The documentary “The Encampments” captures what the corporate media hid during the 2024 mass student protests against Israel’s genocide — that a rainbow coalition organized against genocide.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test of institutional integrity. When a university denies the reality of Israel’s brutality, it reveals complicity with the genocidal regime’s actions. To then misrepresent campus dissent over institutional investment in the Zionist entity as illegitimate — or even “antisemitic” — makes it clear that that these institutions are invested in the existence of Israeli apartheid and genocide.
These contradictions were brought to a head during the Gaza solidarity encampment movement in 2024, where hundreds of college campuses around the world protested against their universities’ affiliations and investments in anything related to Israel. The media and Zionists inside these universities cried wolf about widespread bigotry and hatred, and many believed them.
Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker documented through their film, “The Encampments,” that these protests were not only peaceful and nonviolent but that the violence described in the media almost always came from the Zionist counter protestors.
Workman and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who was a negotiator for the encampment movement and was made famous after being kidnapped by ICE agents, join host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. They share their experiences seen in the film as well as updates to Khalil’s case as he faces potential deportation by the Trump administration. The film — as well as their accounts — document a clear narrative that demonstrates the failure of our institutions to abide by any moral standards, and their active role in descending Western society into fascist authoritarianism.
Transcript
Chris Hedges
On April 17, 2024, hundreds of students at Columbia University set up an encampment to protest the genocide in Gaza and demand that the university divest from corporations that profit from the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine. Columbia’s administration swiftly attempted to shut down the encampment, nicknamed “the liberated zone,” by authorizing police onto the Columbia campus to arrest 100 students. The move backfired. Students at some 100 universities across the country, following Columbia’s example, as well as in Europe, India, Australia and South Africa set up their own encampments.
These students catapulted the question of Palestine and American complicity in the genocide into the public consciousness. They asked obvious questions. If universities divested from apartheid South Africa, why didn’t they divest from the apartheid state of Israel? If they divested from corporations that profited from Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, why didn’t they divest from corporations that profited from Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza?
These students became our nation’s conscience. They understood that the genocide in Gaza is intimately linked with the climate and justice movement, the rights of indigenous people, the wars of extraction and exploitation in places such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indian-occupied Kashmir.
They saw that Palestine presaged a global order where genocidal campaigns would become the norm, not the exception, waged by industrial nations determined to hoard the world’s wealth and resources as the climate crisis ravaged the globe.
The documentary film “The Encampments,” which offers an antidote to the abysmal coverage and slanderous caricatures of the campus protests by the establishment media, is directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman.
It spends seven months following student organizers such as Sueda Polat, Grant Miner and Naye Idriss as well as Mahmound Khalil, who would be seized on March 8, 2025 at his Manhattan apartment by Immigration Customs Enforcement agents who alleged false information on his 2024 green card application, which he denies. Khalil spent 104 days in a detention center in Louisiana until a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional.
University administrations conspired over the summer of 2024, often hiring security firms with links to Israel, to draw up draconian rules to shut down all forms of protests and prescribe free speech, turning college campuses into academic gulags.
But for a few glorious weeks, which this film masterfully documents, the voices of the oppressed were heard and a world based on justice, equality and the rule of law championed.
Joining me to discuss the film, the encampments and the struggle for Palestine are Michael T. Workman and Mahmoud Khalil.
Mahmoud, let’s begin with you. You functioned as one of the chief spokespeople for the encampments. You negotiated, if we want to use that term, with the university officials. Let’s talk about that process of your role as an intermediary between university officials and the student protesters.
Mahmoud Khalil
Thank you so much, Chris, for having me. And I, in fact, was just negotiating between the students and the administration. So I wasn’t acting like as a spokesperson. And in that process, I believe Columbia never dealt with the encampment as a righteous civil rights movement or as students with demands.
They reacted to it as a PR [public relations], as a disciplinary matter at Columbia and you feel like they want to contain it. They don’t want to actually talk about the demands. And we’re very clear, I told them, why would you invest in weapon manufacturers? It’s not about Palestine, it’s not about Israel, but why an educational institution wants to invest and profit off weapons, whether defensive, offensive, or any of that.
