The war in Gaza once again inflames US universities, where Palestinian protests are gaining strength as the Israeli offensive continues with no immediate ceasefire in sight. A hundred students were detained last week at Columbia University; This Monday, the arrests were repeated at New York University and Yale University, involving at least 47 people, in actions that the managers of the centers have justified as the result of a difficult balance between freedom of expression, the toughness against anti-Semitism and the need to guarantee the safety of students. While the camping and confinement of students is extended as the celebrations for the Jewish Passover begin this Monday, the White House itself has issued a statement to comment on the matter.
At Yale, protesters, gathered in tents in one of the central squares of the campus for four days, blocked traffic this Monday to demand that this elite study center divest from its investments in the military industry and those companies who benefit from the war in the Strip. According to the university newspaper Yale Daily Newsthe Police arrested more than 47 people, including students, teachers and other people not related to the institution.
Late in the afternoon, police officers broke down barricades that protesters had erected around their encampment outside the New York University Business School, approximately after police authorities The institution asked attendees to clear the area and report “disruptive” behavior. Up to nearly 400 people had taken part in that rally throughout the day.
In Columbia, tempers remained very heated, after the incidents last Thursday, in which more than a hundred people were detained in a similar protest. It was the first time that the Police entered the campus of the elite center to arrest students since 1968, in the midst of protests against the Vietnam War. The university has suspended the attendance permits of several of the arrested students.
This Monday, the New York university canceled its in-person lessons and replaced them with distance classes, while recommending students not residing in the campus residences not to travel to the facilities, for safety reasons. After noon, a group of professors demonstrated to protest against the arrests and demand that the university readmit those suspended.
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Columbia University President Minouche Safik sent a message to the institution’s staff and students to express her “deep sadness” over the events on her campus. “To cool the animosity and give us all the opportunity to consider next steps, classes will be taught virtually this Monday,” she announced.
Similar protests are taking place at other prestigious university centers across the country, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Emerson, Tufts, Brown and Stanford, on the West Coast. At the University of Michigan headquarters in Ann Arbor, dozens of students have gathered at The Diagonal, the center of campus, to protest.
Protests at American universities are not something new in recent months. Since the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, in which nearly 1,200 people died, and the beginning of the war in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, the demonstrations have taken place with more or less intensity .
The calls, followed closely by Democratic and Republican legislators on Capitol Hill, have triggered appearances in Congress by several of the presidents of major universities, including Safik herself. One of these interventions, that of those responsible for the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard, cited by the Education Committee of the House of Representatives, aroused strong controversy when, in response to a question from congresswoman Elise Stefanik, from the hard wing Republican, they avoided specifying whether they would take action against students who used anti-Semitic language. The controversy was in crescendo for days until triggering the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Now, the police charge against the Columbia students last week has given new impetus to the protests that were already developing, or unleashed new ones where they had not occurred or had dissolved over time.
And Rector Safik finds herself in the eye of the storm. On the one hand, progressive groups criticize her reaction on Thursday. On the other, the hard wing of the Republican Party, which has a long history of confrontations and suspicions towards the presidents of universities that they consider excessively liberal, accuses it of permissiveness against anti-Semitism. The 10 congressmen from New York from that formation, led by Elise Stefanik, an ally of former President Donald Trump, have signed a statement in which they demand her resignation.
The protests, which have also attracted participants not related to universities, have tested the balance between the will to defend freedom of expression and the obligation to create a space in which all students and workers feel safe, they allege. The authorities. Some Jewish students say they no longer feel safe on their campuses and that incidents, and feelings, of anti-Semitism are growing.
The White House itself issued a statement on Sunday condemning the incidents of anti-Semitism. “While every American has the right to peacefully protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation against students and the Jewish community are obviously anti-Semitic, excessive and dangerous. And by echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, they are despicable, especially after the worst massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” the statement noted.
But participants point out that many of them are Jews themselves. Jonathan Ben-Mencham, a doctoral student at Columbia, told CNN that students at that university “organizing in solidarity with Palestine, including Jewish students, have faced harassment, online targeting, and now arrests.” “These are the major threats to the safety of Jewish students at Columbia.”
While, on the other hand, Ben-Mecham added, “the student protesters have been holding interfaith prayer sessions for several days, and will celebrate Easter at the Gaza Solidarity camp. “To say that protesters are a threat against Jewish students is a dangerous slander.”
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