KUALA LUMPUR – Pro-Palestinian demonstrations persist in universities throughout the United States, and they are now spreading to schools in Europe and Australia.
In the second week of protests calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, thousands of students are calling on dozens of universities to divest from Israel, Al Jazeera reported.
Some universities have been forced to cancel their graduation ceremonies, while others have seen entire buildings occupied by protesting students.
One of the latest to join the movement is the City University of New York (CUNY), where hundreds of students have set up an encampment on campus with banners with slogans like “No More Investment in Apartheid.”
“Young people are really starting to show up and demand that schools are held accountable for their relationship with the Israeli colonisation,” Gabby Aossey, a student organiser at the CUNY protest said.
Across the US, university leaders have tried, and largely failed, to quell the demonstrations. Police have intervened violently, with videos emerging from different states showing hundreds of students – and even faculty members – being forcefully arrested.
Meanwhile, Rina Shah, a Washington-based political strategist and former senior congressional aide, said protests in US universities were a display of democracy in action, a welcome sight in an election year marked by concerns of voter apathy chiefly due to Israel’s war on Gaza.
“So when I see a movement like this of students taking peaceful, non-violent action and expressing their concern about the US government backing of Israel, of where our tax money is going, I think that’s extremely healthy,” she told Al Jazeera.
“These students are out there concerned about America’s role in backing (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu. On the one hand, we are supplying weapons and funds to do what he wants to do in Gaza, while on the other we are sending humanitarian aid to Gaza. This is the hypocrisy these students are concerned about.”
Yesterday, police in riot gear cleared an encampment on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. Several dozen students shouted and booed at them from a distance, but the scene was otherwise not confrontational.
The school said in a statement that the demonstration, which began two days ago, had become “infiltrated by professional organisers” with no affiliation to the school and protesters had used anti-Semitic slurs.
“We cannot tolerate this kind of hate on our campus,” the statement posted on the social media platform X said.
At Columbia University, where more than 100 pro-Palestinian activists were arrested by armed police officers on campus about a week ago, university leaders said in a statement on Friday that if the university called the New York police department again, it would “further inflame what is happening on campus”.
Some university leaders and state officials have strongly condemned the protests, calling them “anti-Semitic.”
Demonstrators reject the accusation, with many Jewish activists and some Orthodox Jews joining the ranks of protesters.
“As a child of Holocaust survivors, it disturbs me to my core to see my own people perpetrating something that we’ve been through,” Jewish anti-war protester Sam Koprak told Al Jazeera at a campus gathering. – April 28, 2024