But it was clear they were not in the market to actually talk, they don’t want to be seen as conceding to the students. But they wanted to make the illusion that there was talks with the students and the administration. And the students understood that very well. And that’s why they took the step of escalating and going to Hind’s Hall, previously Hamilton Hall, because this administration and I think that the film captures very well the encampments.
However, before the encampments, these students have been organizing for many years. The first referendum from Columbia students asking the university to divest from Israel was in 2002. What did the university do then? Nothing. In fact, one of Columbia’s former presidents, Lee Bollinger said, the investment from Israel is not a topic that we will ever discuss at Columbia.
Now it is the only topic that’s being discussed in Columbia. And even the months before October 7, students were organizing against Columbia’s increasing ties with Israel. They opened the center in Tel Aviv, Columbia Global Center in Tel Aviv. They established partnerships with Tel Aviv University, a university that’s complicit in creating weapons research against Palestinians to enrich the occupation there.
So the students were organizing, yet the university did not want to hear from them anything. They did not even want to meet with these students. That’s why the students actually escalated to the point of the encampment and later to the point of the occupation of Hamilton.
Chris Hedges
Well, one of the things that we saw was that immediately after October 7th, before there were any protests at Columbia, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine were banned. Before anything happened.
Mahmoud Khalil
Yeah, it was again like with Columbia trying to set the scene for what activism for Palestine should be on campus. These two groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and SJP, as soon as for justice in Palestine for years, they’ve been working, organizing about about what a free Palestine would look like, about what crimes Israel does to Palestinians.
They organized the apartheid week. After October 7, they immediately also like work to mobilize the campus. Yeah, university officials, one of them actually said that they banned these groups “for hateful rhetoric,” and then apologized and said, actually, there was no point of me saying that. Yet only the media would show you that first comment and not the second.
Chris Hedges
Michael, the film, it’s a wonderful film and one of the things that was so refreshing about it is that it provided an honest portrayal of what happened inside the encampments. I visited Columbia a few times, but I spent a lot of time at the Princeton encampment. These were not bastions of anti-Semitism.
On a rough count, maybe 20 or 30% of the protesters were Jewish. In Princeton, on Friday night would have, the Muslim students would do their prayers on a tarp, and then the Jewish students would have Shabbat on the same tarp. This was the world we wanted to create. And I just want you to begin by talking about the media portrayal. It was relentlessly hostile and patently false.
Michael T Workman
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is really kind of the impetus for making a documentary about this. We didn’t set out with the intentions of making a feature film, but seeing the way that the media completely fallaciously maligned the student movement and refused to engage with what the students were actually talking about. That was what really motivated us to make something that could challenge that narrative.
You know, every opportunity the media got to actually engage with what the students were demanding, to engage with the content of the protest. They refused to do that and would reroute and redirect to false claims of violence on campus and false claims of anti-Semitism when one of the largest ethnic groups on these encampments were Jewish students.
And it just was patently false. We ended up having kind of real, factual evidence of what happened on the campus. And so we felt like it was our duty to try to challenge that because the corporate media really has a vice grip control over a large portion of the population. And, you know, as media makers, as filmmakers, as artists, I think it’s our duty to try to fight back against that however we can by making really emotionally resonant films and art that moves people.
And I think one of the things that really also inspired us to make the film was just seeing the bravery of the students.
To be able to be that close and intimate in that environment and to see the sacrifice the students were making and the bravery to stand up against such a repressive state apparatus. I think it’s a disservice to the global population not to be able to see that and experience it, to know what it’s like to stand up and fight back against sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds.
Chris Hedges
Well, the attacks on the students, and it’s portrayed in the film, were violent. People were hurt. One of the most moving, so I found the whole film very moving, but one of the moving moments is when the administration in Columbia thinks they’re going to shut the thing down by arresting 100 students and then students hop the fence to take their place.
