France probes TotalEnergies over 2021 Mozambique attack


AFP
May 4, 2024


TotalEnergies is accused of involuntary manslaughter and non-assistence to people in danger - Copyright AFP Lillian SUWANRUMPHA

Joseph SOTINEL

French prosecutors said Saturday they were investigating oil giant TotalEnergies for possible involuntary manslaughter in connection with a 2021 jihadist attack in Mozambique that killed hundreds.

The probe follows a legal complaint brought by victims’ families and attack survivors, accusing the French energy company, which was developing a major liquefied gas project in the region, of failing to protect its subcontractors, the prosecutors’ office told AFP.

The survivors and families say TotalEnergies also failed to provide fuel so that helicopters could evacuate civilians after Islamic State-linked militants killed dozens of people in the Mozambican port town of Palma on March 24, 2021.

The entire attack in Cabo Delgado province lasted several days, claiming several hundred lives. Some of the victims were beheaded and thousands fled their homes.

Contacted by AFP Saturday, a TotalEnergies spokesman reiterated a previous statement saying it “firmly rejects the accusations”.

He said the company’s Mozambique teams had supplied emergency aid and made the evacuation of 2,500 people from the plant possible, including civilians, staff, contractors and sub-contractors.

The French investigation also seeks to establish whether TotalEnergies is guilty of non-assistance to people in danger, prosecutors said.

Seven British and South African complainants — three survivors and four relatives of victims — accuse TotalEnergies of failing to take steps to ensure the safety of subcontractors even before the assault.

The Al-Shabab group — unrelated to the Somali group of the same name — which carried out the attack had been active in Cabo Delgado province since 2017 and drawing ever closer to Palma.

“The danger was known,” said the complainants lawyer Henri Thulliez in 2023 at the time of the lawsuit.

Depending on the outcome of the preliminary probe, the case would either be dropped, or the investigation intensified with a view to bringing possible charges, they said.

– ‘Positive step’ –

Families and survivors welcomed the French decision, with Nicholas Alexander, a South African attack survivor, calling it “a positive step”.

TotalEnergies, he said, bore “a share of responsibility” in the tragedy, he told AFP.

Anabela Lemos, an activist at Friends of the Earth Mozambique — known locally as Justica Ambiental — said the “negative effects” of the French oil major’s Mozambique operations went beyond the 2021 attack because of environmental “destruction” and “deaths” as a result of its presence there.

TotalEnergies’s $20-billion project to develop a large gas field on the Afungi peninsula was halted following the 2021 attack, but chairman Patrick Pouyanne has since said he hoped to revive it.

In November 2023, a group of 124 NGOs posted an open letter to dozens of financial institutions, including European, Japanese and South African banks, urging them to withdraw from the project.

The NGOs — which included the Human Rights League, Oil Change International and Greenpeace France — told the 28 financial institutions that they would otherwise bear “direct and significant responsibility” for its impact.

“The humanitarian and security risks, as well as the complexity of operations in a conflict zone” were underestimated, the NGOs said in the letter, calling any continuation “reckless”.

The project threatened local ecosystems and the global climate, while failing to benefit local communities, they said.

Mozambique has set high hopes on vast natural gas deposits — the largest found south of the Sahara — that were discovered in the Muslim-majority northern province in 2010.

The former Portuguese colony of 30 million people in southeast Africa is one of the world’s poorest countries despite having large natural resources, especially gas.

It has faced insurgencies from Islamist groups for much of the past decade.

Mexico tourist train an environmental ‘nightmare,’ activists say


AFP
May 4, 2024

Environmental activist Roberto Rojo stands next to metal columns inside a cave supporting Mexico's controversial Maya Train - Copyright AFP CARL DE SOUZA
Jean Arce

In a cave in Mexico’s Riviera Maya, where nature has sculpted a subterranean landscape of stunning beauty, thick steel columns supporting a controversial new tourist railway intrude into a delicate ecosystem.

The Yucatan Peninsula boasts an estimated 2,400 of these caverns and sinkholes, which are known as cenotes and are a major attraction for tourists who swim and snorkel in the crystal clear waters that fill some of them.

Campaigners warn that the unique geological system is under threat from the Maya Train, one of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s flagship infrastructure projects.

“It’s our worst nightmare. We’ve seen a large drill entering and breaking the ceiling of the cave” as well as its ancient stalactites, biologist and speleologist Roberto Rojo told AFP, surveying the damage.

In March, Rojo’s group Selvame del Tren (Save Me From the Train) filmed a huge drill piercing a hole into a cavern for one of the pillars supporting a railway viaduct.

Rojo calculates that the Maya Train, which partially opened in December, will need up to 17,000 columns along its 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) loop around southeastern Mexico.

Work on the project has continued despite a court-ordered suspension pending environmental studies.

The original plan was to build part of the railway — which the government says will bring prosperity to one of the country’s poorest regions — next to a major highway.

But according to environmentalists, the government moved the section into the jungle to avoid a conflict with hoteliers who feared traffic delays during construction.

They accuse Lopez Obrador of rushing to finish the railway before he leaves office in October.



– ‘Ecocide’ –



Activists have branded the construction work “ecocide.”

They say the project lacks the proper environmental impact studies, has razed 8.7 million trees and has irreversibly damaged the underground ecosystem.

Lopez Obrador calls the members of Salvame del Tren “pseudo-environmentalists” and accuses them of profiting from the “alleged defense of nature.”

The construction work, deemed of “national security” importance, is protected by the National Guard.

Reaching one of the affected cenotes is no easy task. It involves driving several kilometers from the resort city of Playa del Carmen, then continuing the journey — almost impossible without a guide — on foot, using a machete to cut through the undergrowth.

Once inside the cave, a helmet with a flashlight is essential.

The cavern is adorned by thousands of stalactites and stalagmites, some ancient and several meters high, others newly formed and measuring just a few centimeters.



– Clean-up promised –



Despite Lopez Obrador’s assurances, concrete has leaked out of the steel columns and contaminated the cenote water, according to environmentalists.

