
Two new documentaries tell very different stories about the campus protest movement for Palestine. In “October 8,” we’re told the protests are cesspools of antisemitic hate. But in “The Encampments,” we learn just how wrong that is.
October 8 / H8TE is not subtle about its claims. We hear, from various talking heads, that there is a “tsunami of Jew-hatred that has exploded across our country” (actress Debra Messing), that pro-Palestine demonstrations are full of “language that calls for genocide” against Jews (NYU professor Scott Galloway), and that such demonstrations are “pro-terror” (Columbia University student activist Noa Fay). Words like “hatred,” “terror,” and most of all “unsafe” are used throughout. In one particularly outlandish segment, we’re asked to believe that campus organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine are not only supportive of Hamas but are directly taking “marching orders” from it. The trouble is, this narrative isn’t true—and the evidence provided in the film is remarkably thin stuff.
What is that evidence? Well, a lot of it comes in the form of cherrypicked footage of individual protesters who have said or done something inflammatory. The filmmakers even managed to find a few genuine instances of antisemitism. The camera lingers, for instance, on a man standing on a street corner with a large, hand-written sign that says “JEWS CONTROL US, UK, AND EU.” Clearly, that’s antisemitic—although, notably, the man is standing alone, and it’s not clear where or when the footage was taken. There’s also a clip of the keffiyeh-clad figure who yelled “We are Hamas!” near the Columbia campus during a protest, and the threatening incident where a self-described “Palestinian activist” demanded the passengers on a New York City subway “raise your hands if you’re a Zionist” and leave the vehicle if they were. But the documentary runs out of these strong (yet isolated) examples pretty quickly, and has to start reaching. As Jake Romm notes in his scathing review for Defector, a shocking amount of the film’s runtime is devoted to “images of tweets or Instagram posts,” rather than anything that happened at a protest rally or encampment. Random posts from anonymous accounts are given inordinate weight. In fact, an alternate title for large chunks of this could be Comment Section: The Movie.
At one point, Representative Ritchie Torres makes an appearance, just to somberly inform us that somebody, somewhere, once posted the phrase “Stupid n—r u soppurt fucking Jews” as a reply to one of his many pro-Israel tweets. Now, to be clear, that’s both hateful and misspelled—but if the erstwhile Representative hadn’t brought it up, probably very few people would ever have seen the post. Another rude tweet Torres wants us to know about comes from a poster called “@q_skinz” who has a paltry 900 followers (at the time of writing). The documentary treats that kind of thing as evidence that the entire pro-Palestinian movement harbors intense antisemitism.
The problem with this logic should be obvious. We’re talking about a movement that has fielded as many as 50,000 protesters for individual marches and over a million worldwide. And yet the makers of October 8 are attempting to condemn that movement as antisemitic based on the words and actions of, generously, perhaps 10 or 15 unrelated people who have yelled an offensive slogan or held an antisemitic sign. But you can expect to find cranks and extremists hovering around the fringes of any large social movement, and that doesn’t tell you anything useful about the movement itself. We could use the same rationale to claim that every Republican voter believes in QAnon. Or we could say that all supporters of Israel are, by definition, violently Islamophobic. After all, some of them recently assaulted a passerby woman and chanted “Death to Arabs” outside a speech by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in Brooklyn, so maybe they all support that kind of thing. But that would be an equally bad argument.
It doesn’t help, either, that the people October 8 chooses to feature as its narrators and moral compasses are biased and non-credible to an often hilarious extent. Along with Ritchie Torres, we’re treated to appearances from Shai Davidai—the professor and pro-Israel activist who was banned from Columbia’s campus last year for “repeatedly harassing and intimidating other employees”—and from actor Michael Rapaport. Shortly before the documentary’s release, Rapaport attracted criticism when he praised the ultra-nationalist rabbi and terrorist Meir Kahane, whose followers are responsible for dozens of murders. In a video shared by the far-right Jewish organization Betar—which has also been providing the Trump administration with lists of targets for deportation—Rapaport bellowed that “Kahane was always right!” He has also posted videos of himself cackling with glee after the infamous Israeli pager bomb attacks in Lebanon and Syria, which killed at least “two children and four healthcare workers” and left other children with extensive burn scars. But in October 8, Rapaport gets to join the chorus of talking heads, complaining that more Hollywood celebrities aren’t staunchly pro-Israel like himself. By any reasonable definition, he’s a supporter of Israeli terrorism who’s featured in a documentary about how Gaza protesters are supposedly supporters of terrorism. The irony is thick.
