The prestigious Columbia University in New York, the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian movement against the war in Gaza on American campuses, threatened Tuesday to dismiss the dozens of people who occupy a building of the establishment, completely cordoned off by the police.
Since Tuesday evening, the campus usually open to passers-by from northern Manhattan has been completely closed off. New York police began entering Tuesday evening, according to AFP journalists, the campus of Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian students have been barricaded in a building since last night.
A police truck with a ladder approached the occupied building, and reporters could see officers climbing to reach a window to gain entry.
Barricaded
A few dozen protesters have been barricaded since last night in a building, Hamilton Hall, which others have protected thanks to a human chain, health masks on their faces and keffiyehs on their heads.
Denouncing an ‘escalation’, Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang threatened to ‘fire’ them 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 tribute to a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza.
The presidency of Columbia began on Monday to administratively ‘suspend’ students who refused to leave this ‘village’ of tents. Six months before the presidential election in a polarized country, the student movement worries the White House and the UN.
Joe Biden, president of Israel’s ‘unwavering’ ally, criticized the reignited tensions at Columbia, a private university that trains the elite: ‘Occupying a university building by force is the wrong approach’ and is ‘not an example peaceful protest,’ thundered John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council.
At the United Nations, Secretary General Antonio Guterres deemed it ‘essential in all circumstances to guarantee freedoms of expression and peaceful demonstration’ while insisting that ‘racist speeches were obviously unacceptable’.
Agreement
Before a duel between ex-President Donald Trump and outgoing Joe Biden, who needs the youth vote, Republican leader of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson denounced ‘absolute illegality and chaos on campuses in America’ and ‘anti-Semitism and the failure to protect Jewish students’. He called for the departure of the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik.
Pro-Palestinian protesters are demanding that their universities cut ties with patrons or businesses linked to Israel. Columbia refuses.
But another elite Northeast campus, Brown University in Providence, announced a deal with students: dismantling the encampment in exchange for a university vote in October on possible “divestments from companies that make it possible and profit from the genocide in Gaza+’.
‘Restore order’
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 and activists from around twenty universities have been arrested, some arrested and placed in detention.
At the University of Texas in Austin (south), nearly 80 people were in custody on Tuesday and will be prosecuted for ‘trespassing’, according to the local sheriff’s office.
In California, the police ‘evacuated and secured’ two buildings at Cal Poly Humboldt University at dawn and arrested 35 people, in order to ‘restore order’ according to this establishment.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a group of students claimed to have raised a Palestinian flag in the center of the campus, before the police put up the colors of the United States, according to the press.
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. The country has the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
/ATS