Worryingly, the well is a source of water for human consumption and eventually reaches the offshore Mesoamerican Reef — the second largest in the world, Rojo said.

“Plants, animals and ourselves depend on this, which is one of the last healthy aquifers we have in Mexico,” he said.

Lopez Obrador said three weeks ago that there has only been one accidental concrete spillage and that it was being remedied.

But inside the affected cenote, a clean-up has not yet happened.

Other columns show signs of leaks and rust. Drills continue to bore holes into the fragile ground.

The newspaper El Universal reported Friday that the environmental protection agency PROFEPA had documented five spillages linked to the railway construction.



– ‘A balance’ –



The government says that for the five completed sections of the train, nine protected natural areas have been created, totaling 1.34 million hectares (3.3 million acres).

Most of it corresponds to the Bajos del Norte National Park, an underwater reserve in the Gulf of Mexico.

The government also created a protected area in the southeastern state of Campeche that it says will be the second-largest rainforest reserve in the world, after the Brazilian Amazon.

In Playa del Carmen, tourists blissfully unaware of the environmental fears arrived recently at a modern Maya Train station that had been inaugurated two months ago.

About a hundred people were waiting for the train, which has a capacity of 2,210 passengers, according to the defense ministry, which manages the project.

Environmental damage is part of the project’s “yin and yang,” said Jaime Vazquez, a tour operator arriving at the station.

“On the one hand there is an effect, of course, but on the other hand you benefit humans. So it’s a balance,” the 40-year-old said.

So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch

The business and trade secretary played into the ideological tosh that the wonders of the Industrial Revolution were funded by beer brewers and sheep farmers

Will Hutton
Sun 5 May 2024 

THE OBSERVER

Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe “Imperial Measurement”, a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative.

If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA. The tax “burden” of defending this barely profitable empire was not worth the candle. Instead, it was free-market economics that unleashed British economic growth – a truth that must be restated before Marxists and reparation-seeking ex-colonies start controlling the narrative.

It is a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh. But enter the business and trade secretary and aspiring Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who took it upon herself to endorse this IEA “research”. She told an audience of financial services bosses at a conference in London: “It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.” If you believe any of this story about oppression and exploitation as the cause of British wealth, then the solutions to “our growth and productivity problem” will be even worse. It was “free markets and liberal institutions” that drove the Industrial Revolution and economic growth thereafter.

Except that, while they were certainly part of a cocktail of reasons for Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence, they were only part. Recent historical research, blithely dismissed by author Kristian Niemietz, the IEA’s head of political economy, has increasingly uncovered a mountain of evidence that places ever more importance on empire, and slavery in particular, as important drivers of the Industrial Revolution and evolution of our economy.

Take innovation, and the correctly celebrated inventions – James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny of 1764/5, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, introduced in 1778/9 – that together made it possible to harness the delicate but tough Barbadense cotton and manufacture it at scale. By the turn of the 18th century, Lancashire had emerged as Europe’s pre-eminent manufacturing centre of high-quality cotton, usable with other weaves and whose dyes and prints would hold. It was a position of global dominance that Lancashire cotton manufacture, soon joined by West Yorkshire, would reinforce over the century ahead.

But as Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write in their brilliant Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, it was no accident that this all began a few miles from Europe’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Or that fine Barbadense cotton flourished in Britain’s slave plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. Or that much of the finance for investing in these expensive, but highly profitable, innovative machines came from Liverpool merchants whose own fortunes originated in transatlantic trade.
By the last decades of the 18th century, the West Indies was co-equal with Europe as Britain’s biggest trading partner

In painstaking research, they place slavery at the heart, not only of early industrialisation, but the growth of services such as banking and insurance. By the last decades of the 18th century, they demonstrate that the West Indies was co-equal with Europe as Britain’s biggest trading partner. Cotton’s importance was preceded by slave-grown sugar, which became a national staple. All this spawned a vast boom in British shipping, from 1m tons and 50,000 seamen in the 1780s to 2.5m tons and 130,000 seamen in the 1830s, with the growth propelled by the Atlantic plantation trade.

The ships and their cargoes, whether of enslaved people, sugar or cotton, needed insuring, generating a large marine insurance industry. Sugar refineries were prone to burning down easily – there were over 100 in London alone in the 1780s – causing the need for specialist fire insurance companies. No account of the boom in the textile industry either side of the Pennines or the City of London is complete without empire and the slave trade, which even after abolition in 1833 would continue as trade in indentured labour.

The trade needed protecting and policing. A strong navy was an imperative – the West Indies became the second most important theatre for the navy outside British home waters, and where the custom of giving sailors a daily tot of West Indian rum originated. A 74-gun ship of the line from 1805 might cost the equivalent of 16 cotton mills, but the money was easily found from burgeoning tariffs. The navy was also a richly profitable and important market for British farmers and gun makers.

No one argues that slavery caused the Industrial Revolution, least of all Berg and Hudson. But to minimise and abstract, as Niemietz attempts, the economic impact of first the sugar and then cotton slave plantations, and also the industries that radiated from them, as not part of the story is plainly inadmissible. It is also true that liberal institutions, such as judicial independence and rule of law, helped early capitalism and was additionally fostered by the creation of a unified internal market.

Britain’s liberal approach to immigration, in welcoming inventors, scientists and engineers from all over Europe, fanned the fires of invention and manufacture, as economic historian Joel Mokyr argues in The Enlightened Economy. Badenoch would be more persuasive if, while exalting such liberal factors, she conceded the critical role of slavery, but also that her own government is hardly a friend of judicial independence, celebrates leaving the largest single market on earth and could scarcely be more hostile to immigration – very different illiberal principles to those she thinks drove the Industrial Revolution.

Empire, without doubt, profoundly affected the British economy. Not least, it was a source of lush, easy profits and rents which have become a benchmark that most British companies target even now, so limiting the projects in which they invest. British industry was still sheltering behind preferential imperial tariffs in 1970.