For that matter, what about those terrorism claims? They come mainly from Jonathan Schanzer, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His nonprofit has a generic-sounding name, but it was founded in 2001 as “Emet” (Hebrew for “truth”), with a stated mission to “provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America.” (Its mission has since expanded to other issues, like scaremongering about China.) Schanzer takes issue with Students for Justice in Palestine in particular, and says this:
Today, we believe that there are about 200 different branches of SJP operating on campuses across the United States. When I say “we believe,” I say that because they are an unincorporated association. It’s not a nonprofit, it’s not a 501(c)3. They actually don’t exist on paper in any accountable way. People think they’re grassroots. What I don’t think they understand is, a terrorist group is actually providing them with marching orders.
By “a terrorist group,” of course, Schanzer means Hamas. And what evidence does October 8 give for this extremely serious allegation? First, that members of Hamas held a meeting in a Philadelphia hotel in 1993 and said that they wanted to “strengthen the Islamic activism for Palestine in North America” by getting their views shared in “American media outlets, universities and research centers.” (In the audio footage that’s presented, from an FBI wiretap, no specific universities or organizations are mentioned.) Second, that SJP “had a toolkit in place right after October 7” for how to organize pro-Palestine protests. This toolkit, it’s claimed, “came to them directly out of Hamas messaging.” But the only evidence Schanzer gives for this is the fact that SJP’s protest materials used phrases like “flood the streets for Palestine,” which is somewhat similar to the name of Hamas’ “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (its name for the Oct. 7 attacks). Finally, the documentary cites a single article in the Stanford Review, which claims that SJP has “strong ties” to another organization called American Muslims for Palestine, and that “Several members of AMP were formerly members of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which was dissolved after it was discovered in 2005 that the organization sent $12.4 million to Hamas.” Even this last accusation is questionable; for its part, Human Rights Watch says the dissolution of HLF was an example of Bush-era government overreach, noting that the organization was “never accused of directly funding terrorist organizations or terrorist attacks.” Instead, U.S. prosecutors claimed only that “the social programs they financed help win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Palestinian people for Hamas.”
So, to recap, the claims in the order they appear are:
- Some Hamas members held a meeting in 1993 where they mentioned spreading their views at colleges.
- Students for Justice in Palestine had protest materials that used the word “flood,” and Hamas also uses the word “flood.”
- Students for Justice in Palestine allegedly has “ties” to a different group called AMP, and some members of AMP used to be in a third group called HLF, which was dissolved after it was accused of giving money to Hamas in the early 2000s, although human rights groups dispute the accusation.
By itself, each of these is a factual statement. And yet, they do not add up to proof that Students for Justice in Palestine or anyone in it are even supportive of Hamas, let alone taking “marching orders” from Hamas. Not even close. It’s all insinuation and guilt-by-association. And yet this is enough for Schanzer, director Wendy Sachs, and the rest of the October 8 team to smear an entire protest movement as terroristic in nature.
And then, of course, there’s the ceaseless complaining about feeling “unsafe.” Talia Khan, a pro-Israel student activist at MIT, says that “Jewish students do not believe that the MIT administration has done an adequate job to make students feel safe on campus.” Jonathan Schanzer, when he’s not calling people terrorist supporters, says that “We now are in a situation where Jewish students on campus feel unsafe. They feel attacked[…] because of this growing movement of anti-Zionism.” Then viewers are told that a rabbi at Columbia circulated an open letter, claiming that its campus was “no longer safe for Jewish students.” And in one of October 8’s biggest running plotlines, we hear that Tessa Veksler—the former student body president of UC Santa Barbara, and yet another pro-Israel activist—“had to take all my exams online, because campus was just not safe for me.” Along with Comment Section: The Movie, another alternate title for the documentary could just be I Feel Unsafe.
However, there’s a difference between feeling unsafe and actually being unsafe. Notably, nobody in the film says they were harmed physically by a pro-Palestinian demonstrator. (If they were, you can bet we’d be hearing about it.) It’s all ambient feelings and vibes, based on seeing symbols, hearing slogans, and reading posts. Veksler herself is probably the best example of that pattern, because her reasons for feeling “unsafe” and fleeing the Santa Barbara campus are pathetically thin. One of them is that, after she posted on Instagram that “I stand with the people of Israel,” she received some “mean” comments. Each of these is shown, accompanied by echoey sound effects, onscreen: they include “most tone deaf president of all time maybe” and a string of green barfing emojis. Probably everyone who uses Instagram has received something worse, at one point or another, but the posts are described as “hate flooding in.” In another rather underwhelming incident, somebody apparently scrawled “Zionist not allowed” on a sheet of paper and put it on the door of a campus common room, together with some other protest signs including “When people are occupied, resistance is justified” inside. This is framed in the film as a terrifying threat, and the “resistance is justified” phrase in particular has attracted a lot of condemnation elsewhere—but it should be noted that, under international law, it is true that people have a right to resist military occupation, invasion, and bombardment, making the slogan a simple statement of fact. This is the kind of thing you find threatening if you’ve never faced an actual threat in your life.
