MY earliest memory of feeling outnumbered comes from a classroom in upstate New York, 1989, where a professor of international relations described the intifada as terrorist in nature. On the first day of class. No mention of an occupation. I turned to look around the room and saw no discomfort. I said something; I don’t remember exactly what, something about occupation, because that was the only truth I knew about Palestine. I don’t remember his reaction. What I remember is the feeling: the privilege I had felt at being in that room came crumbling down. I dropped the class. I don’t regret leaving. The class I took instead was on media framing. And well — here I am.
I found my way to SOAS, and to a different kind of education. The School of Oriental and African Studies was many things but what I remember most is that Palestine was not a controversial subject there. Pro-Palestinian students and academics believed in dialogue rather than censure. It sounds naive in retrospect, but I do not remember ‘antisemitism’ being deployed to shut down conversations. Things got heated but not ugly.
The clearest test of that during my time came when a talk featuring the then not-yet-banned student faction of Hizb ut-Tahrir, cancelled by LSE, found a home at SOAS. One speaker made inflammatory remarks about Jews. The university, under pressure from the University of London’s effort to curb extremism on campuses, moved to ban the group from operating or recruiting at SOAS. The student body pushed back against what it called institutional censorship. The student union voted to overturn the ban.
I am reminded of all this because since Israel’s genocide of Palestinians took its cruellest turn following October 2023, I have watched a pushback build across campuses in the same western hemisphere that has spent decades bullying its way across syllabi. The pushback has been met with preposterous responses — job offers withdrawn, students arrested, blacklisted, threatened — all for supporting a people’s right to dignity, to not be erased from memory.
Students are keeping the name of Palestine alive
Against this backdrop, to hear that 200 students walked out of Sundar Pichai’s commencement address at Stanford is nothing short of laudable. These students were not simply protesting a speech. They were protesting Google’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with Israel, known as Project Nimbus, signed in 2021. They left the ceremony and held their own ‘People’s Commencement’ where the keynote speaker was Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian Columbia University activist who had been arrested by ICE and detained for more than 100 days. He nearly missed his own graduation. He showed up anyway.
There is a particular irony in who was on that stage. Pichai, CEO of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies, had been warned. His predecessor Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona commencement last month for telling graduates that AI would touch everything, even if they didn’t care about science.
Across campuses this graduation season, speakers who praised AI as the next industrial revolution were met with immediate, vocal dissent from a generation that has watched it reshape their job prospects and their world without being asked. Pichai’s response was to avoid the subject entirely. He spoke instead about accessibility, about rural women in India learning new trades on smartphones, about his own immigrant story.
But AI was never really absent from the room. Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion contract at the heart of the student protests, is not simply a cloud computing deal. It includes AI-powered data harvesting, facial recognition and object tracking. The students who walked out were not avoiding the AI conversation. They were having it.
The Western media, predictably, noted that after the demonstrations quieted Pichai was largely well received. This is how it works. The disruption is reported, the restoration of order is noted, and the column inch moves on. Palestine recedes again into the background noise of a conflict the media has never quite known how to hold.
But the students have not moved on. They did not move on at Stanford in 2025 or 2024, at Columbia, at Harvard, at universities across Europe and beyond. They are doing what students at SOAS did in a different era, with different tools and far greater consequences — asserting the right to political expression, refusing the comfort of silence, keeping the name of Palestine alive in rooms designed to forget it.
In 1989, I was one of a few voices in a classroom in upstate New York who knew occupation as the only truth. Decades later, 200 students walked out of a commencement address at one of the world’s most prestigious universities to say the same thing, more loudly, and together. Something, it turns out, has not been forgotten.
The writer runs writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2026