Basil Rodríguez, student arrested in Gaza solidarity camp at Columbia: ‘I couldn’t continue with my life as if nothing had happened’

There is a song that protest organizers at Columbia University in New York sang day and night in the Gaza solidarity camp that became the epicenter of the university protests in the United States. “The world did not give me my voice. The world can’t take it away,” the lyrics say. The word voice is exchanged for others: strength, joy, peace or love. On the night of April 30, a group of students were singing that song in front of the campus building they had occupied the day before. Linking their arms to form a human chain, swaying to the music, about twenty students guarded the entrance to the building, which they had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Police arrested nearly 100 people that night, including the 44 people who occupied the building. Most are scheduled to appear in a Manhattan court this Thursday, accused of breaking and entering.

Basil Rodríguez, 24, was among those singing that song that night, megaphone in hand. She was afraid. She knew that the police were going to burst into the premises at any moment and arrest them, but she continued singing. She was focused on the suffering of the Palestinians, on the more than 35,000 people who have been murdered in Gaza and on the 200 days of constant bombings.

By the time the police came, the students had been camped on one of the campus’s grassy esplanades for about two weeks, demanding that Columbia break relations with any company linked to Israel. Their movement inspired similar camps on dozens of campuses across the United States, Europe and Australia. Given the university’s refusal to give in to their demands, the organizers decided to escalate the mobilization and occupy Hamilton Hall, one of the main buildings of the university, the same one that was occupied during the protests against the Vietnam War, in 1968, and against apartheid in South Africa, in 1985.

The melody of the song suddenly mixed with the sound of the footsteps of hundreds of NYPD riot officers, who expelled students, witnesses and journalists from the campus before making arrests and entering the occupied building. Ann Marie, Basil’s mother, was following the scene on television thousands of miles away in California. She was also an activist: during her university days, in 1992, she was one of the first to join one of the pro-Palestinian groups and knows about police brutality. She was scared, she admits, but also proud. “This generation is the leaders of our future, those who will fight for a just peace for all. I only feel admiration for them,” she says.

During the nearly two-hour operation, police dismantled the encampment, evacuated the building, and detained dozens of people, both on and off campus. Some had to be hospitalized. After the arrests began, Basil has a haze of memories. The police batons, the pushing, two of her colleagues lying on the ground, unconscious, the plastic ties squeezing her wrists. And the lyrics of the songs, which reminded her why she was there. Police charged Basil with criminal trespassing. She spent a night in a cell and when she got home he realized that her legs were covered with bruises, although she does not remember the police beating her. A couple of weeks later, the charges were dropped and the university, so far, has not expelled her.

That night, the students’ fear mixed with their commitment and conviction that their demands were achievable and fair. As an American and a Columbia student, Basil feels a duty to speak out for Palestine. It is, she says, her responsibility. “If I don’t oppose it, I become an accomplice, even financially because I’m paying tuition,” she says. “If we do not protest, the blame for this genocide also falls on us. It is an act of collective conscience and love towards the Palestinians, to defend their right to live.”

In the United States, Israel’s main ally, participating in protests in defense of Palestine come with risks. Under normal circumstances, mobilizing on a university campus should have no consequences, but recent months — with Columbia University suspending student associations, expelling students and allowing the police to enter the campus — show that this time, the situation is different.

“Students risked the kind of harassment that occurs in this country when you raise your voice for Palestine; they risked disciplinary measures from the university in an unpredictable context; and they risked being arrested by a highly politicized and violent police force,” explains Joseph A. Howley, a literature professor at Columbia University. Even Howley, with more than a decade teaching at the university, found it intimidating to participate in protests and mix his work with activism, but he decided to do so out of a sense of responsibility. “I thought it was my turn, as part of the Jewish faculty and as a privileged white man,” he says. Basil, at 24 years of age, is aware of the risks and is willing to take them. “I didn’t want to read about this movement from the outside, I needed to be part of it.” But she wasn’t always so clear.

Basil’s family is part of the Palestinian diaspora. Her father is Mexican, her mother is Palestinian and Colombian, and her grandfather is from Jerusalem, a survivor of the Nakba, the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to create the state of Israel in 1948. Basil grew up with her family in California, living with her grandfather’s suffering, which is passed down, she says, from generation to generation. Since she was little, she has heard stories about the Palestinian struggle and the importance of standing up against oppression and injustice. She has family living in Jerusalem and visited them in 2014, when she was 14 years old. There, she saw firsthand the consequences of the Israeli military occupation and met her mother’s cousin, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist who was murdered by Israel in Jenin in May 2022, even though she clearly identified herself as a member of the press, with a helmet and bulletproof vest.

For Basil, Shireen’s murder was the first turning point on her path to activism. At that time, she was studying the last year of her History degree. “It changed me because I realized that my family was not safe,” she says. “[Shireen] was so brave that I thought she would always be there, but I became aware that no one is invincible in the face of the Israeli occupation and that Israel’s intention is to destroy every aspect of Palestinian life, its history and its culture, and that is why we have to preserve it.”

The second key moment was in early October last year, when Israel began massacring the population of Gaza after the Hamas attack. Basil had just started a master’s degree in American studies at Columbia University, one of the most prestigious in the country, where a year of education costs around $60,000. She wanted to study resistance as a way to repair the wounds left by colonialism, and chose Columbia for its legacy of supporting the Palestinian cause, although she now recognizes that the university represents both a story of terror and hope. Hope, because it is a platform that Palestinians in academia continue to use to seek justice; and horror because, as she explains, Columbia, with its investments, is “complicit in the genocide.” In October, Basil began participating in demonstrations in New York, but later joined the student movement organizing protests in Columbia, determined to make sacrifices and put “her voice and her body at the forefront of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.”

The group, made up of hundreds of students of various nationalities and religions, soon realized that it was not enough to organize marches and rallies. Willing to make their demands and what was happening in Palestine “impossible to ignore,” they went one step further and camped in the middle of the campus. At first, Basil —although she was part of the organization — decided not to join: she did not want to risk being expelled from the university. But as soon as she saw her companions in the tents, she changed her mind. “The universities in Gaza are destroyed, I couldn’t be so selfish as to continue with my life as if nothing had happened.”

That camp barely lasted a day. On April 18, police dismantled it and arrested more than 100 students. Basil escaped: she had gone home to feed her cat. She returned as quickly as she could, on an agonizingly slow subway, and as soon as she arrived she began planning her next steps. Hundreds of students reacted by setting up a second camp, which soon became a perfectly organized community, with hot food, a library, classes and daily assemblies. “We were protesting against something horrible, a genocide, but at the same time, we were creating something beautiful,” Basil recalls.

Thirteen days later, police re-entered campus to break up the encampment and protest at Hamilton Hall, the occupied building. On the esplanade, the worn grass was spotted with tent marks. Basil, although aware of how the student movement was awakened, considered April 30 as a defeat. The university and the police had stripped them of their way of resisting. But that attempt to silence them, she says, made them stronger. “I will not stop. Quite the opposite. And now I have learned and know how to do it better,” she says.

Since then, although the campus is practically empty, and although the vast majority of students have returned home, Basil and pro-Palestinian student groups have continued to protest. They organized, together with teachers and students, a parallel graduation. During the weekend, they set up a third camp on campus; and now they plan to protest in the court where their colleagues are scheduled to appear.

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