And the biggest, most offensive act of harassment of all? Some students dared to circulate a recall petition against Veksler in her capacity as student body president, claiming that she had “fail[ed] to properly condemn racism and Islamophobia on campus.” Frankly, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since it’s unlikely that a committed activist who stands on one side in a heated political struggle can make decisions for all students fairly. If the roles were reversed, and the student body president were a vocal member of Students for Justice in Palestine, Veksler would doubtless see the issue differently. At any rate, it’s something students in a democratic body have every right to do. But in October 8, the recall campaign is treated as antisemitic harassment in itself, complete with more screenshots and ominous sound effects.
No, you don’t understand, they had FLYERS!
And the result of this whole situation? The recall petition failed, and Veksler kept her position. She got what she wanted. But for a brief while, she had to face opposition to her views, and she felt uncomfortable about it. So clearly, she wants you to think it’s she, and not anybody starving or being bombed to bits in Gaza, who is the real victim here.
Some of this stuff may seem silly, but the political consequences of pushing this narrative are serious. In the first place, making the conversation about what American students are doing and saying on American college campuses distracts from the most important issue, and the reason for the whole protest movement to exist: the ongoing and systematic massacre of the people of Gaza. Tellingly, Gaza is barely mentioned in October 8. If you got all your information from the documentary, you’d think all these students just woke up, saw that the October 7 attacks had happened, and thought “well, time to go be antisemitic!” But really, they’re just trying to stop the killing, and that should be the first focus of every discussion. Instead, October 8 helps to prolong it by smearing the anti-genocide demonstrators and their movement. In that sense, the film is war propaganda—and, notably, members of the Israeli military appear as speakers at multiple points. But beyond this, when you recklessly accuse people of antisemitism, say Jewish people are “unsafe” in America, and even baselessly claim protest groups are taking “marching orders” from Hamas, you lay the groundwork for a state crackdown against dissent of all kinds. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen unfold. Under Joe Biden’s presidency, many campus protests were dispersed with brutal police force. Under Donald Trump, students are now being kidnapped off the street by masked federal agents simply for co-writing essays in defense of Palestinian rights—and antisemitism is being used as the pretext. That isn’t “safe” for anyone, Jewish, Palestinian, or otherwise. But the media figures who spend their days slandering protesters have led us directly to this point.
Thankfully, not every documentary about the Palestinian cause is a piece of manipulative hackwork. In fact, The Encampments is quite good. For one thing, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, coming in at a crisp 82 minutes. For another, it contains no extended slideshows of Twitter screenshots. Instead, the newer documentary directly addresses many of the arguments (and pseudo-arguments) made by its opposite number, as if it were made deliberately as a rebuttal.
Whereas Gaza is noticeably absent in October 8, it’s omnipresent in The Encampments. At several points, the camera cuts back to its rubble-strewn streets, its destroyed homes, and its children roaming—possibly orphaned—in search of something to eat. On Columbia University’s campus, we see a drawing of a white kite attached to a tent, a memorial for the murdered Palestinian poet Dr. Refaat Alareer. In Gaza, we see young people writing messages in English on their own tents in refugee camps: Thank you students for Columbia. The two images mirror each other, and the connection between the two places, the two struggles, is underlined. As viewers, we’re never allowed to forget the stakes of this fight.
The two films are also very different in their sense of focus. While October 8 jumps all over the place looking for examples of pro-Palestinian-related antisemitism (and finds few genuine ones), The Encampments focuses exclusively on Columbia, its internal politics, and the various people and groups who have come into conflict there. It offers depth instead of shallow breadth, and the logic behind the encampments and the demand for Columbia to divest itself financially from Israel is laid out in thorough detail. The documentary follows a few main figures, including Mahmoud Khalil, United Auto Workers organizer Grant Miner, and Sueda Polat, a graduate student in human rights. Together, they give a flurry of facts and figures. Columbia’s endowment, one of the largest in the United States, is $14.8 billion, and it invests that money in all kinds of things—but it does so under conditions of secrecy, so in many cases, students aren’t even allowed to know what financial holdings their school has. However, the New York Times reports that the university has made significant investments in “Google, which has a large contract with the Israeli government, and Airbnb, which allows listings in Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.” The Google connection is especially grim for a civilian educational institution, since the tech company reportedly “rushed to sell AI tools” to the IDF as the bombardment of Gaza kicked off in October and November of 2023. Such tools have been used to target individual homes in Gaza for bombardment. And the ties to the weapons industry go further: Obama-era Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, we learn, is both a member of the Board of Trustees at Columbia and the Board of Directors at Lockheed Martin. The Encampments exposes a dark moral stain, and one of its most compelling quotes comes from Mahmoud Khalil, who condemns his school’s complicity in human slaughter:
“What university would want to invest in weapons technology? Why would you do that? We are giving you your university back, to be an honest university.”
