1). “Erupt in Protest, Some See a Political Transformation: The pro-Palestine movement is growing and drawing on precedents from Vietnam to Black Lives Matter, suggesting that unequivocal US support for Israel may be on borrowed time”, May 1, 2024, Arun Kundnani, New Lines Magazine, at < https://newlinesmag.com/
2). “How Columbia University’s complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today”, Apr 30, 2024, DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press (AP), at < https://apnews.com/article/
3). “Dueling protesters clash at UCLA hours after police clear pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia”, May 1, 2024, JAKE OFFENHARTZ, JOSEPH B. FREDERICK, ETHAN SWOPE & STEFANIE DAZIO, Associated Press (AP), at < https://apnews.com/article/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
(NB NOTE - there are videos in the second two articles that will not post to Blogger, so please click on the link to the article to view the videos)
Introduction by dmorista: Many commentators have noticed and commented on the parallels between the current wave of student protest on, at this point certainly a couple of hundred campuses elite and non-elite, and the wave of protests and building occupations in April of 1968.
Item 1)., “Erupt in Protest, ….”, offers the best analysis I could find this morning (without paying or breaching some paywall). As the author notes concerning the response of the Democratic Party to the growing and pervasive sentiment against Zionism in the party's base of support in the U.S. Population:
“Compared with the mid-1970s, today’s Democratic politicians are far less willing to engage with popular sentiment in support of a different foreign policy. This is true despite the looming possibility that their support for Israel could mean Democrats lose the White House to a candidate Biden describes as 'the most antidemocratic' in American history.
“Part of this is attributable to structural changes in American politics that have made the Democratic Party more dependent on wealthy donors. But there is a deeper reason. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. was still expanding its global hegemony and, Vietnam notwithstanding, wanted to make a compelling case for its leadership of the capitalist system. That implied a deference to movements at home and a foreign policy that could be presented as meeting international norms of legitimacy. By contrast, today the U.S. is in relative decline. Rather than making new friends in the world, it is fighting hard to hold on to old allies. An expansive progressive vision has given way to maintaining a brittle status quo. (Emphasis added)
“This means that rather than being a sign of strength, the pro-Israel reflexes of the Democratic Party’s leadership may be a sign of potential weakness. It turned out, in the mid-1970s, that making some concessions to anti-imperialist sentiments was an effective way for U.S. elites to demobilize the domestic anti-war movement. …. the progressive foreign policy initiatives in Congress were overturned within a few years, setting the stage for the more aggressive Cold War foreign policy under Reagan.
“That kind of demobilization through partial absorption is less feasible today. A pro-Israel policy that survives only through wealthy donor support and the inertia of a foreign policy establishment fading in its power will be increasingly hard to uphold. To achieve stability, political power has to rely on more than coercion and censorship carried out on behalf of a narrow elite. (Emphasis added)
Item 2)., “How Columbia University’s complex history ….” offers a comparison between the two epochs of student protest that is less profound and more in line with the ruling class defensive storyline. But is notable for presenting some great photographs that contrast the present with the past, and that remember the pivotal events that took place at Columbia University 56 years ago.
Item 3)., “Dueling protesters clash ….”, reports some of the major events taking place on just three important American University Campuses. These included Columbia, UCLA and Brown University (at Brown the University Administration promised to consider divestment of financial holdings sthat support Israel, and the protesters thanked them, took down their tents and went home!!) Of Course Brown University, with its Watson Center program on the costs of war, has already taken a pretty firm stand against imperialism.
Just this moment, as I write this at about 9:15 AM (Central Time), reports and video footage from the University of Wisconsin and Madison have shown that this is a nationwide movement and a massively supported political sentiment among American young people. When we remember the events of 1968 we have to remember that the much more right-wing Presidential Candidate Richard Nixon benefitted from the temerity of the Democratic Candidate Hubert Humphrey (of course the more effective anti-war candidate in the Democratic Party's Primaries, Robert F. Kennedy, was murdered in yet another fishy event just a couple of months after Martin Luther King was assassinated). And, reminiscent of the old Southern Sheriffs with their claims that “outside agitators” were stirring up their “happy darkies” who used to dance and sing, now the Mayor of New York City (a former high ranking cop) is claiming that some shadowy cabal of interational operatives is stirring up the young people a prestigous universities).