Empire absolved us of thinking how to develop our national economy; the market seemed to achieve that magically by itself. This magical thinking is now integral to our headlong decline, and the IEA is one of its leading advocates, betraying a wilful ignorance that goes beyond history. Its advice wrecked Liz Truss’s career. Badenoch should beware it does not do the same for her.

SEE

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch says historians 'exaggerate' the importance of slavery and colonialism to Britain's growth as a world power saying it was really down to 'ingenuity and industry'

CENSORED

Israel: Al Jazeera goes off air after government order

The Qatari TV network is no longer available in Israel after the Cabinet voted to suspend it. Israel has had a tense relationship with the broadcaster, accusing it of bias and incitement.

The Al Jazeera TV network was taken off the air in Israel on Sunday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet voted to suspend the broadcaster's operations.

The decision follows a law — commonly referred to as the "Al Jazeera law" — passed by the Israeli Knesset that allows the closure of foreign broadcasters considered to pose a security threat amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

"My government decided unanimously: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will close in Israel," Netanyahu posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Al Jazeera on Sunday again rejected accusations from Israel that its reporting from Gaza was biased.

"The Netanyahu government has decided in a highly misleading and calumnious step to endorse the order to shut down Al Jazeera offices in Israel," the network said.

It called the move a "criminal act" that violates the human right of access to information.

"We confirm that we will pursue all avenues at international and legal organizations to protect our rights and crews," it added without elaborating.
What we know about the ban

Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said on X that the order would take immediate effect.

According to Israeli media, the order can suspend broadcasting in the country for 45 days.

Al Jazeera's senior English correspondent in Israel, Imran Khan, said that alongside the TV channel, the website was also being blocked.

He said devices used for providing content to Al Jazeera were also banned, meaning his phone could be confiscated if he uses it for news gathering.

"It’s a wide-ranging ban and we do not know how long it will be in place for," he added, according to his statement on Al Jazeera's website.

"The background of this decision is not professional or journalistic ... it's political," said Waleed Omari, bureau chief of Al Jazeera in Israel and the Palestinian territories, adding that the network was preparing a legal response.
Israel's relationship with the Qatari broadcaster

Israel has had a tense relationship with the Qatar-based news organization, which has intensely covered the ongoing war in Gaza with a particular focus on the Palestinian side.

One of the few media organizations that has continued to function in Gaza since October 7, Al Jazeera has broadcast images and videos of deadly airstrikes and crowded hospitals under Israeli fire.

Israel has accused the network of working with Hamas.

Qatar, which owns the network, has been involved in mediating a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas — a Palestinian militant group considered a terror organization by Israel, the US, Germany and other countries.

VIDEO Netanyahu pushes to shut Israeli office of Al Jazeera TV  01:31

Numerous journalists have been killed in Gaza during Israel's military offensive, including several who worked for Al Jazeera.

The death of the Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 sparked global outrage. She had been reporting for the network during an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank when she was shot dead.

Al Jazeera blamed the Israeli military for the death and took the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Israel has rejected the accusation.

ab/sms (Reuters, AP, AFP)

Israel shuts down Al Jazeera offices: A 'message' being sent to Qatar, expert says

Issued on: 05/05/2024 

Video by:FRANCE 24

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that his government has voted unanimously to shut down the local offices of Qatar-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera, escalating Israel’s long-running feud with the channel at a time when ceasefire negotiations with Hamas — mediated by Qatar — are gaining steam. Qatar is currently hosting Hamas's leadership. “This has probably got a lot more to do with these negotiations, pressure, or some sort of message being sent to Qatar than it has to do with Al Jazeera as a television network,” said John Lyndon, executive director at the Alliance for Middle East Peace.

Palestinians face famine amid persistent food shortages in Gaza

Issued on: 05/05/2024 

Palestinians wait in long queues for food in Gaza as shortages persist despite slight improvements in deliveries of aid to the besieged Strip. Gazans say they are forced to skip meals and haven’t seen vegetables in weeks. "There is famine, full-blown famine in the north and it's moving its way south," World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain said in an interview Friday as she called for a ceasefire and unfettered, safe access to Gaza.

01:29  Video by: FRANCE 24

Guns and sheep: Settlers use shepherding outposts to seize West Bank land

Agence France-Presse
May 4, 2024

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

(AFP) – Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank say armed Jewish settlers are increasingly seizing their lands by bringing livestock to so-called shepherding outposts and refusing to leave.

One settler arrived recently near sunset on a hilltop near the village of Deir Jarir, wearing a black shirt and a green headscarf, like many Palestinian farmers, they said.

"The settlers imitate us in every way," said Abdullah Abu Rahme, a member of a Palestinian anti-settler group, who said the hardliners also employ violence and "throw stones at us and block roads".

One local man, Haidar Abu Makho, 50, looked sadly across to a hill where settlers' sheep were now grazing, in the rural area near Ramallah.

The land, where settlers' bungalows and cars could be seen ringed by a wire fence, he said, "rightfully belongs to my grandfather and father and is meant to be passed down through the generations".

But now, he said, "this shepherd, who is a settler... has obstructed my access to my land".

Israel has occupied the West Bank, home to three million Palestinians, since 1967. Around 490,000 Israeli settlers live there in communities considered illegal under international law.

Violence has often flared, but the bloodshed has intensified since the October 7 attack by Gaza's rulers Hamas sparked the devastating war in the Palestinian coastal territory.

'Aggressive' confiscations


Human rights groups have blamed the hardline religious-nationalist settler movement for an upsurge in attacks and land grabs since the start of the Gaza war.

Among the most radical are the so-called "hilltop youth", often teenage school dropouts who dream of settling all of the biblical land of Israel, and who sometimes also clash with Israeli security forces.

Israeli analyst Elhanan Miller said the hilltop shepherds are "far-right extremists who settle Palestinian land illegally", mostly in the southern West Bank and Jordan Valley.

Miller told AFP that many of them are "marginalised" youths who left school early and use shepherding of sheep and goats as a cover to seize land and natural resources.

