The widespread demonstrations on university campuses in the United States and Europe in response to Israel’s war on Gaza has become a litmus test for the United States and European politicians and policy makers over their stance on the ongoing killings and destruction of Palestinians in the occupied lands for over 200 days.
It all began at Columbia University in New York City on April 17, 2024.
These protests were triggered by a pro-Palestinian campus occupation at Columbia, which led to mass arrests after the university president authorized the New York City Police Department to enter the encampment established by students.
The protesters at Columbia demanded that the university divest from Israel and disassociate from Israeli academic institutions.
Following the initial protests at Columbia, students at several universities on the East Coast, including New York University, Yale University, Emerson College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University, began occupying campuses on April 22.
This movement quickly spreads with protest camps being established on over 40 campuses across the United States.
Similar student protests also emerged in Europe, Australia, and Canada, reflecting a broader civil unrest against the Israel-Hamas war which resulted in over 700 student arrests.
A crackdown on April 27 leading to approximately 200 arrests at Northeastern, Arizona State, and Indiana University.
These protests are part of a broader movement against the Israel-Hamas war, which has been ongoing since October 7, 2023. Pro-Palestinian protestors criticize U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel, as well as its invasion of the Gaza Strip and conduct during the war, which some believed is a genocide.
Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have played a significant role in organizing and mobilizing these protests across North America.
The demonstrations reflect the passionate engagement of students and activists in expressing their views on the conflict and advocating for change. The campuses have become spaces for dialogue, dissent, and solidarity in response to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.
The demands of the protesters are multifaceted and reflect their deep concern about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Some of the key demands expressed by the demonstrators include divestment from Israel, urging universities and institutions to divest from companies with ties to Israel, and calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
The protests also serve as a platform for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, raising awareness about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fostering dialogue on campus, and putting pressure on governments and the international community to take a more active role in resolving the conflict.
Aljazeerah reports that, Pro-Palestine student protests spread in second week of demonstrations as the arge-scale demonstrations take place in US universities and on European streets amid arrests and clashes with police.
The Pro-Palestinian demonstrations continue in universities across the United States, as they also spread to schools in Europe and Australia, calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians.
Thousands of students are calling on dozens of universities to divest from Israel and some universities have been forced to cancel their graduation ceremonies, while others have seen entire buildings occupied by protesting students.
According to Aljazeerah, one of the latest Universities to join the movement is The City University of New York (CUNY), where hundreds of students have set up an encampment on campus like on other campuses, with banners with slogans like “No More Investment in Apartheid”.
A student organiser at the CUNY, Gabby Aossey who spoke to Al Jazeera said, the mobilisation of young pro-Palestinian people in the US is “beautiful to see”.
He said, “Young people are really starting to show up and demand that schools are held accountable for their relationship with the Israeli colonisation”.
Across the US, university leaders have tried, and largely failed, to quell the demonstrations.
The police have intervened violently, with videos emerging from different states showing hundreds of students – and even faculty members – being forcefully arrested.
According to Aljazeerah, early on Saturday, police in riot gear cleared an encampment on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston.
Several dozen students shouted and booed at them from a distance, but the scene was otherwise not confrontational according to the Qatar based news channel.
The school in a statement posted on the social media platform X stated that the demonstration, which began two days ago, had become “infiltrated by professional organisers” with no affiliation to the school and protesters had used anti-Semitic slurs.
“We cannot tolerate this kind of hate on our campus,” the statement said.
President Joe Biden has also joined congressional voices on both sides of the aisle calling the protests “antisemitic” the Guardian reports.
According to the report, the House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, who had just pushed through a $26bn aid package for Israel, came to Columbia on Wednesday to demand that the solidarity encampment be dismantled.
Accorsing to the Guardian, at Columbia, some organizers blamed antisemitic rhetoric on outsiders unaffiliated with the university piggybacking on the protesters.
The Newspaper quoted Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine saying, “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us. We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand against non-students attempting to disrupt our solidarity.”