We once again have an extremist right-wing presidential candidate running. He is far to the right of Richard Nixon, I can only hope that the we will see Trump held out of the White House. Not that Biden is any good, he is terrible. But he represents the discredited status quo, not a new descent into a harsh authoritarian regime, a regime that would be far more supportive of the most extremist Israeli militarists and war criminals.
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As College Campuses Erupt in Protest, Some See a Political Transformation
In the summer of 2020, millions of teenagers, outraged by the police killing of George Floyd, took to the streets of American towns and cities as part of the largest protests against police brutality in U.S. history. Though years have passed, that energy has not entirely dissipated. Many of the young people who protested in 2020 are now college students campaigning for the U.S. to withdraw its support for Israel’s war in Gaza. They constitute the cutting edge of a pro-Palestine movement that has seen over 1.2 million people participate in about 6,000 protests in the U.S. since Oct. 7.
Just as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement demanded a broad cultural reckoning with racism, pro-Palestine activists in colleges are leading a rapid shift in U.S. public opinion on Israel and Palestine. Thanks in large part to their efforts, Israel appears to be losing the battle for public opinion in the U.S., particularly among the younger generation. Attempts to present Palestinian resistance as “just like ISIS and al Qaeda,” as Israeli President Isaac Herzog put it in The New York Times last November, have failed to persuade a majority of Americans. Around two-thirds of voters now support the U.S. government calling for a permanent cease-fire and a de-escalation of Israel’s violence in Gaza.
This protest movement has manifested most recently in a wave of sit-ins and encampments at dozens of universities across the country. While school officials have tried to crack down on these demonstrations, leading in some cases to levels of police violence reminiscent of that used against BLM protesters four years ago, the suppression has only galvanized opposition from a movement committed to challenging support for Israel in the U.S. establishment.
In many ways, the journey of this generation of young protesters resembles the path trodden by their grandparents, who began the 1960s marching for civil rights and ended the decade with opposition to the Vietnam War. “Our consciousness had grown from thinking of the sheriff in Alabama to thinking of a worldwide system,” a veteran of that movement, Willie Ricks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), told me in 2021. “Wherever people were raising their head against imperialism, we were with them.” One of those anti-imperialist struggles was the Palestine liberation movement, which the SNCC supported from the summer of 1967.
The following April, SNCC leaders H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael turned up at Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, which students had occupied to protest against the Vietnam War and gentrification in nearby Harlem. At a press conference in front of the building, Brown angrily denounced Columbia’s racism. Eventually, police officers violently removed the student occupiers. The organizers of today’s Columbia University encampments have carefully studied their 1968 predecessors. “We were only able to do this because the student organizers went into the archives of ‘68 and learned from what the older generation wrote about their experiences,” a Columbia student told the British newspaper The Independent.
Of course, there are huge differences between today and the 1960s. Nevertheless, a similar process is currently taking place, as young people expand the mental map of their politics from the anti-racism of BLM to the implicitly anti-imperialist movement to end U.S. backing for Israel. That trajectory was set in train in 2014 during the uprising by Black Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown. Palestinians in the West Bank watching the protesters suffer tear gas attacks by military-style police saw a resemblance to their own situation and began sending messages of support and advice. Over the following years, young Black activists visited Palestine and a more organic relationship between the two movements formed.
In 2016, a Movement for Black Lives policy document described the U.S. as “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people” and declared its support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel. The anti-racist movement, the document argued, had to “overturn U.S. imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy.” In adding anti-imperialism to anti-racism, these young Black activists opened a political space that has been crucial to the pro-Palestinian movement, just as the SNCC’s opposition to the Vietnam War starting in 1966 opened the space for white activists to form other groups to build a mass movement opposing it.