Rights groups say settlers in shepherding outposts carry guns and have used attack dogs to threaten and attack Palestinians, sometimes killing their livestock and destroying their property.

The groups have been especially active around Deir Jarir, a village of about around 5,000 people, said the local man, Abu Makho.

"The settlers have effectively blocked access to vast stretches of land around Deir Jarir, preventing both agricultural use and grazing for the people across tens of kilometres," he said.

"By situating a shepherd with a flock of sheep atop a hill, a substantial portion of land is seized... denying Palestinians access to it."

He said settlers had "aggressively confiscated" local houses and tractors as well as horses and donkeys, all "symbols of the Palestinian traditional farming life".

'Defenceless'

Israeli rights group B'Tselem said in a report in March that attacks had surged, including incidents where settlers in vehicles were "speeding erratically directly into Palestinian flocks and herds".

B'Tselem also charged that settler groups have enjoyed backing by Israeli security forces.

"Through cooperation and collaboration among the military, police, settlers... Israel has reduced grazing areas available to Palestinians, blocked regular water supply and took measures to isolate the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank," it said.

The Israeli army did not respond to an AFP request for comment on the Deir Jarir case.

Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now said that so far this year, as world attention has focussed on Gaza, Israel has seized more than 1,000 hectares of West Bank land.


In March, Israeli authorities declared as state land 800 hectares next to a farmer's home near the Jordan Valley village of Jiftlik, a move that often leads to restrictions on Palestinians' access.

In areas near Deir Jarir, other residents also said they had been impacted, at great cost to their livelihoods.

Suleiman Khouriyeh, the mayor of the nearby village of Taybeh, population 1,800, said the "entire eastern region has been encroached upon by numerous hilltop shepherds".

"We are unable to access the olive groves that we rightfully own" during harvest season, he said, adding that the community's losses amounted to thousands of dollars.

Khouriyeh said that locals don't have "the power or strength to confront the heavily armed" settlers.

"We are defenceless against them and their weapons."

I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat

The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging as memories fade

Robert Reich

Sun 5 May 2024

I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.

I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.

We Columbia University students urge you to listen to our voices

My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.

To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.


Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.

Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.

Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.

To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.

But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.

Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.


When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.

Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.

I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.

I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.

I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.

The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.

I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.

As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.

I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.

History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.

The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Columbia University protests look increasingly like those in 1968 as police storm campuses nationwide

2024/05/02


The police have regularly been called in to squelch student protests over the past century.
Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Stefan M. Bradley, Amherst College

Columbia University has become the epicenter of student protests over the war in Gaza. In the following Q&A, Stefan Bradley, a history professor at Amherst College and author of the 2009 book “Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s,” touches on the similarities and differences between the protests of the 1960s and now.
How do protests now differ from those of 1968?

Similarities lie in students’ opposition to war, racism and prejudice.

A key difference is social media, which has contributed greatly to the ability of students to mobilize. News of various actions and protests spreads quickly.

Violence or the threat thereof is another difference. Initial demonstrations at Columbia University in April 1968 started with the threat of violence between radical students who wanted to end the university’s ties to war research during the Vietnam War and terminate a university gymnasium construction project and mostly white athletes who wanted to push forward with it. The gym had been designed for mostly Black and brown Harlem residents to enter one door and Columbia affiliates in another. Columbia affiliates also had greater access to various parts of the gym, leading residents to refer to the situation as “Gym Crow.”

Considering the institution’s history of expansion and the uprisings surrounding the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that took place just weeks earlier, tension was in the air. Taking the demonstration to the gym site, student activists then clashed with police in the park before returning to campus to take over Hamilton Hall, the same building where dozens of Columbia student activists in this year’s protests over Gaza were arrested on the night of April 30, 2024.

Until April 30, students were less disruptive than they’d been in the past. The encampments on the South Lawn did not prevent major functions of the university.

But after students took over Hamilton Hall, the calculus has changed. By breaking into the building and barricading themselves in, the campus activists provided administrators with even more justification to call on the police to remove them.
How so?

Officials in 1968 called city police to forcibly remove students, who had subsequently taken over four more buildings, and to make arrests. It quickly turned violent. Police charged into buildings and around campus to make arrests. In a building called Math Hall, activists, including Tom Hayden – author of the Port Huron Statement, a leftist manifesto that called on students to work against racism, imperialism and poverty – fought back. Police struck observers and activists alike with batons.

With long-standing critiques of the university in their minds, and the death of King in their hearts, Harlem residents were ready to support protesting students.


NYPD officers run to head off striking students during the series of protests on the campus of Columbia University in New York City in 1968.
Authenticated News via Getty Images

Black Power leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown explained to the press that if Columbia did not negotiate with the Black students in Hamilton, then the university would have to deal with the “brothers out on the streets” of Harlem. The threat of a coalition with Harlem neighbors aided in the success of the activists in ending the university’s construction of a private gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park and the cessation of the school’s ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a consortium of flagship and elite higher education institutions conducting government-funded defense research during the Cold War.

The threat of violence loomed with the recent building capture and arrests at Hamilton. The 2024 protest is starting to resemble the 1968 protest in terms of students feeling uncomfortable with their university’s decision-making and administrators feeling compelled to regain control of campus. The differences are becoming slimmer and the similarities thicker.

What about the use of symbolism?

In 1968 and today, students used symbolism to send a message.

Fifty-six years ago, demonstrators also took over Hamilton Hall – named after Alexander Hamilton – renaming it Malcolm X University and hanging images of Stokely Carmichael.

Today, protesters renamed it Hind’s Hall – in honor of a 6-year-old Palestinian child killed by Israeli tank fire in Gaza – and flew a Palestinian flag from a Hamilton window.
What is the legacy of the 1968 protest?

The major legacy is that students are the moral compass of these well-endowed, elite institutions – even if they engage in disruptive behavior. They are willing to act on campus when no one else will. If left to the trustees, administrators, faculty and staff, the university would likely be quiet and civil while waiting for the marketplace of ideas and countless committees to suss out what to do about real-time humanitarian crises.

