March Madness

Gaza, March 18, 2025, 📸 Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images

Since deserting the ceasefire deal ten days ago to resume its genocidal campaign and takeover of Palestinian land, Israel has killed 896 Palestinians, bringing the death toll to 50,251, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. That’s 896 men, women, and children—nearly 2 percent of the total murdered since October 7, 2023—killed within a span of ten days, amid the most inhumane of conditions created by Israel and materially supported by the US. Humanitarian aid continues to be blocked, limited food and medicine are being deliberately targeted, while doctors are sounding the alarm on a monstrous pattern of children being treated for close-range gunshot wounds.

Still, Israel is losing. Around the world, minds have changed, eyes have opened. We know that showing up for Palestine is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. We also know that being anti-Zionist is not antisemitic. Palestine, its people, and their freedom live in our hearts, which can never be stripped in the face of arrests, deportations, expulsions, and mass media deception. We will not betray our values, and we will not let fear pressure us.

Israel has been exposed as the occupier, the ethnic cleanser, as the supremacist state it's always been since its founding in 1948. As we bear witness to the Palestinian genocide in real time, the world has shifted, with organizations like the International Criminal Court and UN’s International Court of Justice finally holding Israel and the US in contempt for their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Recently I attended the US premiere of “The Encampments” at Angelika Film Center in Manhattan. Directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, the documentary dives into the 2024 student pro-Palestine movement, focusing on the Columbia University encampment, the first of hundreds of colleges globally to take over their campus lawns to protest Israel’s war on Gaza.

Covertly pitching tents in the middle of the night, Columbia students demanded the university’s divestment specifically from companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza, including Lockheed Martin, BlackRock, Google, and Microsoft. The film tells the story that mainstream media refused to. We hear from the students themselves, from whistleblowers, as well as Palestinians currently in Gaza (journalist and activist Bisan Owda shares her indispensable perspective). We see the student encampment from within and outside of the university’s gates, and how it evolves and escalates with each passing day.

“The Encampments” is narrated by Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate presently and illegally in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Since Khalil’s arrest on March 8th, in just the past three weeks, ICE has targeted and detained seven more international students and faculty from schools across the US—Columbia University, Cornell University, Brown University, Georgetown University, Tufts University, and the University of Alabama—for their links to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.

It’s worth noting that all the students targeted hold either green cards or student visas, and are protected by the U.S. Constitution. It’s also worth nothing that, under the First Amendment, all green card holders, visa holders, and undocumented immigrants have the legal right to criticize the government, participate in protests, and burn the American flag if they so desired to express themselves that way politically.

International Quds Day protest, Times Square, 📸 March 28, 2023

Today is International Quds Day. Established in 1979, each year tens of thousands of people around the world rally in solidarity with Palestine, denouncing Israel and the US, calling for the end of all occupied territories. New York City had its own rally in Times Square this afternoon in honor of Quds Day. With the demonstration came a small, obnoxious group of Zionist counter-protesters screaming obscenities and blaring fog horns in an attempt to overpower our peaceful demonstration. But we had signs, flags, each other, and the knowledge of being on the right side of history.

I truly think that the bulk counter-protesters haven’t stopped to consider that Israel is its own separate and independent country; an attack on Israel is, for a fact, not an attack on the US. And an attack on Israel is, another fact, not antisemitic, but anti-Zionist (aka anti-occupation/anti-settler colonialism).

With documentaries like “The Encampments” and “No Other Land” (I’d be remiss not to call out the Oscar-winning film’s director, Hamdan Ballal’s brutal beating by IDF soldiers just days ago) giving Palestinians the space and platform to tell their stories, along with social media boiling over with horrifying, urgent footage coming out of Gaza, I can only hope that more of us find the courage and compassion to cut through the overwhelming expanse of false and maddening narratives, like swatting dust motes in a sunbeam back into the void.