Naturally, conservatives are alarmed by today’s protesting college students. They denounce this generation as “woke” and lay the blame on TikTok, Marxist professors and diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools and colleges. Equally anxious are liberal Zionists, who fear that Israel is to this generation what South Africa was to young people in the 1980s — the epitome of political immorality. They are uniting with conservatives to implement a litany of measures to restrict pro-Palestinian activism in colleges. University leaders deemed insufficiently repressive have lost their jobs, professors have been fired for expressing pro-Palestinian views, over 900 students have been arrested, and many more face disciplinary measures. The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that foreign students involved in the protests could be deported. There have even been demands that the civil activism group Students for Justice for Palestine face prosecution on criminal charges of material support for terrorism.
In spite of these attempts at censorship, the U.S. pro-Palestine movement has successfully forced its moral outrage over Israel’s onslaught on Gaza onto the agenda. As has long been understood, because Israel is dependent on the U.S. for financial, diplomatic and military support, U.S. opinion is a crucial front in the battle for Palestinian liberation.
The Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad, a key figure in pro-Palestinian advocacy in the U.S. until his death in 1999, argued in 1983 that the goal of the movement should be the “mobilization of international support and moral isolation of the enemy … addressing not so much the governments but the civil societies in the adversary’s strongholds, in this case the Israeli and American publics.” He had in mind something like the anti-Vietnam War movement, in which he had been a pioneering figure.
Even 10 years ago, anyone in the pro-Palestinian movement predicting the “moral isolation” of Zionism in U.S. public opinion or civil society institutions would have been considered wildly optimistic. But that is now a foreseeable scenario. It is also true that this advance comes at a terrible cost, resulting not only from over a decade of pro-Palestinian organizing but also from the flow of images of the devastating consequences of Israel’s high-tech war of mass elimination.
Take, for example, Human Rights Watch, which published a major study in 2021 finding that Israel is practicing apartheid against the Palestinians. Scholars working in the Palestinian liberation movement, such as Fayez Sayegh, have been comparing Zionism to apartheid South Africa since 1965, arguing that the origins of Israeli racism lie in the broader context of a settler colonial project. Human Rights Watch’s analysis was more legalistic. Nevertheless, for the leading human rights organization in the U.S. to apply the term “apartheid” and call for targeted sanctions and boycotts implied that Israel was not the liberal democratic society it claims to be. That was of tremendous significance.
Over the past few months, trade unions have been declaring their support for a cease-fire, teachers have been informing students about Israel’s “illegal military occupation of Palestine,” and major churches have been calling for the government to halt all its funding of Israel. Over 100 cities, towns and villages have passed resolutions calling for an Israeli cease-fire, including Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco.
Even in the federal government, staff at various agencies, from the State Department to NASA, have circulated open letters calling for a cease-fire. Congressional staffers have protested outside the Capitol to condemn lawmakers for their complicity in Israel’s war. Unlike before, the U.S. media now describes Israeli leaders, not Palestinians, as rejecters of peace plans. And despite the universally pro-Israeli appearance cultivated by the major Jewish organizations in the U.S., American Jews are sharply divided in their views.
Having successfully challenged Israel’s dominance of public opinion, the pro-Palestine movement in the U.S. is now facing a more daunting task: breaking the Democratic Party leadership’s support for Israel. For now — despite the massive number of protests, the threat of the “uncommitted” protest vote and the increasingly obvious contradiction between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensive in Gaza and the U.S. desire for stability in the region — the Biden administration continues to be solid in its financial and military backing for Israel.
The annual commitment of $3.3 billion for Israel continues, even as threats of famine and ethnic cleansing loom in Gaza. The most recent batch of arms shipments included more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines. In attacking the Ansar Allah group, or Houthi movement, which has attempted to enforce a sea blockade of Israel from Yemen, the U.S. is also providing direct military cover for Israel’s war in Gaza. That 80 Democratic members of the House of Representatives have called for a cease-fire is significant. But it is a fraction of what the number would be if public opinion were properly represented.
