The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’

Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.

“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”