The Guardian reports that, with the end of Columbia’s semester next week, US university officials may be hoping that the protests will die down.
The Newspaper however informed that, students have said they plan to continue until their demands are met for the school to divest from companies they say profit from Israel’s war, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and to end its partnership with Tel Aviv University.
Columbia opened up its campus to the press on Friday, after a deadline for clearing the camp had passed with little progress in negotiations between the protesters and the faculty.
Protesters said the university had given loose assurances that police would not be called in to remove them. But with commencement ceremonies honoring graduating students due to start on 15 May on the same lawn now transformed into a sit-in, they said they would stand by their demands that the university disclose and divest from investments “furthering genocide”, stop further investments and grant amnesty to arrested students who had been thrown out of their dormitories and denied access to the cafeteria.
A student, Majd, involved in the campout for the past week, said it had been tense when there was a threat of forcible removal along shifting deadlines.
“That’s been kind of exhausting but we’re good now that we know that the school has confirmed there is no more threat of NYPD coming on to the campus”, he said.
At the University of Texas at Austin, state troopers in riot gear took 34 protesters into custody; at the University of Southern California, officers struggled to break up a protest camp.
At Yale, university police arrested 45 protesters on Monday. After protesters rejected orders to leave, police charged them with criminal trespassing.
It came one day after 14 students ended an eight-day hunger strike designed to pressure the university to divest. At Emory University in Atlanta, police were filmed violently arresting students and faculty.
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow has suggested that the current atmosphere, given the clear generational divide on the issue of US support for Israel, could summon the ghosts of 1968, when college protests against the Vietnam war spilled into the national political domain.
He said, the protests culminates in violent clashes between the national guard and protesters at the Democratic national convention in Chicago.
Anti-war groups are also reportedly planning large protests at the party’s convention in Chicago.
The head of the US Palestinian Community Network, Hatem Abudayyeh, has said this will be the “most important” convention since the tumult of the late 60s.
A writer and former lecturer at Yale, Jim Sleeper was quoted warning that the protests may be twisted by adults seeking to score political points by weaponizing accusations of antisemitism.
He said, “We have this phenomenon of older people who are ginning this up, playing the antisemitism card, and the same people who were in 2015 complaining about liberal colleges turning students into crybabies are now doing the same thing but about antisemitism. Students may be romantically valorizing Palestine, but they’re not vicious antisemites. If you have leaders who are inculcating the right things, then people will agree”.
A resident undergraduate said,“The kids are away from home for the first time, feeling adult, testing things out, combining idealism with the politics of moral posturing, and they do that in the safety of these quadrangles. And there are excesses, hurling words at each other, and there’s always an element of dramatization.”
According to the Guardian, the historical precedents are becoming more overt. In 1969, Harvard called in the police to clear anti-war protesters, as Columbia had done a year earlier.
It added that, the events produced pictures of bruised and bloodied students.
It recalled that, in a 1970 incident seared in the US national memory, the national guard at Kent State University in Ohio opened fire on students protesting the war, killing four.
On the other hand according to the Newspaper, at Yale, President Kingman Brewster, who later became the US ambassador to the UK, sided with the students, refused the police access to the campus, and opened it up to protesters.
Brewster later infuriated the Nixon administration by saying, before the trial of three Black panthers who had exploded three bombs at the Yale hockey rink.
He expressed skepticism about that he was “the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States”.
Sleeper said that perhaps Brewster’s approach worked at the time.
He said,“Maybe we’re finding that some university presidents now are not closely enough in touch with their students and could be a little bit more canny and sophisticated in building trust and doing something affirmative.”
The Guardian reports that, outside Columbia’s main gates on Thursday, campus security and police were refusing entry to non-students and faculty.
According to the Guardian, a visitor, Saba Gul, 39, who attended MIT in the early 2000s, said that it had once been “completely OK” for universities to be in bed with defense technology industries but that this generation was saying no.
He said, “Young students are showing us the power of people. If you’re siding against a national student movement, you are on the wrong side.”
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