For two weeks, student anger has spread across the United States, from California to large universities in the Northeast, via the South and the Center. At New Yorkthe large and highly renowned Columbia University is the epicenter of this movement of pro-Palestinian activists.
American students are speaking out against the war that Israel is waging in the Gaza Strip, against Hamas. As protesters barricaded themselves in a campus building, Hamilton Hall, and others surrounded it in a human chain outside, LThe New York police intervened on Wednesday to dislodge them. A police truck with a ladder approached the occupied building, and reporters could see officers climbing to reach a window to gain entry.
Denouncing an “escalation,” Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang earlier threatened to “expel” students from the university accusing them of “vandalizing, breaking and blocking access” to Hamilton Hall. The building was renamed “Hind’s Hall” by the pro-Palestinian group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, in honor of a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza.
The White House denounces a “bad approach”
This protest movement sparked reactions from the White House to the United Nations. Joe Biden, president of Israel’s “unwavering” ally, criticized these reignited tensions at Columbiaprivate university in Manhattan which trains the country’s elite: “Forcibly occupying a university building is the wrong approach” and does not represent “an example of peaceful demonstration”, thundered John Kirby, spokesperson for the Security Council National from the White House.
At the UN in New York, its Secretary General Antonio Guterres considered it “essential in all circumstances to guarantee freedoms of expression and peaceful demonstration” while insisting that “racist speeches were obviously unacceptable”.
Six months before the presidential election, the Republican opposition led by the President of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, once again denounced “utter illegality and chaos on campuses in America” as well as “anti-Semitism and the failure to protect Jewish students.”
He called for the departure of the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik. On their side, pro-Palestinian protesters demand that Columbia cut ties with patrons or businesses linked to Israel.
Columbia refuses, but another elite northeastern campus, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, announced an agreement with the students: dismantling the encampment in exchange for a university vote in October on possible “divestments from” companies that enable and profit from the genocide in Gaza.
Brutal arrests of students
Across the United States, images of law enforcement in riot gear brutally intervening on campuses have gone around the world. Since last weekend, hundreds of students, teachers, activists from 19 universities were arrestedsome arrested and prosecuted.
These new pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the United States have revived the electric debate since October between freedom of expression and accusations of anti-Semitism. This winter, the university presidents of Harvard and UPenn had to resign after being accused before Congress of not doing enough against anti-Semitism. The United States has the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
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