The filmmakers also note that Columbia has a long history of making divestments on ethical grounds. The endowment broke away from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa in 1985, and from companies that operated in Sudan during the Darfur genocide in 2006 (though they reversed that divestment in 2021, just in time for a new round of civil war and genocide in Sudan). They also divested from tobacco companies in 2008, from private prisons in 2015, and from fossil fuel companies in 2017. So students like Khalil, Miner, and Polat were not demanding anything unprecedented or outrageous from their university. They were only asking that it apply the same ethical standards to Israeli war crimes in Gaza that it had already used for many other issues. Setting up tent encampments and occupying buildings like Hind’s Hall—formerly “Hamilton Hall,” but renamed by the protesters for Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by the IDF in February 2024—wasn’t their first resort, but their last. The tents went up only in April 2024, after Columbia students had voted to divest from Israel in 2020 and submitted petitions for the same thing in December 2023, but were refused by the administration each time. Mass protest was the only option left.
One aspect of Columbia’s history stands out in The Encampments: the university’s role as a key battleground in the protest movement against the Vietnam war more than 50 years ago. Grainy archival footage of tents on the lawn then cuts into high-definition footage of tents on the lawn now, and we see groups of young students from the 1960s occupy Hind’s Hall (back when it was called Hamilton Hall) in the same way the Gaza protesters did in 2024. In a news soundbite, we hear Senator Bernie Sanders say that Gaza could be “Biden’s Vietnam,” as indeed it proved to be.2 In fact, when we look at the historical record, we find that the two movements’ tactics are nearly identical—something W.D. Ehrhart, a Vietnam veteran who became a staunch anti-war activist after his military service, pointed out in Current Affairs while the Columbia protests were still in full swing. But there’s a deep hypocrisy on display, because while Columbia’s administration boasts about the university’s “long and proud tradition of protest and activism”—and its webpages are full of material about the Vietnam era— they condemn the same kind of protest now, when it’s a live issue. It’s like they’re trying to embody the sarcastic definition of a liberal that went viral in 2023: “someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”
The same slander, harassment, and violence that was leveled against the Vietnam-era protesters has returned in the Palestine struggle, and it’s on full display in The Encampments. Back in the 1960s, as Ehrhart recalls, U.S. military officials made the same allegations of insidious foreign influence that opponents of the Gaza encampments do today, calling the antiwar movement “an arm of Hanoi within the United States.” It was a lie then, just as the idea of protesters receiving “marching orders” from Hamas is a lie now. But it provided enough excuse for police to show up and “wad[e] into peaceful demonstrations with tear gas, riot clubs, and guns.” In the documentary, we see the same state-sanctioned violence play out on Columbia’s campus, with cops showing up in armored vehicles to the site of the protests and shoving people, handcuffing them, and dragging them along the ground. Elsewhere in the country, universities have taken Columbia’s crackdown as a green light to suppress their own protests, including with pepper spray, tasers, and rubber bullets. At the Indiana University encampment, Current Affairs contributor Bryce Greene was described over the radio by a police sniper who seemed to view him as a potential target: “Main actor, Black male with the afro. In a black shirt.” This, not receiving a mean tweet in your mentions, is what it means to be threatened for your beliefs.
It’s all the more ironic that this kind of crackdown is being carried out in the name of stopping “antisemitism,” since so many of the protesters who have put their academic careers and their bodies on the line for Gaza are Jewish themselves. This fact is entirely ignored in October 8, where Bari Weiss looks smugly into the camera and says that “there’s no separating Zionism from Judaism.” In that film, the existence of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, or the 350 rabbis who have condemned Israel for its ethnic cleansing, isn’t even mentioned. “Jewish” and “Zionist” are treated as synonymous words, just as Weiss says, in order to claim that statements about “Zionism” are really hate speech. But this is a false equivalency. Plenty of the most fervent Zionists aren’t Jewish at all, but Evangelical Christians who believe war in the Middle East is necessary to bring about the Biblical end times; Mike Huckabee, the Trump administration’s newly-appointed ambassador to Israel, is one of these dangerous fanatics. And if anything, it’s antisemitic in a far more profound way to associate all Jewish people with the actions of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, or the rogue state they run.