And I think one of things that frustrated all of us who supported these movements, these encampments, is that the real violence was carried out against the protesters. And you capture that horrific scene in, was it UCLA, right? Where pro-Zionist thugs with long truncheons and flashbang grenades and of course on the steps of a little library you had, I think there were former IDF Soldiers if I’m not mistaken I would use some kind of chemical spray against students.
But when the violence when you documented and line it up was not directed at Jewish students or even Zionist students it was directed towards the people protesting and I think what was the global figure, 3,000 students were arrested, 100 students at Columbia were expelled.
Michael T Workman
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like this is one of those things where, it’s just like Israel where every accusation is an admission of guilt. You know, it’s like psychological projection where the people who are doing the violence are claiming that there’s being violence inflicted on them at every turn. And UCLA was the perfect example of this, you know.
The administration and the police department watched as a violent gang of Zionist counter protesters invaded the camp and beat people with steel pipes and screamed slurs. There was a festival that UCLA condoned next to the encampment that was funded by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife that was blasting Israeli torture music into the encampment.
And then there’s footage in the film of those counter protesters who were coming up to the encampment protesters and threatening them with slurs and a whole lot of other things. So, you know, every accusation is an admission and it really rang true throughout this whole process, through this whole protest movement.
Mahmoud Khalil
Yeah, and I want to add and it was very ironic that some of these Zionist students who come to claim victimhood in the classroom. During the winter break, like of 2023, 2024, a lot of them were actively participating in the genocide. They went for their winter break to their IDF service to go participate as military personnel and then come back to Columbia and say that we’re facing anti-Semitism.
Yet Columbia rewarded one of those students who assaulted, literally assaulted other Columbia students with pepper spray or whatever like chemical sprays and gave him close to $400,000. And we only discovered that because Congress actually mentioned it in their report.
So that’s the environment that Columbia University nurtured. And the students at the encampment as well, like, we’re investing a lot in de-escalation techniques. Like, there were a lot of teachings about de-escalation because we knew that these students only wanted to come, or these actors, because not only students, unfortunately some faculty, were participating in harassing and intimidating the pro-Palestine students, who would come, instigate violence, provocate, and then just looking for that five second video or one photo to publish online to say like, see, there’s antisemitism at Columbia, to create that fiction that this movement is inherently antisemitic or there’s like antisemitism because of the Palestine movement on campus.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk a little bit about, Mahmoud, the occupation of Hind’s Hall, why that took place, its significance. In the film, there’s black and white footage of the 1968 occupation of Hamilton Hall. It appears that those ‘68 protests against the Vietnam War were important to the students at Columbia, but talk about that moment and why it happened.
Mahmoud Khalil
Absolutely. I mean, the students were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement tradition or the protest tradition at Columbia University, starting with the ‘68, of course, when students were opposing the Vietnam War, also in support of the Civil Rights Movement. They occupied Hamilton Hall because of Columbia ties to that and Columbia’s attempt to expand into Harlem area.
But also then during the anti-apartheid South Africa movement, also the students took that same step. So that was the hysterical, I would say, significance of occupying Hamilton Hall. But it’s not only about that significance. It’s about the students wanting to have their voices heard. The university refused to do that. The university refused to engage in good faith negotiations.
In fact, the morning of Hamilton Hall, the university came and distributed flyers that if you don’t leave this area by 2 p.m., you will be disciplined, you will be expelled, police may come in. So literally, the university dealt with the encampment the same way, I would say, of course, on a different scale, how Israel deals with Gaza, with literally like a siege.
The first few days of the encampment, the university wouldn’t let food or blankets in. So we had to negotiate, people want to use the bathroom, can they use the bathroom? And then with distributing leaflets and flyers, the same way that Israel would do that, basically forcing people to leave their houses, Columbia also did that. So at that point, the students felt that they’re not being heard, that they wanted to do something more significant. So they took that step of, and it was like barely 40, 50 students to go into Hamilton Hall and rename it into Hind’s Hall.
