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The Gaza solidarity encampment at the Columbia University's campus
Students at more than 40 universities and colleges in the United States and around the world have lit a fire under the Palestine solidarity movement by setting up encampments on their campuses. They are demanding that their universities end their complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine more broadly.
While the first and longest-running student takeover has been at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, it was Columbia University that lit the fuse for a widespread student movement and drew global attention. The administration’s decision at the elite New York City school to sic the repressive New York Police Department on peacefully protesting students led to a global movement and gave hope for the first time in months to countless people. As of April 26, student occupations extended to France and Australia in addition to dozens of campuses in the United States.
Police repression at other sites besides Columbia has been fierce as well. At Emerson University in Boston, Massachusetts, the Boston Police Department was livestreamed manhandling protesters in the early hours of April 25. At Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the police threw Caroline Fohlin, an economics professor who attempted to intervene in arrests of students, to the ground, her head hitting the concrete. The University of Southern California allowed officers to fire rubber bullets at students, and the University of Texas–Austin had local and state police on motorcycles, horseback, and on foot arresting students.
But the police didn’t always have the upper hand. At Cal Poly Humboldt, students successfully barricaded themselves in a building. And, at the City University of New York’s City College, protesters pushed the police back and maintained the integrity of their encampment.
Through it all, students have grounded the protests in what matters: conditions in Gaza and their universities’ ties to Israel. Even as establishment figures hemmed and hawed in the face of the student uprising—President Joe Biden tried to link them to “antisemitism”—two mass graves were uncovered in Palestine, which was from the aftermath of terroristic Israeli raids on two hospitals in Gaza. About 400 doctors, patients, children, and others were found dead, in some cases buried alive.
The higher-ups on campuses, in boardrooms, and in presidential palaces around the world appeared to have nothing new to say about Israel’s horrifying and murderous tactics. The Zionist state’s genocide in Gaza has already reached its 200th day, with at least 34,000 dead and an invasion reportedly imminent in Rafah, the southern city and place of last refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
While some have claimed that the mainly U.S. student movement is a distraction, movement figures like Harsha Walia have noted the connections between racist state violence in the United States and in Israel and elsewhere. And, if nothing else, the student movement in advance of both the launch of the aid-carrying “Freedom Flotilla” and International Workers’ Day has given countless Palestinian solidarity activists something concrete to do beyond doomscrolling horrifying images from Gaza for hours or attempting to carry on with their daily lives in the face of ongoing genocide.
Moreover, with billions of dollars in endowment money, social capital, and, in some cases, direct links to the state of Israel, universities are an important site of struggle for the advancement of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. For example, Columbia University maintains a campus in Tel Aviv.
The United States proves increasingly inhospitable to free speech, a cornerstone of democracy; and it seems nearly every private and public institution has been corporatized, militarized, or both. Reprising the historical role of universities as centers of knowledge and public interest as students are doing now could offer a site for pushback to not just the genocide in Gaza, but much more.
In the coming days, there may be many more encampments in an ever-widening range of sites around the world. The protesters are united in their purpose; as a common chant, “Disclose, divest; we will not stop, we will not rest!” is heard across the globe.
“We are over 6 months into the genocide in Gaza.”
We have let life go on, let business go on as usual, while a genocide has been broadcast to us for months. Meanwhile, MIT has received OVER $11 MILLION in research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel since 2015. Multiple labs on this campus are performing sponsored research for the material benefit of the Israeli Occupation Forces. As recently as March 2024, such funding has been renewed.
It is unconscionable. It is immoral. It reflects a gross disdain for human life and human dignity that this institution, MIT, has chosen to embody.
To MIT, we charge you in the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people for your explicit role in providing scientific and technological support for the Israeli Occupation Forces’ and their crimes. The students and workers of this campus have made our demands CLEAR. In the last month, undergraduates in the Undergraduate Association and grad workers in the Graduate Students Union PASSED referendums demanding that MIT stop accepting blood money from the Ministry of Defense of Israel, the same entity enacting the genocide in Gaza. We have shown that we are with the Palestinian people, and now is the time to act.
We are what make MIT the place that it is. They use our labor to advance their prestige. They use our student culture to improve their image. We are so much stronger as a community, and if you have ever wondered what YOU can do, this is it. The students of Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and countless other schools, with the resilience of their Gaza solidarity encampments, have shown us what it means to resist the powers of our complicit institutions and fight collectively. Come support the encampment. Come now.
