What if the protests on American campuses reach Europe? The stage seems far away. But in France and the United Kingdom, students have already begun to occupy and camp on campuses. And political and academic authorities fear contagion, although for now the movement, which also reaches European countries such as Italy, is limited.
Between firmness and dialogue, French authorities, concerned about the impact on society of the Hamas attack on October 7 and the Israeli war in Gaza, have redoubled efforts to prevent the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States from reproducing. The British Government, which has maintained a belligerent attitude towards the continuous pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent months in the streets of London, has contacted the various rectors to demand that they be firm and nip in the bud any sign of what they consider anti-Semitism.
Although the protest has not caught on like on the other side of the Atlantic, in France it has ignited a partisan brawl between a radical left that waves the Palestinian flag and a right that calls for cutting off public funds if the mobilizations are not stopped immediately.
On Monday, during an attempted encampment at the Sorbonne that the police quickly cleared, the candidate for the European elections of the France Insoumise party (LFI), Rima Hassan, proclaimed on the X network: “The Sorbonne students mobilized to denounce the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It’s time for the uprising, let’s go support them! The same day, the president of the Paris region, the conservative Valérie Pécresse, announced that she was suspending funding for another focus of contestation, Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies. Pécresse accused “a radicalized minority that calls for anti-Semitic hatred and is exploited by LFI and its allies.” Islamo-leftists”.
In the United Kingdom, groups of students have begun improvising camps since Wednesday in defense of the Palestinian people and against the Israeli attacks on Gaza in universities such as Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle, Lancaster and Edinburgh. The organization of these protests is very weakly coordinated. As in France, the number of participants is not proportional to the magnitude of the American mobilizations and, so far, there have been no episodes of vandalism or confrontations with the police.
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“We have always been clear that people have the right to protest in a peaceful and law-abiding way, but without abusing or intimidating other people,” explained a Downing Street spokesperson. “The police have the capacity and powers to stop disorders and protests, and they will have our full support,” he added.
At the University of Manchester, more than 100 students have gathered at the so-called Palestinian Resistance Camp, in Brunswick Park, to demand that the center end its relations with arms companies such as BAE Systems or Tel Aviv University.
Collaboration with Israel
In Italian universities such as Turin, Pisa, Bologna and Rome, student groups have been demanding the suspension of collaborations with Israel for weeks, and on some campuses there have been clashes with the police. As a result of the protests in the United States, students from universities such as La Sapienza in Rome have announced mobilizations for May 7, and occupations. In Spain, according to Efe, a university camp in solidarity with Palestine that began this Monday at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Valencia will continue indefinitely as long as they have “strength” and achieve their goal: “Achieve the end of the Palestinian genocide ”. In France there have been mobilizations, in addition to Paris, in Rennes, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lyon and Grenoble, among other cities, according to a count of Le Monde.
A common demand in the protests is that universities review or cancel agreements with Israeli universities. This was one of the topics this Thursday in a closed-door forum in which the students and management participated at the Paris headquarters of Sciences Po, a nursery for French elites and an establishment of global influence. For two hours, some 320 people spoke about the war and its impact on the Parisian campus: the police occupation and eviction of a courtyard in the middle of last week; the blocking of a street in the main building for one day; and finally the agreement to vacate the area and return to calm.
“It has been a tough debate, with quite clear positions, a lot of emotion, and now I hope that everyone finds calm,” said the center’s interim administrator, Jean Bassères, at the exit. Appearing alongside Bassères was the dean of the School of International Affairs, Arancha González Laya, who declared: “Dialogue is not always comfortable, but in democracies nothing is comfortable, and here we have privileged the path of opening a dialogue.”
The protests can mark the campaign for the European elections in June: in France it is already happening. The radical left and the social democrats – the one that is openly pro-Palestinian and the one that seeks a balance – are fighting a battle that is projected on the campuses.
France is one of the Western countries with the largest Muslim and Jewish population. And in intellectual and political debates there is a recurring fixation on the supposed americanization from France: the importation of the Columbia or Los Angeles protests would be the definitive test.
The Government wants to avoid it. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has promised: “There will never be a right to blockade, nor any tolerance for the action of an agitating and dangerous minority that seeks to impose its rules on our students and our teachers.”
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