In a development highlighting the continued aggression of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia, over 100 pro-Palestinian protesters wearing kaffiyahs and hiding their identities with masks stormed Columbia University’s Butler Library yesterday, remaining until the evening before being forced out by the NYPD.
The incident came despite efforts on the part of the Columbia administration to introduce new mask regulations and hire additional safety officers to limit pro-Palestinian activism that has veered into anti-Semitism under fiscal pressure–to the tune of freezing $400 million in federal funding–exerted by the Trump administration to push Columbia to address its anti-Semitism problen. While the intention of this protest may have been to reignite the encampment movement that swept across campuses last spring, it can also be seen as just one of a series of continued protests in response to the visa-revocation of non-citizen activists including Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student and permanent resident who acted as the spokesman for the activist pro-Palestinan groups behind the Columbia encampment.
These include a protest involving hundreds of Columbia students and faculty taking to the streets of New York in response to the detainments less than a month ago on April 17, and Columbia students chaining themselves to a fence just a few days later on April 21.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a broad coalition consisting of over 120 student groups that once supported Khymani James, 25, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and supports “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” took responsibility for the protest. The protesters, backed by CUAD, attempted to rename the library after Basel Al-Araj, the “militant intellectual” who, according to Israeli intelligence, plotted against Israel as part of a terrorist cell and who died in a two-hour standoff, shooting IDF soldiers. The renaming echoes the takeover of Hamilton Hall last year, at the time renamed by protesters Hind’s Hall after a six-year-old girl who died in Gaza.
That takeover led to two janitors suing Columbia University for the violence they experienced at the hands of the protesters.
Video of the protest shows a situation verging on assault, with protesters pushing and shoving against safety officers. At least two officers were injured in the protest during a crowd “surge”, and one protester was wheeled out on a stretcher. Though the protest inside was limited to the reading room of Butler Library, another group gathered outside the library in support of the protesters, breaching the doorway. It has not yet been determined whether non-students also supported the protest.
Over 80 students were finally arrested for storming the library, with charges being brought this morning.
Acting University President Claire Shipman released a statement saying that she had seen the reading room “defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans.” She also detailed how the protest had forced out “900 students studying for finals.” Shipman described herself as being “incensed” that this had happened at a time when the students were doing “critical academic work.” Though Shipman also called for Columbia to “come together as a community,” the exact way in which this will happen, or how Columbia might prevent something like this from occurring again, remains unclear.
Image of the Columbia submitted to Minding the Campus on May 8, 2025.