Because again, these students’ main concern was, look at what’s happening in Gaza. Look at the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. That’s why they named it after Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl who was shot hundreds of times by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. So they wanted to also shift that focus back to Gaza, that it’s not about us, it’s not about what we’re doing here. We’re doing here to stop the genocide in Palestine.
Chris Hedges
And maybe you can just explain, it’s in the film, what was the response.
Mahmoud Khalil
You know, like, it’s insane every time I think about it because Columbia with the collaboration of many billionaires, they pushed the NYPD to bring military-grade equipment. Like, if you look at the photos and the videos, it’s literally military-grade equipment coming into a small building with only 40 people inside.
Like if you only knock the door, like people, that’s it. They did not, even the morning of that day, the university, they suspended me as the negotiator. So saying that we don’t, they want to cut off any kind of communication with these protesters. So it’s just like you see the collision between money and power to curb any protest against the status quo, against the establishment. And as a result, the police opened fire, actually, on the protesters.
Chris Hedges
These were with rubber bullets, is that correct? And tear gas?
Mahmoud Khalil
No, no, no, there was one live bullet that was shot. So you can see the level of violence that was inflected upon these students. And I will say it once again that it’s Columbia University that invited violence into its campus by bringing the police, not one time, not two times, over about five times in a matter of one year.
And the last time the police came to Columbia was in the 1960s. So for over 55 years or more, the police did not come to campus, but because of the Palestinian or pro-Palestine protests, the police came about five times to campus.
Chris Hedges
Michael, towards the end of the film you have Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia, finally was pushed out making this unbelievable statement about wanting to recreate community after shutting down these encampments and expelling a hundred students and then you immediately juxtapose it with the kind of police state that Columbia University has become. Let’s talk about that moment in the film because it’s significant. And they ensured that these comments would not come back.
Michael T Workman
Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like a cartoonish part of the film. I mean, there’s many parts of this film that feel like it’s almost like a comic book villain. I would say like Eric Adams also falls into that category throughout the film, the now will-be former mayor of New York City.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, right. He’s another one.
Michael T Workman
But you know, Minouche Shafik kind of ends the film, like you said, in this very dystopian address to all of the students about wanting to create community and peace and that we’ll talk about these complicated things through civil discourse. And the reality was that, yeah, like you said, Columbia became a police state.
There were… it was incredibly hard for even students to get on campus. They recreated a kind of war on terror-adjacent threat level that they would use to change the security on campus. They literally, there was like a meme that came out of like George Bush’s threat level during the war on terror where they used red level or orange or yellow or green as the danger on campus and they were doing the same thing and it was really, I mean, it’s almost kind of pathetic.
At the same time because, they’re spending millions and millions of dollars on private security every single day to not divest from Israel. And the security guards, like, for the most part, don’t really care. They’re just symbolically on campus, you know.
When I would go on campus, I would film for hours with a big camera and they would just look at me and do nothing, you know? So it’s just really like they’re just burning this money away, really symbolically and also to create fear among the students so that the students don’t continue their protests. I mean, I think that the irony is the students won’t stop and that there may be an ebb in the movement now, but the students will continue to fight for a liberated Palestine, to fight for divestment, just like the movement for Palestine won’t stop.
And their repression, in a lot of ways, you know, breeds the resistance to that, you know, and it makes it overt who the enemy is.
Chris Hedges
Well, let’s be clear, Columbia’s on lockdown. You can’t get through the gates unless you have a Columbia ID. And Columbia has authorized, if I have this right, a permanent presence of NYPD on the campus. Is that correct?
Mahmoud Khalil
They had authorized it in the past, I’m not sure if now it’s still in effect. But yeah, basically I have a few Palestinian friends from the West Bank and they tell me it’s very reminiscent with their movement in the West Bank going from one checkpoint to another to prove that you are a student, to show your ID. It’s not only at the gates, like even inside campus, they can come and scan you or scan your ID.
