(Los Angeles) Hundreds of arrests, riot police facing students who do not let up: the tension remains electric Thursday on American campuses, prey to increasingly tense demonstrations against the war in Gaza.
Published at 10:35 a.m.
Romain FONSEGRIVES with Moisés AVILA in Austin
France Media Agency
Read “Hot Spring at Columbia University”
From Los Angeles to New York, from Austin to Boston, via Chicago and Atlanta, the movement of pro-Palestinian American students is growing by the hour. Some of the most prestigious universities in the world are affected, such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton.
The scenes across the country follow one another and are similar: students set up tents on their campuses, to denounce the military support of the United States for Israel and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
Then they are dislodged, often in a muscular manner, by police officers in riot gear, at the request of university management.
Wednesday evening, more than a hundred demonstrators were arrested near Emerson College, a university in Boston. Thousands of miles away, mounted officers apprehended students at the University of Texas at Austin.
And on Thursday morning, it was the turn of students at Emory University in Atlanta, in the southern United States, to be evicted manu militari by the police.
Despite this, the movement is growing.
Early Thursday, a new encampment was set up on the campus of George Washington University in the capital, where a demonstration is planned for the morning.
Videos on social media show a bronze statue of the first American president, the eponym of the university and the city, with a Palestinian flag around its forehead. At the foot of the statue, around ten tents were set up by the demonstrators.
National Guard
PHOTO TED SHAFFREY, ASSOCIATED PRESS
It was from Columbia University that the protest started about a week ago – before spreading across the country, in particular thanks to very strong mobilization of students on social networks.
“Millions of Palestinians in Gaza sleep in the cold every night without access to food or shelter,” explains Yazen, an American-Palestinian student in New York, to justify his participation in this movement.
For more than a week, the 23-year-old student has been sleeping every night on a lawn at Columbia University.
It was from this university that the protest started about a week ago – before spreading across the country, in particular thanks to very strong mobilization of students on social networks.
Sabrina, who did not wish to give her last name, explains that the demonstration also attracted many individuals to the gates of the Columbia campus, many of whom “tend to be quite violent or to utter anti-Semitic insults.”
“When I come to campus, I often hide my Jewish symbols for my own safety,” explains this student, who says she does not really feel safe.
On Wednesday, the Republican tenor in Congress Mike Johnson went to Columbia University, where he threatened to ask Joe Biden to mobilize the National Guard on campuses, prey according to him to a “virus of anti-Semitism” .
A part of American society in fact accuses American universities of anti-Zionism – allegations which cost the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs this winter.
Mike Johnson’s warning, however, resonates painfully in the United States: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State University on anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Four students were killed.
The White House has so far refrained from mentioning this scenario, simply assuring that the Democratic president, who hopes to be re-elected in November, “supports freedom of expression, debate and non-discrimination” in the universities.
