Since April 18, the Palestinian flag has been flying from east to west in different universities in the United States. The student mobilization in solidarity with Gaza, which has so far resulted in a thousand detainees on more than 25 campuses in at least 21 States, is making its way into the history books along with the massive protests against the Vietnam War in the late sixties. The police eviction of two encampments (including Columbia) and a lockdown on two New York campuses on Tuesday night, with a total of 300 arrests, does not seem to have deterred the protesters; nor the threat of academic suspension and even expulsion for those who participate in the concentrations. On the contrary, the spirits of students and activists confronted with each other and with the forces of order seem increasingly tense, as demonstrated by the scenes of violence experienced this morning on the campus of the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles.
The focus of attention has shifted in recent days from east to west: from the tense calm in Columbia, where the governing junta has asked the police to remain until at least May 17 to guarantee order, to the campus of UCLA, where violent clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters, with a shower of objects and blows, forced the police to intervene hours after the rectorate declared the camping illegal. The use of force is daily currency, as the actions of the state troopers, the state police deployed by the governor of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott, to repress concentrations on the Austin campus, the last one this Tuesday. These are the same state agents who, many on social media denounce, did not intervene in time to stop the massacre at the Uvalde school a year ago. The day before, tension also shook the state university of Portland (Oregon) and the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, and those of Tulane (New Orleans) and Arizona. Only Brown University regained calm without police intervention, after dozens of students agreed to put up the tents.
Since April 18, when the police eviction of the first student camp in Columbia lit the fuse of the protests throughout the country, the mobilization has shaken the United States like a high-voltage electric current both for the presidency of Joe Biden, for the probable loss of votes among young people due to Washington’s military support for Israel, as well as for the governing boards of the prestigious Ivy League centers, which depend on donor financing. Just two weeks before the traditional graduation ceremonies, the New York Police Department (NYPD), the largest in the country, plans to deploy between 15 and 20 officers on the Columbia campus, “to maintain the order and guarantee that the camps are not set up again,” as requested in the letter sent by the rector, Minouche Shafik. Also by letter, the rectorate had requested police intervention on Tuesday night to cleanthe campus, since the police cannot intervene by right. “We have had no other option,” the rector explained in the letter, the opposite of the apology she requested after also resorting to the police to evacuate the first camp.
Columbia University woke up in silence this Wednesday, after brigades of workers cleaned the main esplanade during the early hours of the morning, where until this Tuesday around 80 tents were erected, of the approximately 120 that occupied the place last week . The dismantling of the tents and the sweeping of glass and elements of furniture used by the occupants of the Hamilton Hall building to barricade themselves in—metal picnic tables and wooden chairs—reveal an image similar to that of normality, but vacuum-packed; a tense and rhetorical calm: access to the campus remains restricted to essential services personnel and students living in one of the residences. The overflight of the vast campus by NYPD helicopters, which has stunned the neighborhood’s residents for days, has not stopped.
Leaning on a walker, Mary, with five degrees from Columbia and a specialist in the Italian Renaissance, lamented shortly before the eviction the material damage to what she considers her home: as a student, she participated in the protests against the Vietnam War in 1968, and today, retired, she goes every day as a volunteer to the library, which was closed on Tuesday to avoid greater evils. “Columbia is like my home and it hurts me to see its facilities being mistreated,” she said next to the occupied building. “I perfectly understand the protest of young people because that’s where they come from. [Donald] Trump and fascism, we must stop them, but their demands are not going to reach anywhere, much less to the Holy Land: the university is handcuffed by donors and today also by politicians,” he explained about the threat of withdrawal of funds. by the former and the pressures of the latter. The main student demand, that Columbia withdraw its investments from companies linked to Israel, was before being made explicit an illusory desideratum: already in February, the governing board announced that it had no intention of doing so.
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The campuses are not isolated compounds from the city, as they reflect what is bustling in the streets, and vice versa: since October 7, the NYPD has responded to about 1,100 protests, out of a total of 2,400, related to the war in Gaza, according to The department reported this Wednesday. Almost daily, nerve centers such as New York Central Station or the touristic Brooklyn Bridge are filled with protesters. In the occupation of the Columbia building, the rector’s office and police see a foreign hand, foreign to the university community. Michael, a retiree who presents himself as a “socialist Jew,” waited late Tuesday morning glued to his mobile phone for one of the barricaded people to open a side door for him to join the confinement, convinced that “the police will repress peaceful resistance and “We have to do everything possible to prevent it, we cannot let power get its way again.” Who else participates in the protests? Michael shrugs his shoulders and answers that students, but also “some fellow travelers, activists and left-wing militants, tired of Republicans and Democrats being the same: is there any difference between them when it comes to Israel?”
In a protest called a week ago at the gates of Columbia by thirty associations, mostly from the city’s Arab and Muslim community, banners demanding a ceasefire and a free Palestine rubbed shoulders with others calling for the release of prisoners from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the second Palestinian organization after Fatah, and with a Marxist orientation. The majority of the protesters, however, are campus students, although in the opinion of academic and political authorities they are instrumentalized for spurious interests to present them as the genuine and innocent vanguard of the protests. Pro-Israel counter-demonstrations, some of them defending extreme positions, receive less media attention.
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