And Columbia, I would just give you this very, very short thing about Columbia. Like the Board of Trustees of Columbia tells you who Columbia really serves. They have billionaires, weapon manufacturers, Wall Street and journalists. In the past, Minouche Shafik, who came from the World Bank and from the Bank of England, came in because they thought that Columbia is a money making machine. So they needed a banker to preside. Now we have…
Chris Hedges
Let me just interrupt you for bit. Let me interrupt you if people don’t know. Columbia has massive real estate holdings. I think Katherine Franke described it as a real estate agency that does education on the side. So when you talk about it as a money-making machine, that’s what you’re talking about.
Mahmoud Khalil
It is, and absolutely. And now they have Claire Shipman, a journalist, because they are facing a PR crisis. So they wanted a PR person to deal with it. They had someone else who used to be Mike Bloomberg’s deputy cracking down on Wall Street in 2009 to deal with the protests. So that’s the institution that you’re dealing with, a non-educational institution at all. It’s as Rashid Khalidi explained it, it’s Vichy on the Hudson.
Chris Hedges
I want, Mahmoud, I want you to talk about what this has done to the university because you mentioned Khalidi, one of the great scholars of the Middle East who taught at Columbia. You had one of the most respected Middle East departments in the country. And you, I think, were in the School of Foreign Affairs, which is headed by a former IDF intelligence officer, if that is correct, who did absolutely nothing to stand up for you or protect you.
What has this done to Columbia as an academic institution and extrapolate outwards? What is this essentially silencing or ending of free speech on campuses and persecution of the few professors who stood with you? What has it done to the academic institutions across the country?
Mahmoud Khalil
It’s absolutely a shame what Columbia has done to academic freedom across the country. That they sold out on their values, on the premise of what a university should be. Columbia now acts like, functions as a neutral place for inquiry and more as credential factory for the policy class. Literally look at the revolving doors, faculty between, basically now they are moving between Langley, the State Department and Morningside Heights. Like SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs], they now have all these war criminals. I bet maybe Eric Adams will join it at some stage.
Chris Hedges
This is SIPA for people who don’t know, is the School of Foreign Affairs at Columbia.
Mahmoud Khalil
Exactly, the school where I was, but even the journalism school, they train the people who staff mainstream newsrooms. So that’s how consensus gets manufactured through institutional incentives and professional gatekeeping. And this is what Columbia has absolutely become right now.
And this is what’s dangerous about the state of academic freedom across the country and of course the freedom of speech by capitulating to Trump, paying him $400 million. But also they paid $22 million to what they say, in a settlement with Jewish and Israeli staff, a case that they could have easily won because there wasn’t any of that.
Actually, it’s all the staff, including Jewish staff who were harassed by the institution that they deserve the money. Yet they wanted that because it serves their purpose of being protectors of the establishment, of the Zionist donors who they have.
Chris Hedges
What did that encampment or all of these encampments mean to you as a Palestinian? You grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. The Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing, that trauma rippled through your own family and the families around you. What did these encampments mean to you as a Palestinian?
Mahmoud Khalil
Absolutely, it means that finally the people are waking up to what’s happening to Palestinians, what has been happening to Palestinians since the early 90s, sorry, 20th century. And it means that hopefully there is some hope that there’s a change coming because unfortunately the U.S. is an active part of the ethnic cleansing of the war on Palestinians.
And all the crimes that are happening against me, against my people, are being literally paid by us, by you, by the taxpayers, that a big portion of our money is going toward sustaining an apartheid, colonial, genocidal state. That’s the state of Israel. So that’s, I think, the main significance of the encampment and actually the community that it created, not only between Palestinian Jewish students, between all students on campus.
We had community gatherings. We had teachings about the history of segregation, the history of slavery, about the history of the military industrial complex in this country. And that’s what feared the administrations, whether the Columbia one or the establishment in this country, that these students can find a community where they care about each other, where they can teach themselves without the need for an institution to decide what can be or cannot be educated.
