My experience of the Columbia University encampment was guided by a phrase I first read while at Cometa in Como, Italy. Last summer I was herding 6-year-old summer campers into classrooms, and I noticed a carved wooden sign at the entrance that said, “Quid est veritas? Est vir qui adest.” When I asked for its meaning, the school director explained that the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is the truth?”, is followed by the answer, “It is the man you are looking at.” The meaning I instinctively assigned to it was that the person – the reality before me – is the truth. I carried this phrase with me for the whole year, but its importance exponentially grew when the student encampments began at my university.

On April 17, hundreds of students set up tents on one of Columbia’s main lawns in an effort to show solidarity with the people in Gaza and pressure the University to divest from its ties with Israel. A day later, the University authorized the NY Police Department to sweep the encampment and over 100 students were arrested on trespassing charges. A second, larger encampment was set up on the lawn next to the old one, inspiring other universities to follow suit and sparking an international movement.

Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was the first of its kind and garnered widespread media attention. Our campus was flooded with journalists and news crews, and we grew used to the sound of helicopters and drones circling above us. Since October 7 many students on our campus were doxed for their pro-Palestinian views, and it became clear that expressing an opinion not full-heartedly pro-Israel carried the risk of being harassed and threatened. When I declined an interview for a journalist, she frustratedly asked, “Why does no one want to give me an interview?” I responded, “It’s not because we don’t care, it’s because we’re scared.”

News updates on the encampment were published daily, and it was described as being violent, antisemitic, and dangerous. I was perplexed by these descriptors since what I saw from the outside was groups of students sitting on a lawn singing songs and doing their homework, but I soon realized that there were two protests going on at Columbia. There was the encampment inside the campus property which was largely non-violent, and there were protestors outside who were not university affiliates. I wanted to know the truth of the encampment inside, but what was it? It is the reality in front of me, so I went in. I had friends there, living and sleeping in tents through rain and shine, boiling days and freezing nights. The encampment was not a one-noted reality as most media outlets wanted us to believe; the truth of it was complicated.

Walking home from my first visit, I called my mom because I desired to share the beautiful things I witnessed. I told her, “It was all so organized! I felt like it was organized by CL!” The lawn on which the encampment stood was a rectangle with tents neatly pitched around the perimeter so as to leave a large open space in the center. Upon arrival, someone greeted the visitors and directed the first-timers to the Community Guidelines board and offered a mask to protect one’s privacy. A posted schedule provided daily updates on events: Arab music performances, Palestinian dance lessons, guest speakers, and teach-ins on the history of student movements and Palestinian resistance. In a tent called “The People’s Writing Center,” grad students helped anyone who was falling behind on their assignments. In another, students could check out books as in a library. Palestinian restaurants across the city donated food and students donated hygiene products and toiletries. I also witnessed a beautiful interfaith solidarity. Muslim and Jewish students were the prevalent groups in the encampment, and there was a strong sense of unity among the two. Five times a day the Muslim students met in the open space and prayed, while the Jewish students celebrated Sabbath. At Passover, a large Seder dinner took place in the encampment with Jewish students teaching everyone the tradition and meaning behind the holiday. One Sunday, Christian students organized an inter-denominational Christian service and communion.

Although many things I saw were true and meaningful, the problems with the encampment were abundantly clear. The organizers and many within the camp saw themselves as revolutionaries. Revolution, however, is intrinsically tied to ideology, making dialogue extremely difficult. For example, in the chants used at Columbia and across the country, the meaning of words like “intifada” changed based on who you asked. It felt like there was little room to discuss these things, and little patience for an exchange of ideas and opinions. One day, I was listening to a guest speaker, who gave a convincing talk. However, as soon as he left, the chanting began. I sat through it like I usually would, cheering along with some and staying silent for others, until they began one I hadn’t heard before: “We don’t want no two state, we remember ‘48.” I sat shocked, and then quietly got up, left. I never went back because that chant signaled to me a closed-mindedness that I had not seen before. At the core of that chant was pure ideology, whose strategy – as often is the case with ideology – is to simplify an extremely complex history into a good-and-evil binary.

The truth is that the encampment with all its beauty and its problems was full of contradictions. I can speak mostly about the Pro-Palestinian side of things, but it was equally complicated for the Jewish and Israeli students on campus. Many of my Jewish friends felt perfectly safe on campus. Yet, one of my Orthodox Jewish roommates left New York two weeks before the end of the semester because she felt unsafe. The truth is also the fact that my Jewish friend was called a traitor and hospitalized after Israeli students attacked her with a chemical spray during a peaceful protest for Palestine. What is the truth? From what I understood, it was all of those people, all of those realities.

For my Confirmation I was given a necklace with a cross which I had never taken out of the box. I wore it for the first time when the encampment began, and I have worn it every day since. Throughout those weeks, everyone on campus showed their support for whatever side they were on by wearing symbols, mostly Palestinian keffiyehs or yellow “Free the hostages” pins. You were either on one side or the other. The cross became for me a way to say “I am on the side of truth. I care about this issue because we are talking about my Holy Land too.” Once I stopped going to the encampment, that cross became a way for me to say to my friends who chose to remain, “Just because I am not with you does not mean I am against you.” The cross held new meaning for me, and I tried to reflect on this as the CL University Student Pilgrimage grew nearer.

The pilgrimage was proposed after our CLU meeting with Cardinal Pizzaballa soon after October 7. He invited us to pray, because as he said, “prayer is action,” so in lieu of our usual summer CLU vacation in the Colorado mountains, we embarked on a pilgrimage to pray for peace. I wasn’t excited to go because I would be missing my last week in New York with my friends. Nevertheless, I remembered Cardinal Pizzaballa’s invitation and realized that if I couldn’t support the Holy Land by being in the encampment, I would show my love and support by praying on the pilgrimage.

I left for the pilgrimage under false pretenses, telling my college friends I was “visiting a friend” in Wisconsin. The first night, Francesca talked to us about the importance of prayer and the importance of pilgrimages and intentions. Her words stuck with me so much that, lying in my sleeping bag, I texted a few of my friends saying “I lied, I’m actually in Wisconsin for a pilgrimage, please let me know if there’s anything you want me to pray for!” Interestingly, although those friends are atheists, they responded with their full-hearted support and a list of intentions for me.

In those days of walking together, I reflected back to the phrase from Cometa and came to the realization that the meaning behind “Est vir qui adest” is that Christ is the truth. And all of a sudden, I no longer understood the meaning of that phrase. I began questioning how everything regarding faith I was seeing and experiencing on the pilgrimage applied to my life. I was born and raised in this faith and this movement, and for the first time I found myself questioning what Christ as Truth meant for me. It is essential for us to have these questions because by asking them, by being in dialogue with others, we can come to true faith. Ultimately, this was what I took away from the pilgrimage: a desire to ask questions about my faith and the Truth the same way I wanted to judge and understand what was happening on my campus.

Gloria, Baltimore, MD