It is true that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called for a cease-fire to allow for the release of hostages and to deliver humanitarian aid. And the U.S. abstained on, rather than vetoed, the most recent cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also delivered a speech stating that if Netanyahu remains in power, “then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”
But it would be a mistake to put too much weight on these developments. Biden, Blinken and Schumer — and their counterparts in Israel — know that rhetorical shifts are unimportant so long as U.S. financial and military support for Israel continues.
Moreover, in the same week that it declined to veto the resolution, the U.S. withdrew for a year the entirety of its funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), fully endorsing Israel’s delegitimization of the agency and directly worsening the hunger and despair of Gazans, even as the Biden administration’s rhetoric deplores the humanitarian situation. The grim reality is that the movements opposing Israel’s war have not been able to push Democratic leaders to change course in any substantial way.
In the mid-1970s, when the anti-war movement of that generation peaked, Democratic politicians responded quite differently. It was mainly the military victories won by the Vietnamese communists, rather than protests at home, which forced the U.S. to withdraw its combat troops in 1973. But the anti-war movement generated other significant changes in U.S. foreign policy. The Democratic-controlled 93rd Congress, from 1973 to 1975, gave itself the power to review and reverse White House decisions to fight wars; made intelligence agencies more accountable; abolished two national security entities, the Un-American Activities Committee and the Office of Public Safety; and banned or reduced U.S. military support to authoritarian groups and governments in Angola, Chile, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey. Congress also passed legislation to give itself the power to reject proposed major arms sales.
But this was also the period in which Israel sealed a tighter bond with U.S. power. By supplying weapons and counterinsurgency training to U.S.-allied right-wing authoritarian regimes in South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and Honduras, when the U.S. was unable to act itself because of domestic or diplomatic concerns, Israel created deep links with ruling elites in the U.S., especially its foreign policy establishment. It was during this period, for example, that a young Joe Biden became an ardent Zionist, making his first visit to Israel in 1973. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” he told the Senate in 1986.
Compared with the mid-1970s, today’s Democratic politicians are far less willing to engage with popular sentiment in support of a different foreign policy. This is true despite the looming possibility that their support for Israel could mean Democrats lose the White House to a candidate Biden describes as “the most antidemocratic” in American history.
Part of this is attributable to structural changes in American politics that have made the Democratic Party more dependent on wealthy donors. But there is a deeper reason. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. was still expanding its global hegemony and, Vietnam notwithstanding, wanted to make a compelling case for its leadership of the capitalist system. That implied a deference to movements at home and a foreign policy that could be presented as meeting international norms of legitimacy. By contrast, today the U.S. is in relative decline. Rather than making new friends in the world, it is fighting hard to hold on to old allies. An expansive progressive vision has given way to maintaining a brittle status quo.
This means that rather than being a sign of strength, the pro-Israel reflexes of the Democratic Party’s leadership may be a sign of potential weakness. It turned out, in the mid-1970s, that making some concessions to anti-imperialist sentiments was an effective way for U.S. elites to demobilize the domestic anti-war movement. With U.S. troops no longer deployed in Vietnam from 1973, and Democratic lawmakers passing some foreign policy reforms, the energy of the anti-war movement dissipated. In the absence of anti-imperialist protests on the streets, the progressive foreign policy initiatives in Congress were overturned within a few years, setting the stage for the more aggressive Cold War foreign policy under Reagan.
That kind of demobilization through partial absorption is less feasible today. A pro-Israel policy that survives only through wealthy donor support and the inertia of a foreign policy establishment fading in its power will be increasingly hard to uphold. To achieve stability, political power has to rely on more than coercion and censorship carried out on behalf of a narrow elite.