Young people have always been impatient in their calls for justice. In 1968, the issues were Columbia’s construction of a gymnasium in West Harlem and the university’s relationship with the IDA; in the 1980s, it was the university’s financial interests in apartheid South Africa; and in the 2010s, the school’s investments in private prison corporations. The 1968 rebellion taught later generations not to accept indiscriminate killing and injustice.

Another legacy is that the deployment of police to break up demonstrations may end disruptions in the short term, but it may also end up radicalizing moderate students who see their friends get arrested or injured.

What makes a protest successful?

Of course, students want every demand met, but that is often unlikely to happen. A better mark of success is the disruption of the status quo and the amount of attention they bring to issues. In that regard, the protests have been a success.

Conflict at a place like Columbia garners attention because of its location in the media capital of the world. When administrators respond to issues students raise by focusing on policies and procedures, it can give the impression that the issues are not important.

Fifty-six years ago, campus activists inspired students abroad to chant “Two, Three, Many Columbias!” Administrators may want to remain apolitical, but campus demonstrators want to know where their tuition goes and have a say in how it is spent. Highlighting the conflict between key sources of funding – the students paying tuition and the school’s major donors – is a notable victory.

How unprecedented are the student arrests?

There is precedence for student arrests on and off campus. The NYPD violently arrested more than 700 students in April 1968 and dozens more in May.

When students in the 20th century rebelled against the idea that the university was supposed to act in the place of their parents, higher education officials turned to law enforcement in the hope that students would comply.

There were arrests at the Fisk Institute in 1925 for protests over strict student rules, including those that limited participation in civil rights movements; there was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to pass out civil rights literature on campus.

In 1970, there were also police or National Guard-involved shootings of students at Jackson State and Kent State, a predominantly white university.

In 2016, police battled students protesting tuition hikes in California. There were no fatal shootings, but nonlethal weapons like pepper spray were deployed. Inviting police onto campus introduces an element that concedes power to those not interested in the educational well-being of students.

Stefan M. Bradley, Professor of Black Studies and History, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

© The Moderate Voice

Will the US campus protests harm Biden – and benefit Trump?

Rightwing media have seized on campus protests to portray the president as weak. Will it have an impact in November?


Robert Tait in Washington

THE GUARDIAN

Sat 4 May 2024 


At the height of the tensions on US campuses this week, with Republicans gleefully seizing on student unrest as an election issue that could propel Donald Trump back into the White House, Joe Biden tried to steer a middle path.

Weighing the democratic right to peaceful protest and the political necessity to stem disruption, Biden declared that “order must prevail”.


“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear – none of this is a peaceful protest,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “Dissent is essential for democracy … There’s the right to protest. But not the right to cause chaos.”

His comments were his most notable intervention yet in the face of campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The protests are a potential minefield for Biden.


As his lead over Trump among younger voters continues to slip significantly from its 2020 levels and as he tries to fend off Republican attacks, he risks alienating young voters by siding with police.

On the other hand, as riot police have moved against pro-Palestinian encampments and arrested thousands of people, senior Republican figures and Trump himself have been pushing hard to depict the US president as losing control and allowing America’s universities to slide into upheaval.

Fox News has lavished round-the-clock coverage to what it has portrayed as a perfect storm of “Democrat chaos”, with riot police moving into occupied buildings on Columbia campus and open brawling at UCLA after a pro-Israel group attacked an encampment with sticks and fireworks.

The events have diverted attention from the Trump trial in New York, where he is facing charges over a hush-money payment to an adult film star. That has confounded hopes among Democrat strategists that details from the trial would deal a blow to the Republican campaign.

The focus of Fox and other conservative media on the pro-Palestinian protests marks a shift from other areas of supposed disorder allegedly caused by Biden administration incompetence – particularly the US-Mexico border, where there has been a continuous inflow of asylum seekers.


Trump – posing, somewhat incongruously given his current legal predicament, as the law-and-order candidate – led the chorus on his Truth Social media platform. He called for a “COMPLETE LOCKDOWN” of Columbia and other universities similar to what he claimed had been imposed on the area outside the Manhattan court where he is on trial, supposedly to stop his supporters gathering.

His pronouncement came after he had minimised a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – where a counter-protester was killed and after which he was condemned for saying there had been “fine people on both sides” – as a “peanut” compared with the current protests.

View image in fullscreenPolice officers on the UCLA campus earlier this week. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

Trump is attempting to capitalise on a febrile campus atmosphere in which Jewish and pro-Israel students have complained of antisemitism and being subjected to threats.

So far, analysts say, there is scant evidence of the images of campus upheaval having a radical effect on voter attitudes – although some caution that this may change if protests continue into the autumn.

Biden is conscious of parallels with previous instances of student protests sweeping through American campuses, and producing arguably decisive effects in presidential politics.

In 1968, mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war spilled over into the Democratic national convention in Chicago – coincidentally, the city that will stage this year’s event, where Biden will be formally adopted as his party’s candidate – resulting in violent street clashes with police and punch-ups on the convention floor.

The anarchic scenes were followed by the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice-president, to the Republican Richard Nixon.


With polls showing the president running neck-and-neck with Trump, but behind in most battleground states, the Biden campaign could be forgiven for fearing that the current tumult might be instrumental in engineering a repetition.

Analysts, however, point out that the Gaza war does not resonate with the American public in the same way as the war in Vietnam, where more than half a million US troops were deployed by 1968.

“The raw numbers [of protesters] would have been a lot bigger in 1968,” said Kyle Kondik of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia.

“The current protests are certainly large, but it does seem like Vietnam was fundamentally a lot different [from Gaza]. You had young people being drafted to fight overseas, America was engaged heavily in fighting a land war overseas.

“The US has indirect involvement in Gaza in terms of funding. But it’s different and less impactful overall. I don’t think the race has changed in any kind of a significant way.”

Other observers say that even for voters under 34, a cohort among which polls have shown Biden’s lead over Trump to be slipping significantly, Gaza plays a much smaller role than the passions emanating from college campuses would indicate.

Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report, told the Wall Street Journal’s free expression podcast: “What we see from the data is that for voters under 34, the top issues are the same as the top issues for folks over the age of 34, which the economy and the cost of living – they are concerned about issue of gun violence.”

In a possible indicator that Gaza’s electoral impact even younger voters may be limited, an NBC focus group of college students opposed to US support for Israel’s military offensive revealed that few planned to vote based on the issue – although some said they would opt for third-party candidates such as Jill Stein of the Green party or Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Yet for Biden, even that could have disproportionately negative effects. Walter said: “If you take just a small percentage of younger people who feel very strongly about this issue and say, ‘I cannot vote for Trump, but Biden is no good, I’m staying home’ … for Biden that might be a lot.

“He has a coalition that’s dependent on voters who dislike Trump coming back to him.”

What electoral bearing the protests have could be decided by the effectiveness of the very crackdowns Republicans have been calling for – especially when combined with the imminent end of the academic year, which will see most students leaving campus.

JD Vance, the Republican senator and outspoken Trump ally, may have inadvertently highlighted a Republican dilemma when he posted on X: “No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them.”


With more than 2,000 protesters having been arrested, that process may already have begun, apparently with Biden’s blessing.

If the college clampdowns successfully quell the protests, it would deprive Republicans of the images of chaos they crave – unless the war in Gaza continues to rage, fuelling future protests.

Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait said it was in Trump’s interests for the protests to carry on – a development he connected to a continuation of the war in Gaza into the autumn, thus triggering a fresh round of unrest at the height of the election campaign.

“In a recent social-media post, Trump demanded, ‘STOP THE PROTESTS NOW!!!’” Chait wrote. “If they are still going on during a prospective second Trump term, he will probably stop them with maximal violence. In the meantime, he fervently wishes them to continue through November.”

Global Student protests against Israel’s offensive in Gaza spread


AFP
May 4, 2024

Students on campuses around the world have responded to the ongoing crisis in Gaza - Copyright AFP Guillermo Arias

Student protests against the Israeli military assault on Gaza following the unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel have spread to several countries.

Here is a round-up of the main campaigns.

– United States –

Demonstrators have gathered on at least 40 US university campuses since April 17, often erecting tent camps to protest at the soaring death toll in the Gaza Strip.

Nearly 2,000 people have been detained, according to US media, in demonstrations reminiscent of protests against the Vietnam War.

In recent days, police have forcibly dismantled several student sit-ins, including one at New York University at the request of its administrators.

Demonstrators barricaded inside Columbia University, the epicentre in New York of the student protests, complained of police brutality when officers cleared the faculty.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, hundreds of police emptied a camp, tearing down barriers and detaining more than 200 protesters.

Brown University on Rhode Island reached an agreement with students to remove their camp from the grounds in exchange for it considering divesting from “companies enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza”.

President Joe Biden broke his silence on the protests on Thursday, insisting “order must prevail”.



– France –

Police on Friday forcibly evacuated protesters from a pro-Gaza sit-in at Sciences Po in Paris, the country’s top political science school.

Officials said 91 people were arrested.

Sciences Po interim administrator Jean Basseres rejected a student demand to examine the institution’s links with Israeli universities.

Outside the nearby Sorbonne University, the Union of Jewish Students in France set up a “dialogue table” on Friday.

“Jewish students have their place in this dialogue,” said Joann Sfar, a comic-book artist invited as a guest speaker.

He said he understood why students were “outraged by what’s going on in the Middle East”.

At Paris-Dauphine University, administrators banned a conference involving Rima Hassan, a Franco-Palestinian expert in international law who has been vocal in condemning “genocide” in Gaza.

The ban, introduced on the grounds there was a risk of public disorder, has been overturned by the judicial authorities.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday condemned the university blockades at Sciences Po and other French universities that “prevented debate”.



– Germany –

Police intervened on Friday to evacuate protesters outside Humboldt University in central Berlin.

A number of demonstrators were “forcibly” removed after refusing to decamp to another location, police said.

Berlin mayor Kai Wegner criticised the protest, saying on X, formerly Twitter, that the city didn’t want to see events like those in the United States or France.



– Canada –

Students have protested against the war in Gaza in several cities, including Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

Hundreds of demonstrators have joined the first and largest camp, at Montreal’s McGill University, in the face of threats of a police clearance.

They have vowed to remain there until McGill cuts all financial and academic ties with Israel.

University administrators said on Wednesday they wanted the camp removed immediately, alleging that certain protesters were not members of the student body.



– Australia –

Hundreds of rival supporters of Gaza and Israel faced off at Sydney University on Friday, shouting slogans and waving flags.

Except for a few heated exchanges, the protest and counter-protest passed off peacefully.

Pro-ceasefire demonstrators have been camped for 10 days on a green lawn in front of the university. They want it to cut ties with Israeli institutions and reject funding from arms companies.



– Ireland –

Students at Trinity College Dublin university began a sit-in on Friday, describing the protest as a “solidarity encampment with Palestine”.



– Mexico –

Dozens of students from the country’s largest university, UNAM, set up a camp in the capital on Thursday, chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will overcome”.

They want the Mexican government to sever all ties with Israel.



– Switzerland –

About 100 students have since Thursday been occupying the entrance of a building at Lausanne University, calling for an academic boycott of Israel and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The peaceful sit-in is due to continue until Monday.

burs-cls/gil/jj/imm

‘I was happy they still stand beside us’: Palestinians in Rafah on US campus protests

Word of the demonstrations that have spread across the west has cheered some in Gaza’s southernmost city

Malak A Tantesh in Rafah

Sun 5 May 2024 

THE GUARDIAN


In the tented camps and crowded streets of Rafah, the pro-Palestinian campus protests in the US have been followed closely.

“We hear a lot of news about students’ demonstrations in American universities … When I saw that, I was very happy that there are still those who stand beside us and in support of us,” said Nevin Abu Shahma, 39, who fled to Rafah from northern Gaza early in the war.


