The Encampments: A powerful new doc about the pro-Gaza student movement

Mahmoud Khalil looms large in The Encampments, a powerful new documentary about the student movement that erupted at Columbia University in solidarity with Gaza last year. Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who in March was unlawfully arrested by Ice agents and now faces deportation due to his activism, is one of the primary interview subjects.

While the Trump administration and his allies in the media have sought to portray Khalil as a rabble-rousing extremist, he comes across as gentle and softly spoken, motivated by a belief in freedom, equality and the value of human life. Khalil is not the only interviewee to have suffered serious consequences for his involvement in the protests: while it’s not as dramatic, Grant Miner – a graduate student, teacher and union leader at Columbia – was recently expelled and fired from his job. Because of these events, and others like them, we’re now in an uncertain moment: it’s not yet clear whether last year’s protests were a peak for the pro-Palestine student movement, or whether they were only the beginning. 

The Encampments was co-directed by journalist Kei Pritsker and filmmaker Michael T. Workman, and produced by Watermelon Pictures and the hip-hop artist Macklemore. The documentary focuses on the particular tactic of the encampments – students camping in tents on the lawns of their universities – which started at Columbia last April before spreading to campuses elsewhere in the US and around the world. It shows how these peaceful protests were met with extraordinary repression, police brutality and violence, and slandered by the political and media establishment: we see one pundit complaining about the “little Gazas” and “disgusting cess pools” springing up across the country, Netaynahu comparing the protesters to Nazis in 1930s Germany, and Columbia professor Shai Davidai calling them terrorists. 

While focused on the US, the narrative is firmly rooted in what was happening in Gaza at the time, interspersing footage of the encampments with interviews with Gaza-based Bisan Owda, harrowing scenes of devastation and human suffering, and the call for help made by Hind Rijab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car surrounded by dead bodies for several hours before being murdered by an IDF sniper (when Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall, they renamed it after her.) By placing Gaza centre-stage, The Encampments makes clear what the stakes were: this was not an abstract struggle but a desperate, real-time attempt to stop a genocide.

Last week, I interviewed co-director Kei Pritsker over Zoom. We discussed Mahmoud Khalil, the effects of Trump’s efforts to repress the Palestine movement, whether Israel’s decline in public approval is reversible, and more. 

How are you feeling about what happened to Mahmoud Khalil?

Kai Pritsker: We found out about it like everyone else, on our phones, and it was devastating. But knowing Mahmoud, it would be almost irresponsible for us to fall into despair or to start spreading fear. This tactic of arresting, abducting, and attempting to deport people is designed to silence us, so we don’t want to protest anymore. But if you’ve ever met Mahmoud, or if you’ve watched the film or read the letter that he wrote from prison, you know that he is unbreakable. This has been the quest of his entire life. The issue of Palestine is not a random thing for him. His grandparents were expelled from Palestine during the Nakba. I don’t want to give away too much, as I encourage people to watch the film and hear his story, but it’s an issue that's defined his whole life, this quest to right the injustices faced not just by his family but by millions of Palestinian refugees who share the same story. When asked at the encampment if he was afraid of being deported, he said, ‘I will live. Palestine will live.’ He's not going to be broken by this. I don’t know what will happen with this case, but even if the worst-case scenario happens and he is deported, I know he will never stop talking about Palestine. I know he will never give up.

Why was the reaction to these encampments, from politicians and the media, so hysterical?

Kai Pritsker: In any logical world, there should be nothing super controversial about this. These students weren’t hurting anyone, they were peacefully sitting on a lawn and demanding an end to a genocide. But the university relies on patronage from people that are embroiled in the military-industrial complex, in corporations that benefit and profit from war. If you look at most of the Board of Trustees, a lot of them are people who either work directly for these companies or who, because of their class position in society, want to see the continuation of the status quo and generally feel like they benefit from US foreign policy.

As for the media reaction, I think what triggered the hysteria was the fact that this represented the disintegration of decades of pro-Israel propaganda. The children of some of the most powerful people in the country go to Columbia, and these students – and students all over the country – were not only rejecting this propaganda but saying: ‘we are going to risk everything that this society has told us to value, i.e. our college degrees, prestige, the Ivory tower. We don’t care about any of that. It means nothing to us.’ I remember one student said, ‘how could I care about getting a C in chemistry knowing that there are no schools left in Gaza?’ That really is the mentality of the students, and it’s not a mentality you can discipline or chastise by throwing someone in prison. They’re just going to come out and do the same thing over again – so many of the students, as soon as they got out of jail, came right back to the campus.

We’re told we live in a democracy, but if you can’t even demand a ceasefire, which is what the vast majority of Americans have wanted to see for the last 18 months, then then what kind of democracy do we even have?

We have seen a significant shift in public opinion against Israel in the last 18 months, particularly among younger generations. Do you think that is now irreversible? 

Kai Pritsker: I think so. There are certain things in life that you just can’t unsee, and I’m not at all surprised that people are completely disgusted with the genocide that Israel’s committing. After all, this is what we‘re taught is the worst crime conceivable. A lot has changed in the US in the last few years. Whether it was the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street, the uprising in 2020 against racism, people have generally had a greater and greater sense that we’re being lied to by the powers that be. I think [the issue of] Palestine has shown people that you really have no say in this society. We’re told we live in a democracy, but if you can’t even stop a genocide in that democracy, if you can’t even demand a ceasefire, which is what the vast majority of Americans have wanted to see for the last 18 months, then then what kind of democracy do we even have? What kind of democracy is it when the majority of people in the country want a cease fire, but the entire media is just backing one side: they won’t talk about the Nakba, they won’t talk about the blockade of Gaza, they won't talk about what it's like to live in the West Bank, that it’s literally a racialised apartheid no different than Jim Crow. 

Are you concerned that, following the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors, there’s going to be a chilling effect?

Kai Pritsker: No, I’m not. I want people to remember that the reason they're doing this is because we are winning. They're doing this because they've lost the battle of ideas, the battle for people's hearts and minds. They are trying to defend an indefensible position, and people see Israel for what it is now: it is not ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, it’s a racist ethno-state that has ethnic cleansing literally baked into its DNA. So I’m not concerned, because once the truth is out there you can’t really get it back in the bottle. I think they’re trying to stop an idea whose time has come. At this point, the liberation of Palestine feels inevitable, and I think one day we’ll look back at this moment and say, ’wow, they really thought that arresting students was going to convince everyone that genocide was OK’.

The Encampments is out now, screening at various cinemas in New York, including Film at Lincoln Centre, Nitehawk and Alamo Drafthouse, and most major cities in the United States.