Ask yourself what it would take to compel us to act. Then ask yourself if the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in this genocide are enough for us to act. Ask yourself what business this institution has to maintain ties with a genocidal state after six months.
Today, we say that we refuse to give our labor to genocide. We refuse to make space on this campus for genocide. We will not rest until MIT cuts research ties with the Israeli military.
Our people at MIT have shown that we stand in solidarity with our steadfast siblings in Palestine. We rebuke the complicity of our institution, and today, we take the next step together in fighting for what we believe in.
Image by Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition
“Reprehensible and dangerous.” “Terrorist sympathizers.” “It’s not 1938 Berlin. It’s 2024, Columbia University, NYC.”
The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different. As a Jewish student at Columbia, it depresses me that I have to correct the record and explain what the real risk to our safety looks like. I still can’t quite believe how the events on campus over the past few days have been so cynically and hysterically misrepresented by the media and by our elected representatives.
Last week, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, representing more than 100 student organizations, including Jewish groups, organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a peaceful campus protest in solidarity with Palestine. CUAD was reactivated after the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of students camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn. They vowed to stay put until the university divests from companies that profit from their ties to Israel. Protesters prayed, chanted, ate pizza, and condemned the university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Though counter-protesters waved Israeli flags near the encampment, the campus remained largely calm from my vantage point.
Columbia responded by imposing a miniature police state. Just over a day after the encampment was formed, university President Minouche Shafik asked and authorized the New York Police Department to clear the lawn and load 108 students – including a number of Jewish students – onto Department of Corrections buses to be held at NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. One Jewish student told me that she and her fellow protesters were restrained in zip-tie handcuffs for eight hours and held in cells where they shared a toilet without privacy. The NYPD chief of patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
Since then, dozens of undergraduates have been locked out of their dorms without notice. Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, notably gave students just 15 minutes to retrieve their belongings after returning from lockup and finding themselves evicted. Suspended students cannot return to campus and are struggling to access food or medical care. Students who keep Shabbat, and do not use electronics on the Sabbath, were forced to rely on technology in order to secure food and emergency housing. This crackdown was the most violence inflicted on our student body in decades. I implore you, as our Jewish Voice for Peace chapter does, to consider whether arresting Jewish students keeps us and Columbia safe.
Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety. I saw politicians compare student organizers to neo-Nazis and call for a National Guard deployment, apparently ignorant of the lives lost at Kent State and in Charlottesville, and with very little pushback from national media. This is a repulsive form of self-aggrandizement that I can only assume is intended to preserve relationships with influential donors. Calls to more heavily police our campus actively endanger Jewish students, and threaten the regular operations of the university far more gravely than peaceful protests.
It’s true, the fact that CUAD organizers fundamentally reject bigotry and hate has not stopped unrelated actors from exploiting opportunities to shamefully harass Jewish students with grotesque or antisemitic statements. I condemn antisemitism – which should seem obvious since I have experienced it many times myself. (This likely won’t keep controversial Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai from calling me a kapo.) But the often off-campus actions of a few unaffiliated individuals simply do not characterize this disciplined student campaign. The efforts to connect these offensive but relatively isolated incidents to the broader pro-Palestinian protest movement mirror a wider strategy to delegitimize all criticism of Israel.
As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewish prayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.
On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.
Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.
Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities.
I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine.
And we are not alone. College campuses across the United States have followed Columbia’s lead.
And so, it is my hope that we can all learn from their examples to remain clear-eyed about the stakes of this crisis and focus on the actual violence being perpetrated in all of our names.
APRIL 27, 2024
By George Binette
University campuses in the United States have long been ideological battlegrounds in the nation’s ‘culture wars’, but since last October the reality of Israel’s unrelenting war on Gaza and its people has fuelled passionate protests on a scale not witnessed since the height of the movement opposing the US war on Vietnam.
On 17th April students at Columbia University in New York City established a miniature tent city on a lawn outside a main campus building. They set up the encampment as an expression of solidarity with the people of Gaza and to back demands for an immediate ceasefire and divestment of Columbia’s Israel-linked investments.
Within 48 hours Columbia’s already embattled president, the Egyptian-American economist, Minouche Shafik, who had previously been vice-chancellor at the London School of Economics and a deputy governor at the Bank of England, had asked New York’s police department to intervene and evict the campers. The cops, many clad in riot gear, duly obliged and arrested over 100 including several Jewish students. All those taken into custody are currently out of jail, but the university administration has suspended many of the students and evicted some, if not all, of those who had student accommodation. In-person classes have ceased for the remainder of the academic year with teaching once more online.