It is hard to say how the current crisis will be resolved. Perhaps the U.S. will manage Netanyahu’s transition out of office, negotiate an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners and bring about a permanent cease-fire. But the destruction of Gaza is so extensive that there will be no return to the situation before Oct. 7.
The current level of mobilization of the U.S. pro-Palestinian movement is in part a response to the emergency in Gaza. If a permanent cease-fire were achieved, the movement might fade into the background. But it is now a deep enough current in U.S. society and has developed enough of a political consciousness, centered on opposition to Zionism, that it is likely to continue to grow in strength. As views on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the U.S. experience generational turnover, this movement is likely to gain more institutional power, in universities, news organizations, cultural organizations, trade unions and so on.
The story of a sclerotic political establishment paralyzed by the radical demands of a young generation has played out before in U.S. history. The protest movement against support for Israel now shaking institutions across the country is revealing daily the serious contradictions in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. A change in U.S. policy in the region seems inevitable, though the timeframe is unclear. A failure to address demands today, however, is only setting the stage for a harder landing in the future. When that comes, it will likely take both Israel’s supporters and opponents by surprise.
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How Columbia University's complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today
NEW YORK (AP) — College students taking up space and making demands for change. University administrators facing pressure to get things back under control. Police brought in to make arrests. At other schools: students taking note, and sometimes taking action.
Columbia University, 2024. And Columbia University, 1968.
The pro-Palestinian demonstration and subsequent arrests at Columbia that have set off similar protests at campuses nationwide these days and even internationally aren’t new ground for students at the Ivy League school. They’re the latest in a Columbia tradition that dates back more than five decades — one that also helped provide inspiration for the anti-apartheid protest of the 1980s, the Iraq war protests, and more.
“When you’re going to Columbia, you know you’re going to an institution which has an honored place in the history of American protest,” said Mark Naison, professor of history and African & African American Studies at Fordham University and himself a participant in the 1968 demonstrations. “Whenever there is a movement, you know Columbia is going to be right there.”
STUDENTS ARE AWARE OF THE HISTORY
AP AUDIO: How Columbia University’s complex history with the student protest movement echoes into today
AP correspondent Julie Walker reports on how Columbia University’s complex history with the student protest movement echoes today.
It’s part of Columbia’s lore, students taking part in this month’s demonstrations point out — recognized by the school itself in commemorative anniversary programming and taught about in classes.
“A lot of students here are aware of what happened in 1968,” said Sofia Ongele, 23, among those who joined the encampment in response to this month’s arrests.
The end of an academic year was also approaching in April of that year when students took over five campus buildings. There were multiple reasons. Some were protesting the university’s connection to an institute doing weapon research for the Vietnam War; others opposed how the elite school treated Black and brown residents in the community around the school as well as the atmosphere for minority students.
After several days, Columbia’s president allowed a thousand New York Police Department officers to be brought in to clear most demonstrators out. The arrests, 700 of them, were not gentle. Fists were flying, clubs swinging. Dozens of students and more than a dozen officers were injured.
It’s never been forgotten history. That includes now, when pro-Palestinian students calling on the university to divest from any economic ties to Israel over the war in Gaza set up a tent encampment earlier this month and more than 100 were arrested. It helped spark similar demonstrations at campuses around the country and world.
The storied protest past is one of the reasons Ongele chose Columbia for college and came here from her native Santa Clarita, California. “I wanted to be in an environment where people were indeed socially conscious,” she said.
When it comes to protest, “We have not only the privilege but the responsibility to continue in the shoes of those who came before us,” Ongele said. The goal, she said: to ensure “that we’re able to maintain the integrity of this university as one that is indeed socially aware, one that does have students that do care deeply about what goes on in the world, what goes on in our communities, and what goes on in the lives of the students that make up our community.”
Columbia University officials did not respond to an email asking about the school’s position on the legacy of the 1968 events. Those events, like the current protest, “sparked a huge increase in student activism around the country,” Mark Rudd, a leader of that protest, said in an email to The Associated Press. “Myself and others spent the entire year after April 1968 traveling the country, spreading to campuses the spirit of Columbia.”