Pro-Palestinian protests that have fanned across US universities for weeks are now more muted after a series of clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern White House directive to restore order.

But similar demonstrations have spread in some form to campuses in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, and on Saturday students waved Palestinian flags and chanted anti-war slogans during a ceremony at the University of Michigan.

View image in fullscreen

More than a million people have been displaced to Rafah, creating a humanitarian crisis. Photograph: Saher Alghorra/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Asmaa al-Najili, 30, who had arrived in Rafah from Khan Younis, a nearby city which was the site of heavy fighting in March, said she had used news clips of protesting students to cheer up her seven-year-old daughter.


More than a million people displaced from elsewhere in Gaza by Israel’s military offensive are sheltering in Rafah, the territory’s southernmost city. Most are kept up to date by social media – when they can get signals or charge their phones – or local radio channels broadcasting live feeds of Middle Eastern TV channels like Al Jazeera.

Haitham Abu Marsa said that before the recent unrest few in Gaza had heard of the US universities where the protests have been most intense. Like many in Rafah, he said the activism seen in the US highlighted the lack of protest in support of Palestinians in the Arab world.


Israelis voice sadness and defiance over Gaza protests on US campuses

“These protests [in the US] … made us happy by finding people from the west who stood with our cause … [But] at the same time it made us sad because our brothers in the Arab countries did not do what these people did,” the 33-year-old said.

The war has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s local health officials, caused widespread destruction and plunged the territory into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands are unaccounted for.

The conflict began on 7 October when Hamas attacked southern Israel, abducting about 250 people and killing roughly 1,200, mostly civilians. Eighty hostages were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails during a short-lived truce in November. Israel said Hamas is still holding about 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Repeated threats by Israeli officials to launch a major military operation into Rafah have made many in the city very anxious, and some have already moved on elsewhere. Israel said Hamas leaders and four battalions of militants are based there, as well as some of the hostages.

Though there is now more food available in Rafah, inadequate supplies, overcrowding and a lack of health facilities have caused a continuing acute humanitarian crisis.

The growing death toll in Gaza and images of the widespread destruction there have swayed public opinion in the US, with support for Israel’s military assault dropping from 50% in a November Gallup poll to 36% in late March. Bernie Sanders drew comparisons with protests in the US against the war in Vietnam.

In Rafah, Marwan Hegazy, from the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, also referred to the mass demonstrations of the 1960s.

“The protests of university students were the reason for stopping other wars in the past, such as the Vietnam war,” Hegazy, 60, said. “We hope that the rest of the students of the world will stand up for us.”

Messages to the protesters were scrawled on a handful of tents in the camp, with one reading: “Thank you students in solidarity with Gaza. Your message has reached us. Thank you students of Columbia. Thank you students.”

Student protesters interrupt University of Michigan commencement

With some demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza and others with Israel, students waved flags and chanted slogans

Maya Yang

Sat 4 May 2024 

THE GUARDIAN

Students demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza waved Palestinian flags and keffiyehs and chanted anti-war slogans during the University of Michigan’s commencement ceremony on Saturday.

Videos on social media showed students donning their graduation gowns as they appeared to chant: “Israel bombs, UMich pays!” and “How many kids have you killed today?” One photo showed a plane appearing to carry a sky banner over the university with the message: “Divest from Israel now! Free Palestine!”



‘They’re sending a message’: harsh police tactics questioned amid US campus protest crackdowns

According to the Associated Press, one banner read: “No universities left in Gaza.”

At one point, several graduates appeared to stage a walkout from the ceremony while carrying Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs as onlooking students applauded.

The protest, along with numerous other student-led protests across US universities, comes amid Israel’s deadly war on Gaza since Hamas’s 7 October attacks that killed more than 1,100 Israelis. In response, Israeli forces have killed more than 34,000 Palestinians across Gaza while leaving 2 million survivors displaced across the narrow strip amid a famine caused by Israeli restrictions on aid.

View image in fullscreenProtesters at Michigan Stadium on Saturday. Photograph: Jacob Hamilton, MLive.com/AP

Israel has also destroyed every university in Gaza, in addition to killing at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors, according to the UN, which has condemned Israel’s actions as “scholasticide”.

No arrests were reported during the University of Michigan ceremony, which comprised tens of thousands of attendees, the Associated Press reports, adding that as US navy secretary Carlos Del Toro addressed the crowd, he at one point said: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you can please draw your attention back to the podium.”

While administering an oath to the armed forces graduates, Del Toro said they would “protect the freedoms that we so cherish”, including “the right to protest peacefully”, according to the Associated Press.

On Monday, University of Michigan students set up a Palestinian solidarity encampment on campus in calls for the university to divest from companies with investments in Israel. The encampment was led by Tahrir, a coalition of more than 80 organizations including the university chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the Michigan Daily reports.

Pictures online showed various hand-painted signs at the encampment including ones that read: “Faculty and staff for liberation” and “Apartheid isn’t kosher! Jews demand divestment!”

On Friday, police arrested a pro-Palestinian protester outside the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art, the Detroit News reports, adding that police used a chemical spray to disperse students. According to a university spokesperson who spoke to the outlet, a dinner was held at the museum on Friday to recognize those receiving honorary degrees from the university.

One video online appeared to show Sarah Hubbard, chair of the university’s board of regents, waving and appearing to film students from inside the museum as they chanted: “Regent Hubbard, you can’t hide, you are funding genocide!”

In recent weeks, more than 2,000 people have been arrested during Palestinian solidarity and anti-war protests on US college campuses. University leaders have been heavily criticized across the country for authorizing police forces to conduct arrests on campus, many of which have been carried out violently.

At the University of Virginia, 25 people were arrested on Saturday for trespassing after police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters who refused to remove tents from campus.

At Columbia University in New York, the Columbia Spectator reported police using stun grenades on the anti-war protesters while carrying out arrests. The Manhattan district attorney’s office confirmed that a police officer fired a gun during the arrests.