Since the initial police raid, a new encampment has sprung up elsewhere on the Columbia campus, while dozens of protests inspired by the Columbia student activists have taken place across much of the US, with nearly two dozen other campuses witnessing the erection of makeshift camps by 24th April. In addition to Columbia, five (Brown, Cornell, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Yale) of the other six elite Ivy League institutions have now seen encampments. Several other universities have seen demonstrations. While still concentrated in the northeast, the wave of protests has become national.
The movement is far from homogenous, with precise demands varying from campus to campus. Some have simply demanded an end to investments in corporations supplying weaponry to the Israeli military such as Lockheed-Martin, the principal manufacturer of US fighter jets for which BAe is a contractor, and RTX, formerly Raytheon, producer of Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Others have gone further and called for divestment from all shareholdings in companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, including the likes of Airbnb, along with the termination of exchange programmes with Israeli universities.
At least 15 campuses have seen protesters arrested since 17th April. Police broke up encampments and made mass arrests at New York University and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut on 22nd April. Later in the week, police in Los Angeles dismantled an encampment at the University of Southern California (USC).
The USC authorities had earlier fuelled anger after cancelling a speech by the class of 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a student in biomedical engineering and a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage. A pro-Zionist group on the campus, Trojans for Israel (USC’s sports teams carry the “Trojans” moniker), had trawled her social media posts and found pro-Palestinian tweets. The panic-stricken university management has now cancelled the main graduation ceremony and withdrawn invitations to all commencement speakers including the ground-breaking tennis star, Billie-Jean King.
In Boston, police descended on an alleyway encampment by students at Emerson College Wednesday (24th April) night, arresting 108 protesters, with documented allegations of grossly excessive force. The city’s Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, widely seen as a progressive, has so far backed the cops’ actions. Another protest camp has since sprung up at the city’s Northeastern University.
Demonstrators at Atlanta’s Emory University claim that police used tear gas and even rubber bullets in clearing a ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’, which had also become a focal point for opposition to the construction of ‘Cop City’, a police training centre spread across 171 acres on the city’s outskirts.
Brutal reactions to student protests have also come in Texas where at the state university’s main campus in Austin both local police and state troopers were deployed to smash a peaceful student protest. Local media reported the arrest of 34 students and alumni along with two journalists including a Fox News employee. The police action had the public backing of Governor Greg Abbott, frequently mentioned as a potential Trump running mate.
Abbott is hardly alone among Republican politicians in urging harsh crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protest. A group of 27 Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri have published a letter to the Biden administration’s Education Secretary and Attorney General calling for the restoration of “order to campuses that have been effectively shut down by anti-Semitic mobs that are targeting Jewish students.” Cotton and Hawley have explicitly called for the deployment of the National Guard, evoking for some memories of the killing of protesting students by Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio in 1970.
The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose own job security seems precarious, went to the Columbia campus to denounce the student protests and even suggested that Minouche Shafik should resign from the university’s presidency if she could not “restore order.” The previous weekend, Johnson had helped steer a series of “foreign aid” bills through the House of Representatives including some $17bn (£13.7bn) for Israel’s military with a further $9bn earmarked for “humanitarian” relief.
The day following Johnson’s grandstanding, the Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar appeared at Columbia to accompany her daughter, one of the student protesters arrested the week before. Omar, who represents a Minnesota district, is a member of “the Squad” and a forthright opponent of Israel’s war. While hardly typical of Congressional Democrats, Omar was far from alone in voting against the release of still more money for Israel’s war machine. Three dozen other Democrats also said “no” to the package, a figure which would have been almost unthinkable six months before.
The still small, but significant, shift among Democratic Party politicians partly reflects the impact of months of unprecedented protest both on campuses and far beyond, with a transformed stance among several US unions, not least the United Autoworkers, also exercising some influence. Opinion polling suggests a clear majority of US voters and an overwhelming 77% of Democrats back a ceasefire, with an unprecedented level of public sympathy. The April Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District saw a first-term “Squad” member score an easy victory despite prominent attacks on her stance against Israel’s war.