Really, the world is full of courageous and principled Jewish people who object in the strongest way to Israel’s actions, and we meet several of them in The Encampments. Grant Miner is one such Jewish activist, and one of the most important organizers of the entire encampment project. He relates how he grew up with Zionist beliefs, thinking that “Jews needed a state” and calls to “free Palestine” were overblown, before becoming “disillusioned” later in life. We meet Rabbi Abby Stein leading a circle of students in traditional Jewish songs and prayers in the middle of the Columbia encampment. At one point, there’s even a huge banner that says “Shabbat Shalom from the Liberation Zone.” The solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian communities is moving, and the idea that all these people are motivated by ethnic or religious hatred is just laughable. 3
Now, a little more than a month from its release, many of the main figures in The Encampments have come under intense repression. Grant Miner was recently expelled from Columbia for his activism, which is not just a free-speech issue but a labor one, since he was the president of the UAW chapter that represents graduate workers on the campus. The journalist Ali Abunimah, who appears briefly in the documentary to discuss the genocide charges against Israel, was detained and interrogated by police in Switzerland, then expelled from the country, purely for his speech. The full weight of the U.S. State Department has been brought to bear against Mahmoud Khalil, who’s now sitting in a notorious ICE detention center in Louisiana, about a three and a half-hour drive from where I’m typing these words. Even the Trump administration admits he’s committed no crime beyond having the wrong opinions.
Just watching The Encampments can get you targeted. Just two days ago, a crowd of students at UCLA tried to hold a screening outdoors, only to be interrupted by “around 30 UCPD [University of California Police Department] officers wearing riot gear” and “armed with less-than-lethal weapons,” who reportedly “ran into the crowd of students, detaining two individuals and confiscating the screening equipment.” Again, I’d like the makers of October 8 to look me in the eye and tell me who’s “unsafe” in this country.
If The Encampments has a flaw, as a piece of narrative filmmaking, it’s that it doesn’t have much of an ending. It just kind of stops, with the underlying conflict unresolved. But that’s because the ending hasn’t been decided yet; as the great Joe Strummer reminds us, “the future is unwritten.” It’s up to us to write it, and make it a good one.
On a hot and humid Friday last month, the New Orleans chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace put out a call online: they were going to make some noise outside the local ICE office and demand freedom for Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and every other political prisoner being held in this country. So I left the blue-white glare of the computer for an hour or two and joined them, along with my Current Affairs colleagues John Ross and Nathan Robinson. For a Friday, and on short notice, the protesters got a good turnout; at a guess, probably 50 people showed up altogether. People from the local Palestinian community—and we have a big one, here in the Crescent City—spoke about what their families in the Middle East have gone through. A woman from Jewish Voice for Peace, whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten, sung a haunting rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.” There was quite a lot of chanting, yelling, and banging on drums; the green-and-red flags blew horizontal in the strong wind. I don’t know if the ICE officers up in the building could hear us, but I hope we ruined their lunch breaks. Watching The Encampments, I recognize the same spirit in the students at Columbia that I saw then. The anger, yes, but also the love for our fellow human beings who are being harmed, and the determination that this obscene bombing and starvation campaign will end, whatever it takes. There’s no way anybody can claim, in any kind of honesty or good faith, that it’s antisemitism you see at these protests. Just the opposite. It’s the best humanity has to offer, and no amount of lying and complaining from the supporters of war crimes and genocide will slow it down.
1. Although another contender for that grim title is the killings in the “dirty war” carried out by the fascist Argentinian dictatorship of the late 1970s, which had a confirmed count of at least 1,296 Jewish victims and possibly as many as 3,000. The United States, of course, supported the dictatorship.
2. Not that Bernie, who’s somehow still trotting out the line about Israel’s “right to defend itself,” is necessarily a guiding light here.
3. In a recent debate about The Encampments, the Israeli writer Hen Mazzig has taken issue with the film’s portrayal of Jewish protesters, claiming that it’s equivalent to a racist group saying “we’re not racists, we have some Black folks we can push forward.” But keep in mind, people like Miner and Rabbi Stein weren’t just present at the Columbia protests, they were in leadership roles. Miner, in particular, was one of the most important organizers. The same is true for a lot of pro-Palestinian events around the country, like the recent occupation of Trump Tower led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Tokenism, this isn’t.