Around a hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators were briefly arrested by riot police at a Boston university. The establishment, Northeastern University, announced on refused were arrested.”
“Kill the Jews”
“Violent anti-Semitic insults” like “Kill the Jews” had been uttered on campus according to the university, which announced a “return to normal” at midday. An “illegal” encampment of a few tents was dismantled there by university police officers and local law enforcement in riot gear, according to images posted on social networks.
At the other end of the country, law enforcement at Arizona State University (ASU) “arrested 69 people on Saturday after setting up an unauthorized encampment,” the establishment said. accusing “most of not being ASU students or staff.” These people will be “pursued for illegal trespass”.
And in the central United States, 23 people were arrested when police, equipped with riot gear, evacuated a camp set up at Indiana University, the “Indiana Daily Student” newspaper reported.
Campus closed and end of academic year remotely
The presidency of Columbia, the New York epicenter of student mobilization, has for its part given up on having the police evacuate a “village” of tents of 200 people on a lawn on its campus. However, a leader of the movement is banned from entering after making anti-Zionist threats in a video dating from January. The young man later offered his “apologies,” according to CNN, which described the campus as “relatively quiet” on Saturday.
On the other hand, the situation has become tense at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), whose president resigned this winter after statements to Congress in Washington considered ambiguous on the fight against anti-Semitism. Following “credible reports of cases of harassment and intimidation”, the presidency ordered the immediate dismantling of a camp.
In California, the Humboldt Polytechnic University campus will remain “closed” for the remainder of the semester, and classes will take place remotely, due to the “occupancy” of two buildings, according to a press release. And in neighboring Canada, a camp was set up for the first time at McGill University in Montreal where the movement has been going on since February. The establishment is worried about “a risk of escalation and confrontation”.
Painful memories and expanding movement
Images of riot police arresting students, at the call of university leaders, went around the world. They echo the uprising on American campuses during the Vietnam War. Even a painful memory, that of the Ohio National Guard opening fire in May 1970 at Kent State University, killing four students who were demonstrating peacefully.
The solidarity movement with Gaza took a political turn seven months before the American presidential election, between allegations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and defense of freedom of expression, a constitutional right in the United States. The country has the largest number of Jews in the world behind Israel (some six million) and also millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
All week across the United States, pro-Palestinian students and activists were arrested and most often released without prosecution. And in these gatherings, left-wing and anti-Zionist Jewish students support the Palestinian cause, keffiyeh on their shoulders, even denouncing a “genocide” that would be perpetrated by Israel.
But other young American Jews express their discomfort and fear in the face of anti-Semitic slogans. Skyler Sieradzky, 21, of George Washington University in the capital said this week that he was spat on when he arrived with an Israeli flag.
