The Violence of Indifference

The Encampments film and the dangers of the past tense.

By Cecilia Zuniga

Illustration by Etta Lund

I am standing at the edge of Columbia’s South Lawn as a riot-geared battalion of NYPD officers floods the gate. Their boots hit the ground in lockstep, and we watch as they begin to peel students off the grass. Tearing apart linked arms, smug faces in uniform indulge in their own spectacle. One by one, our friends are zip-tied and dragged off of the lawn. Guttural screams begin to swell, and I taste hot, salty tears streaming down my face. There is an officer standing directly in front of me, refusing to look me in the eyes. We take a deep breath and flood the West Lawn. 

A year later, I am sinking into a polyester cushion, rewatching this scene at the Angelika. A wide-pan shot encapsulates the amassing crowd of students, as an orchestral composition overlays the scene of arrest. The camera, however, refuses to linger. An abrupt transition brings us a shaky hand-held shot, capturing the moment Sueda Polat, SIPA ’25, calls students to flood the other lawn. An intensifying cello concerto matches the scene’s brevity; I feel people in the theater holding their breath, and my chest feels heavy. 

The Encampments (2025) was released in an emergency screening at the Crosby Hotel on March 21, 2025, two weeks after the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, SIPA ’24. The 76-minute film was directed by BreakThrough News journalists Kei Pritsker and filmmaker Michael T. Workman, who camped at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment for two weeks last spring. Executively produced by Macklemore and BreakThrough Editor-in-Chief Ben Becker, the film dissects the chronology of pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia’s campus from October 2023 through the occupation of Hamilton Hall in April 2024. 

The Encampments sets out to dispel dominant media narratives surrounding the protests—largely framed as violent and antisemitic by mainstream news outlets—while also centering the voices of student organizers such as Polat, Khalil, since-expelled SWC President Grant Miner, and Naye Idriss, CC ’20. It counternarrates with a poignant focus on local community and national solidarity on other college campuses, while also foregrounding scenes of devastation and genocide in Gaza. “Do you remember how that felt?” Pritsker asks during the post-film Q&A at the Angelika. “Do you remember what kind of power we wielded for two weeks? Do you remember how we made the whole system come to its knees?” His questions are met with rousing applause. 

Yet as I subway back to Columbia, it feels impossible to grapple with past violence when it marches defiantly into the present. I return to a Columbia where The Encampments has yet to be screened on campus, where my fellow students continue to put their bodies on the line for Palestine. Columbia remains barricaded, surveilled, and militarized—sightings of NYPD’s Strategic Response Group have become normalized. I return to an institution that feigns helplessness as our peers are disappeared by a lawless state, an institution which has taken an active role in such palpable violence. Both Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, GS ’25, pleaded with Columbia's administration for protection days before they were targeted and detained by ICE. Neither were answered, nor have their names been mentioned in any formal correspondence from the administration. I return to eerie silence and a university that funds the total deprivation and squashing of human life in Gaza. 

For many, going to watch The Encampments is an act of solidarity. The televised genocide in Gaza persists against the Western media’s desensitization, and the film forces its audience to confront that. Yet as I read dozens of articles on The Encampments, I can’t help but notice the stickiness of past tense, the hesitancy to say the word “genocide,” and the luxury of being a third-party observer where solidarity can be doled out at convenience. Even on our own campus, hundreds of students stand by idly as their peers continue fighting for a free Palestine, regardless of criminalization, silencing, and institutional repression. There are those who play frisbee on the South Lawn, blasting Charli XCX to drown out our chants on the sundial. There are those whose attendance at protests hinges upon the shield of the press pass, as if the veneer of objectivity somehow justifies their non-participation. There are those who watch; and there are those who resist.

I write to those who limit this conversation to the realm of academic freedom. To those who have watched their peers get arrested and now theorize about it in history class. I write to those who showed up to the lawns last year, who felt it deeply, and have since settled into the ease of such dissonance. Indifference, and the refusal to feel, is violence. Indifference is how the University—how any fascist entity—will win. It is reprehensible that our peers have been kidnapped for speaking out against the merciless killing of their own people. It is egregious that we pass through police barricades to get to class. And it is grotesque that we continue to watch babies being pulled out of rubble on our screens.  This institution depends upon your hesitancy to speak and your consent to its profound violence. I write in the hopes of making you wake up to the rot beneath your feet. Until then, the rest of us will make you listen. 

Free Mahmoud, Free Mohsen, and Free Palestine.