So it’s absolutely a very big sign of hope. And I remember when I saw a picture from like two kids in Gaza holding signs, thank you Columbia students, thank you Princeton students, thank you Harvard students. And it broke my heart to have someone going through a genocide find the time to send a picture to us here thanking us. But that means that it means a lot to them. That means that they are being seen. It means that finally something may happen. And that’s what all Palestinians want to do.
They want, they don’t want propaganda, they don’t want any of that manufactured narratives because we know that we are righteous, we know that our cause is righteous, it’s for every human being. We just need people to see that and act when they see that.
Chris Hedges
Michael, when you began attempting to distribute your film, did they throw up roadblocks as they often do on this when you deal with Palestine?
Michael T Workman
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I would say that we were expecting worse than what we got. But we were expecting it would be really, really hard. You know, the narrative had shifted quite a bit in the population of the US, like their consensus, their feelings towards Palestine over the course of us finishing the film.
And I think that opened up more opportunities for us to get the film out more widely. But we were still met with a lot of repression. A lot of Zionist organizations specifically targeted me and my co-director, Kei [Pritsker]. There was a person who came into the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan during our opening weekend, screaming and yelling about the film being anti-Semitic, a piece of terrorist propaganda, and spray painted a yellow ribbon inside of the lobby of the Angelika, which is one of the premier theaters in the country.
And so we had to pay for heightened security then throughout that whole opening weekend. Any theater really, most theaters were targeted by targeted harassment campaigns that were screening the film by Zionist organizations where they would send thousands of emails, sometimes hundreds of emails to these theaters, intimidating them, telling them not to screen the film.
You know, we had two students at UCLA who attempted to screen the film outside on their campus on the lawn that a year prior they had an encampment set up and two of them were arrested. There were 60 riot police that showed up to the screening. They confiscated the equipment, the tiny equipment the students had. It was really like a sheet and some speakers and a projector. And two students were arrested from that.
You know, we’ve had lots of film festivals reject us based on the politics, based off of donors and banks that support them. And we know that because we have friends on the inside of these festivals that know that there were internal battles trying to screen the film. It’s really been a constant kind of piece of agitation in these institutions that has really made them try to live up to the ideals that they espouse, especially in the documentary film world.
Like everybody is always talking about how we’re trying to tell the stories of the oppressed and, you know, change consciousness and create impact and all of these things. You know, but when it’s something like Palestine, something that still is controversial and still the elite and the corporate class don’t want us to talk about, then they shut down.
And so I think we’ve seen that in all types of ways with the encampments, but it’s really been the grassroots and the movement that has gotten us through that. We were able to fill the theaters and sell out screenings in Manhattan over opening weekend because organizers were bringing friends and families and loved ones to the screenings to fill them out.
And when theaters saw that people actually do want the truth. People actually do want to know more about what’s happening in Palestine, to know more about the student movement. Theaters, in spite of all of the threats, screen the film. So it’s been as inspiring as it has been disheartening, because we knew what we were up against. We weren’t naive about the uphill battle that we would face making this film and what it could do to our careers.
But we knew that we needed to do it. And I think it goes back to what I was talking about earlier of seeing the bravery of the students, seeing the bravery of the people of Palestine, it just is a thing that is contagious to us. And I feel like it felt like a duty for us to do something. And it’s an honor to be a part of the movement’s an honor to work with Mahmoud and Sueda and Grant and all of these other students who are in the film who were absolutely instrumental to its organizing.
But you know, it’s still an uphill battle. All of the streamers too, the mainstreamers outright rejected the film. They didn’t want to touch it with a 60 foot pole. We’re now doing an awards campaign for the Oscars, seeing if we can get shortlisted.
We had eight publicists turn us down just outright. So now we’re trying to do it on the grassroots level. One of the things that’s come up is within our kind of capitalist system, we have a censorship regime, but we don’t call it censorship. There’s no bureau of censorship, but stories about Palestine, stories that really try to push the narrative to try to challenge power. They just get quietly rejected from grants or from film festivals and they don’t know why and they will never be told why or that it’s about politics and whatnot.
But you know, that happens all the time and that’s been happening with stories about Palestine for the past century. And so we want to be able to talk about these things now too because it hurts the art that’s being made.