NOT EVERYONE SUPPORTS THE PROTESTS
But the echoes of the past aren’t only in inspiration. Then, as now, the protest had its detractors. Naison said the disruption to campus life, and to law and order, angered many at Columbia and outside of it.
“Student protesters are not popular people in the United States of America,” he said. “We weren’t popular in the ’60s. We accomplished a tremendous amount. But we also helped drive the country to the right.”
That has a corollary these days with those critical of the protests, who have condemned what they say is a descent into antisemitism. Some Jewish students have said they have felt targeted for their identity and afraid to be on campus and university presidents have come under political pressure to clamp down and use methods like police intervention.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik had just testified in front of a congressional panel investigating concerns about antisemitism at elite schools when the camp initially went up. Despite her requesting police action the next day for what she called a “harassing and intimidating environment,” Republicans in Congress have called for her resignation.
“Freedom of speech is so important, but not beyond the right to security,” said Itai Dreifuss, 25, a third-year student who grew up in the United States and Israel. He was near the encampment this past week, standing in front of posters taped to a wall of the people who were taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct 7 attack that set off the current conflagration.
That feeling among some students that personal animosity is being directed against them is a difference between 1968 and now, Naison said. That conflict between demonstrators and their decriers “is far more visceral,” Naison asserts, which he says makes this time even more fraught.
“It’s history repeating itself, but it’s also uncharted territory,” he said. “What we have here is a whole group of people who see these protests as a natural extension of fighting for justice, and a whole other group of people who see this as a deadly attack on them and their history and tradition. And that makes it very difficult for university officials to manage.”
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Dueling protesters clash at UCLA hours after police clear pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia
Officers have taken protesters into custody after Columbia University called in police to end the pro-Palestinian occupation on the New York campus. The scene unfolded shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday as police, wearing helmets and carrying zip ties and riot shields, massed at the Ivy League university’s entrance.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dueling groups of protesters clashed Wednesday at the University of California, Los Angeles, grappling in fistfights and shoving, kicking and using sticks to beat one another. Hours earlier, police burst into a building at Columbia University that pro-Palestinian protesters took over and broke up a demonstration that had paralyzed the school while inspiring others.
After a couple of hours of scuffles between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators at UCLA, police wearing helmets and face shields formed lines and slowly separated the groups. That quelled the violence, and the scene was calm as day broke.
Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies that support the war in Gaza have spread across the country in a student movement unlike any other in the 21st century, reaching from New York to Texas and California. The ensuing crackdown by police on some college campuses has stirred echoes of the much larger student protest movement during the Vietnam War era.
There have been confrontations with law enforcement and more than 1,000 arrests. In rarer instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.
What to know about student protests
- What’s happening: Student protests over the Israel-Hamas war have popped up at many college campuses following the arrest of demonstrators in April at Columbia University.
- Why: The students are protesting the war’s death toll and are calling for universities to separate themselves from any companies that are advancing Israel’s military efforts in Gaza.
- Now: Follow our live updates on protests on college campuses across the U.S.
The clashes at UCLA took place around a tent encampment built by pro-Palestinian protesters, who erected a line of parade barricades, plywood and wooden pallets at the edge of the camp — while counter-protesters tried to pull them down. Video showed fireworks exploding over and in the encampment.
People threw chairs and other objects and at one point a group piled on a person who lay on the ground, kicking and beating them with sticks until others pulled them out of the scrum.
It was not clear how many people might be injured.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the violence “absolutely abhorrent and inexcusable” in a post on social media platform X and said officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. Officers from the California Highway Patrol also appeared to be there. The university said it had requested help.
Security was tightened Tuesday at the campus after officials said there were “physical altercations” between factions of protesters.
Late that same day, New York City officers entered Columbia’s campus after the university requested help, according to a statement released by a spokesperson. A tent encampment on the school’s grounds was cleared, along with Hamilton Hall where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window. Protesters seized the hall at the Ivy League school about 20 hours earlier.
