to the administration detailing every triviality in her life. She ran into Claire Shipman on the street and asked to take a photo with her, which she then sent to the administration, saying, “I have attached a photo of Columbia’s President, Claire Shipman, with a notorious anti-Israel agitator that I have exclusively obtained.” She changed the display name of her email to “Minouche Shafik” (you can do that) and started emailing administrators to scold them for being worse at making videos than she (Shafik) was. (Center for Student Success and Intervention, another disciplinary body, briefly opened a sixth inquiry into Alwan for “impersonating Columbia staff members.”) She posted a picture of Shai Davidai standing next to a Palestinian flag and tweeted “Correlation does not equal causation, but I do hope the @FBI and @DHSgov are looking into this.” (Davidai, not understanding the joke, responded with, “The leader of @ColumbiaSJP is trying to get me deported by spreading obvious lies about me. This is the kind of student that @Columbia admits.”) She sent emails titled “Matchmaking” that read: “Dear Office of Institutional Equity (“OIE”), I wanted to introduce you to the Office of Institutional Effectiveness (“OIE”) at Barnard, which I’ve CC’d. I know you have been struggling with effectiveness.” Neither of the offices seemed to appreciate the email. “It’s a way for me to reclaim power,” Alwan said. “It’s to show them how stupid they are to be treating college students as national security threats.”

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Alwan graduated last spring. Since her graduation, there have been almost no on-campus protests, few fliers, and not really much of anything, comparatively. Memory is strange here. People like Alwan feel like they’re from another era.

But that era created this one. Mahmoud Khalil became the prime example for international students, who now know that a wrong word or opinion can trigger the eyes of the DHS and land them in a Louisiana detention center. The OIE would become a critical front in the fight over free speech, and by June 2025, there would be over a thousand cases. As for CUAD, they ultimately convinced dozens of students to occupy Butler Library by telling them it would be a low-risk action; in the end, almost all of them got suspended or expelled. Most of the people who would be carrying on the movement are gone as a result. 

Alwan returned home to Charlottesville after graduating. When I spoke to her last, she was painting beach scenes and organizing her email. She had recently finished The Summer I Turned Pretty and the new season of Stranger Things. She was also reading “basic romance books,” in addition to political theory. She started a paralegal job at a New York immigration law firm a couple months ago. She was recently arrested again at a protest against ICE.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the lawsuit accusing Alwan of knowing about Oct. 7 in advance was also against “AOC, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Mahmoud Khalil, and some ‘random professors at Columbia.’” These politicians and professors were actually involved in a previous lawsuit preceding the March lawsuit referenced here. Additionally, a previous version of this article identified the Fall 2024 vigil as being organized by SJP; it was actually organized by Jafra.