And it hurts the academic work that’s being done too, because there’s academic censorship in the same way. But the only way that we see that we’re gonna get through this is through mobilizing the movement, mobilizing people who want to get these stories out and actually fighting back on the grassroots because we don’t have a big advertising budget. We’re not corporate backed.
Chris Hedges
It’s a magnificent film and just tell people before we close, and I just want to ask one more question to Mahmoud, how people can see it, where they can go to stream it or watch it.
Michael T Workman
Yeah, so people can rent the film on any of the major kind of film rental platforms like Apple TV, Vimeo, YouTube, Amazon. You can also watch it on Watermelon Plus, which is a Palestinian-owned streaming platform that’s run by our film distributor, Watermelon Pictures.
But you can also organize screenings, grassroots screenings at your churches, at your schools, in your community groups, wherever by going to watermelonpictures.com, which is our distributor, and going and clicking on “The Encampments” and hosting a screening. And that’s really the way that is the best way to see the film.
We want people to see it in a space together and to be in a theater and to share an emotional experience with people and to not feel alone. Because I think there’s a lot of people out there who feel something for Palestine, want to be engaged, but maybe don’t have that community and haven’t been around people. So we encourage people to share space together.
Chris Hedges
The Trump administration is still trying to deport you, so just update us as to where you’re at. And then I wondered if to close the interview you could speak about where we have to go from here. The genocide continues. It’s being slow-walked, but it hasn’t stopped despite this sham ceasefire.
Mahmoud Khalil
Absolutely. For now, the Trump administration has been trying to deport me through every channel they have. So after a federal court found that their actions against me were unconstitutional, that I’m not a foreign policy threat or a national security threat. They are basically using all the resources.
So they have went to the appellate court, tried to redetain me, the appellate court or the appeal court. They refused that. So now we’re waiting for a formal decision by the appeal court to basically ensure that I must remain free and the conduct that I was taking part of is constitutional, is fully constitutional and that criticizing Israel and protesting the genocide is totally lawful for everyone in the United States.
On your other question, now that there is, they call it a ceasefire so Israel would move from mass killing Palestinians and the hundreds every day to killing Palestinians, just a few Palestinian every day.
And that’s really what we are at right now. So the most important thing is to not forget that Israel is continuing with its occupation, its apartheid, with its ethnic cleansing, with its genocide, and to make them pay for it, to make them pay for it by cutting all sorts of ties, funds, relationships with the pariah state of Israel.
And to do that through the student movement, whether through continuing to advocate and educate about Palestine, but also organizing around that now we have an amazing opportunity with the midterms, not that we think that these sort of processes would get us justice. It’s a start that anyone, any Congress member who sided with Israel, who gets money from AIPAC or any of these shady groups, they shouldn’t be reelected full stop.
This is the first thing that Americans can do. And the second is to continue to organize at every level, not only federal level, on the local level. I’ve seen incredible people here now in Brooklyn. They’re organizing within their co-ops, within their kids’ schools to ensure that Palestine is present, to ensure that education about Palestine is being taught the right way without interference, without propaganda.
So literally there is opportunity at every place because the last thing that we want is for people to forget what Israel has done to Palestinians in Gaza for killing over 70,000 Palestinians. And we want to make that famous phrase that the memory of the American public is so short that they may forget after six months. We don’t want that to happen because Israel would do the same at any time.
If someone kills 70,000 people, they would continue to kill. They don’t have any conscience. They don’t have any values, and they would continue to do that. So I think that’s the most important thing to do in the next phase until we achieve a full liberation, a full liberation where everyone, literally everyone, can live in peace, dignity, freedom, regardless of their religion, regardless of what views they have here or there. It’s that simple ask to me yhat seems like a lot of people find it very difficult to comprehend.
Chris Hedges
Well, my father worked in the civil rights movement. It’s called one person, one vote. Thank you, Mahmoud. Thank you, Michael. And I want to thank Victor [Padilla], Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack
Be the first to comment