While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu may brand the campus protests as “anti-Semitic” and even compare them with the atmosphere at German universities in the 1930s, an increasing number of Jewish Americans reject such rhetoric. Fissures in the once monolithic support for Israel among 7.6 million Jewish people in the US had already developed before last October. The growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 1996, and the more recent IfNotNow, which opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, which preceded the current war, highlight the rejection of the pro-Zionist narrative among a substantial layer of younger Jews.
So far, the Biden administration has had little to say about the student protests and maintains that it is attempting to exercise a restraining hand on the Netanyahu war cabinet even as it continues to pour billions to the IDF. Biden has paid a modest political price to date with campaigns in Democratic Party presidential primaries persuading many voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots. As in August 1968, Chicago is the host city for the Democrats’ convention, where Biden will doubtless be confirmed as the party’s candidate. Whether or not the spectre of the ’68 protests and their savage suppression haunts Joe Biden is unknown, but the very real prospect of mass abstention or votes for third party candidates just might cost him re-election and ironically propel Donald Trump back into the White House.
George Binette is a Massachusetts native. He is a former Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer and writes in a personal capacity.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_Columbia_pro-Palestine_protest_16.jpg Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. Author: SWinxy, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
The fire this time: mass movement for Palestine on US campuses
By Sophie Squire
Saturday 27 April 2024
Najla Said, daughter of the late Edward Said, arrive at Columbia’s solidarity encampment in support of the US student movement (Picture: @NationalSJP on Twitter)
A militant movement for Palestine is spreading across campuses in the US. Protests, occupations and encampments have spread to more than 40 campuses after students at Columbia University and Barnard College took action.
The occupation at Columbia was still standing strong after ten days on Friday, despite the police trying to smash up the encampment.
The protests have forced university management to enter negotiations with students, who are pushing for the university to divest from all companies that fund and support the Israeli apartheid state.
“We want to stay visible,” said Columbia student protester Mahmoud Khalil. “The university should do something about what we’re asking for, about the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. They should stop investing in this genocide.”
The movement is gathering steam fast, with students on more campuses springing into action every day.
In New York, hundreds of protesters set up an encampment at Gould Plaza at New York university earlier this week. They ignored orders from university bosses who said they’d face punishment if they stayed.
As cops tried to remove them from Gould Plaza, they chanted, “We will not stop, we will not rest. Disclose. Divest.”
At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, students were furious on Thursday that university bosses were trying to ban their group from campus. The FIT Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said they wouldn’t leave the Goodman Centre until their demands were met, which they have renamed the People’s Museum.
The strength of the protests at the University of Southern California forced university management to cancel its commencement ceremony, fearing protesters would disrupt it.
On Wednesday, students at Brown University in Rhode Island said they would not move their tents despite university bosses saying they were breaching university policy.
Niyanta Nepal, president-elect of the student body, said, “What we’re putting on the line is so minimal in risk compared to what Gazans are going through. This is the least we can be doing, as youth in a privileged situation, to take ownership of the situation.”
The lengths to which the US state would go to stop the protest were on display throughout the week. Protesters and students spotted and photographed snipers on the roof of buildings pointed at crowds at Ohio state university and Indiana University Bloomington.
State troopers, some on horseback, charged students at the University of Texas on Wednesday. Lines of cops in military attire marched onto the university campus to try and intimidate students.
In total 34 protesters were arrested by the cops and almost 100 detained. And the cops fired rubber bullets at protesters at the University of Southern California, reportedly hitting a student.
Students do not face repression alone; workers stand by the students they teach. Hundreds of workers at Columbia University walked out this week in solidarity with their students.
A group of workers at the University of Texas wrote a statement stating that they would be taking part in “No classes, No grading. No assignments. No work” while the cops occupy their university.
The group added that there could be no “business as usual” until they left. Others stood in front of their students to protect them from police repression.
Steven Thrasher is an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He said, “Once we heard that they were going to be doing this encampment, we wanted to be here as a presence to help protect them and support them.”
He explained that workers and students were using a colour code system to identify whether they are willing to be arrested. The assistant professor explained that red indicates you are willing to risk arrest.
“And I’m a level red,” said Thrasher. “I was horrified to see students around the country being assaulted by cops. So I wanted to put my body on the line before they could touch our students.”
Students worldwide are inspired by the protests in the US. There were solidarity protests on university campuses in France, Turkey, Italy and Australia.
And pro-Palestinian students occupied the centre of the University of Warwick to hit back at the universities’ ties to the Israeli state. Students and workers here in Britain must follow the lead of those fighting in the US.
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