“After the University learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” the school said. “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing. We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”
A few dozen people were arrested at the building after protesters shrugged off an earlier ultimatum to abandon the encampment Monday or be suspended and unfolded as other universities stepped up efforts to end demonstrations that were inspired by Columbia.
Fabien Lugo, a first-year accounting student who said he was not involved in the protests, said he opposed the university’s decision to call in police.
“This is too intense,” he said. “It feels like more of an escalation than a de-escalation.”
Just blocks away from Columbia, at The City College of New York, demonstrators were in a standoff with police outside the public college’s main gate. Video posted on social media by news reporters on the scene late Tuesday showed officers putting some people to the ground and shoving others as they cleared people from the street and sidewalks.
After police arrived, officers lowered a Palestinian flag atop the City College flagpole, balled it up and tossed it to the ground before raising an American flag.
Brown University, another member of the Ivy League, reached an agreement Tuesday with protesters on its Rhode Island campus. Demonstrators said they would close their encampment in exchange for administrators taking a vote to consider divestment from Israel in October. The compromise appeared to mark the first time a U.S. college has agreed to vote on divestment in the wake of the protests.
Meanwhile, at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, police in riot gear closed in on an encampment late Tuesday and arrested about 20 people for trespassing, at least one of whom was thrown to the ground. University officials had warned earlier in the day that students would face criminal charges if they did not disperse.
First-year student Brayden Lang watched from the sidelines. “I still know very little about this conflict,” he said. “But the deaths of thousands is something I cannot stand for.”
Police also cleared an encampment at Tulane University early Wednesday.
The nationwide campus protests began at Columbia in response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there.
As cease-fire negotiations appeared to gain steam, it wasn’t clear whether those talks would lead to an easing of protests.
Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests as antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.
Columbia’s police action happened on the 56th anniversary of a similar move to quash an occupation of Hamilton Hall by students protesting racism and the Vietnam War.
The police department earlier Tuesday said officers wouldn’t enter the grounds without the college administration’s request or an imminent emergency. Now, law enforcement will be there through May 17, the end of the university’s commencement events.
In a letter to senior police officials, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the administration made the request that officers remove protesters from the occupied building and a nearby tent encampment “with the utmost regret.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that police had to move into Hamilton Hall “for the safety of those children.”
He again blamed outside agitators for the building takeover — an idea Shafik has also raised, though neither provided specific evidence to back up the contention, which was disputed by protest organizers and participants.
The police department’s deputy commissioner for public information, Tarik Sheppard, said 40 to 50 people were arrested at Hamilton Hall and that there were no injuries.
Adams later said that about 300 people were arrested in police crackdowns at Columbia University and City College.
Protesters first set up a tent encampment at Columbia almost two weeks ago. The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, arresting more than 100 people, only for the students to return.
Negotiations between the protesters and the college came to a standstill in recent days, and the school set a deadline for the activists to abandon the tent encampment Monday afternoon or be suspended.
Instead, protesters defied the ultimatum and took over Hamilton Hall early Tuesday, carrying in furniture and metal barricades.
Ilana Lewkovitch, a self-described “leftist Zionist” student at Columbia, said it’s been hard to concentrate on school for weeks. Her exams have been disrupted with chants of “say it loud, say it clear, we want Zionists out of here.”
Lewkovitch, who is Jewish, said she wished the current pro-Palestinian protests were more open to people like her who criticize Israel’s war policies but believe there should be an Israeli state.
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Offenhartz and Frederick reported from New York. Associated Press journalists around the country contributed to this report, including Cedar Attanasio, Jonathan Mattise, Colleen Long, Karen Matthews, Jim Vertuno, Hannah Schoenbaum, Sarah Brumfield, Christopher Weber, Carolyn Thompson, Dave Collins, Makiya Seminera, Philip Marcelo, Corey Williams and Felicia Fonseca.
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