View image in fullscreenRawan Antar, 21, center, chants in support of Palestinians in Ann Arbor on Saturday. Photograph: Katy Kildee/AP

View image in fullscreenA protester in Ann Arbor on Saturday. Photograph: Katy Kildee/AP

At the University of California, Los Angeles, videos online showed police in riot gear firing rubber bullets on campus, with anti-war student protesters saying that multiple people had been shot in the head.

Other videos surfacing online throughout the week showed multiple faculty members at various universities being violently arrested by police. In a post on X, Steve Tamari, a 65-year-old Middle East historian at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, said that he had been “body-slammed and crushed by the weight of several St Louis county police officers, then dragged across campus by the police”. In addition to broken ribs, Tamari said he sustained a broken hand.

25 arrested at University of Virginia after police clash with pro-Palestinian protesters

Story by PHILIP MARCELO and DENISE LAVOIE, Associated Press

 • 

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

Twenty-five people were arrested Saturday for trespassing at the University of Virginia after police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters who refused to remove tents from campus, and demonstrators at the University of Michigan chanted anti-war messages and waved flags during commencement ceremonies.

In Virginia, student demonstrators began their protest on a lawn outside the school chapel Tuesday. On Saturday, video from WVAW-TV showed police wearing heavy gear and holding shields lined up on the campus in Charlottesville. Protesters chanted “Free Palestine,” and university police said on the social platform X that an “unlawful assembly” had been declared in the area.



Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024.( Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

As police moved in, students were pushed to the ground, pulled by their arms and sprayed with a chemical irritant, Laura Goldblatt, an assistant professor of English and global studies who has been helping student demonstrators, told The Washington Post.


Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024.( Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

“Our concern since this began has been the safety of our students. Students are not safe right now,” Goldblatt said.

The university administration said in a statement that the demonstrators were told the tents and canopies they erected were prohibited under school policy and were asked to remove them. Virginia State Police were asked to help with enforcement, the university said.

It was the latest clash in several tense and sometimes violent weeks at colleges and universities around the country that have seen dozens of protests and hundreds of arrests at demonstrations over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century. Some schools have reached agreements with protesters to end the demonstrations and reduce the possibility of disrupting final exams and commencements.


Graduates sporting Israeli flags and pins shout at Pro-Palestinian protesters as they demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024.( Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

The Associated Press has recorded at least 61 incidents since April 18 in which arrests were made at protests, with more than 2,400 people being arrested on 47 campuses. The figures are based on AP reporting and statements from universities and law enforcement agencies.

Many encampments have been dismantled.

Michigan was among the schools bracing for protests during commencement this weekend, including Indiana University, Ohio State University and Northeastern University in Boston. Many more are slated in the coming weeks.

A plane bearing a banner that reads ""We stand with Israel jewishlivesmatter.us" flies overhead before the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

In Ann Arbor, the protest happened at the beginning of the event at Michigan Stadium. About 75 people, many wearing traditional Arabic kaffiyehs along with their graduation caps, marched up the main aisle toward the graduation stage.

They chanted “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!” while holding signs, including one that read: “No universities left in Gaza.”

Overhead, planes flew banners with competing messages. “Divest from Israel now! Free Palestine!” and “We stand with Israel. Jewish lives matter.”


Campus Protests Commencements© Provided by The Associated Press

Officials said no one was arrested, and the protest didn’t seriously interrupt the nearly two-hour event, which was attended by tens of thousands of people, some of them waving Israeli flags.


A graduate waits for the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony to begin at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

State police prevented the demonstrators from reaching the stage and university spokesperson Colleen Mastony said public safety personnel escorted the protesters to the rear of the stadium, where they remained through the conclusion of the event.

“Peaceful protests like this have taken place at U-M commencement ceremonies for decades,” she added.




Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024.( Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

The university has allowed protesters to set up an encampment on campus, but police assisted in breaking up a large gathering at a graduation-related event Friday night, and one person was arrested.

At Indiana, protesters were urging supporters to wear their kaffiyehs and walk out during remarks by President Pamela Whitten on Saturday evening. The Bloomington campus designated a protest zone outside Memorial Stadium, the arena for the ceremony.


Graduate Ari Belchinsky wears pro-Israel pins during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Jacob Hamilton/Ann Arbor News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

At Princeton, in New Jersey, 18 students launched a hunger strike in an effort to push the university to divest from companies tied to Israel.

One of them, senior David Chmielewski said in an email that the strike started Friday morning with participants consuming water only, and it will continue until administrators meet with students about demands including amnesty from criminal and disciplinary charges for protesters.

Graduates sporting Israeli flags and pins shout at Pro-Palestinian protesters as they demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Katy Kildee/Detroit News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

Other demonstrators are participating in “solidarity fasts” lasting 24 hours, Chmielewski said.

Princeton students set up a protest encampment and some held a sit-in at an administrative building this week, leading to about 15 arrests.


Rawan Antar, 21, center, chants in support of Palestinians during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Katy Kildee/Detroit News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

Students at other colleges, including Brown and Yale, launched similar hunger strikes earlier this year before the more recent wave of encampments.

Meanwhile in Medford, Massachusetts, students at Tufts University peacefully took down their encampment without police intervention Friday night.

School officials said they were pleased with the development, which wasn’t the result of any agreement. Protest organizers said in a statement that they were “deeply angered and disappointed” that negotiations with the university had failed.


A graduate holds his cap with an Israeli flag while shouting at pro-Palestinian protesters as they demonstrate during the University of Michigan's Spring 2024 Commencement Ceremony at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Mich., Saturday, May 4, 2024. (Katy Kildee/Detroit News via AP)© Provided by The Associated Press

The protests stem from the conflict that started Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages.

Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Israeli strikes have devastated the enclave and displaced most of its inhabitants.

The Associated Press
25 arrested at University of Virginia after police clash with pro-Palestinian protesters
Duration 0:38  View on Watch

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Marcelo reported from New York. Lavoie reported from Richmond, Virginia. Associated Press reporters Ed White in Detroit, Nick Perry in Boston and Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, contributed.