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‘The Student Revolution Will Help Free Palestine Within Our Lifetime’

‘a total liberation from the university's participation in the Western imperial system’
By - AMAN HASAN KUMAR
Update: 2024-05-03 04:21 GMT

“On the 207th day of genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestinian student activists struck a decisive blow to Israel by exposing Columbia University’s use of violence to protect their investments in Israel’s vicious assault on Palestinians,” wrote Columbia University Apartheid Divest, one of a group of student organisations protesting the war on Palestine on the Columbia University campus in Harlem, New York.

The latest round of violence perpetrated on them, by heavily militarised police including a SWAT team and “the vicious Strategic Response Group” of the NYPD, was triggered after the students took control of a campus building called Hamilton Hall and floated a banner from it to rename it Hind’s Hall, in memory of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed in Gaza over a period of weeks surrounded by the dead bodies of her family members in the burnt shell of their car after the Israeli military fired a tank shell at them and later killed the Red Cross paramedics trying to reach the young survivor. Hind’s body was recovered two weeks later.

At Hind’s Hall and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the lawns outside Butler Library, the students’ demands were clear. They want their university to divest all finances, including the 13 billion dollar endowment, from “companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” They want their university to sever all academic ties with Israel in occupied Palestine, including a proposed campus center in Tel Aviv, dual degree and study abroad programs, and collaborations between faculty. And they want their university to publicly demand a ceasefire in Gaza and to denounce “the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.”

In response, after days and weeks of ratcheted tensions and negotiations with the groups leading the peaceful protest, the Columbia administration sent in armed police to clear the protestors and their encampment, first on April 18, then again to clear a much larger second encampment, on April 30. Columbia University Apartheid Divest stated that evening:

“The brave protestors in Hind’s Hall put themselves in harm’s way to force Columbia to divest. In response, Columbia University broke every written and unwritten rule of university norms by inviting a SWAT team and hundreds of armed riot cops, including the vicious Strategic Response Group, to invade Columbia’s classrooms, barricade students and press alike inside their dorms, and brutalize hundreds of us with metal equipment, tasers, flash grenades, and batons.

“Over 100 students were arrested. At least one student was hospitalized due to injuries from the NYPD. Video footage shows police shoving students to the ground, tasers crackling in the background as our classmates screamed, and a student being thrown down concrete stairs, leaving her unconscious. She was then denied medical care by Columbia.”

The campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that night: “Multiple Columbia students were taken straight to the hospital due to severe injuries by NYPD. Students had swollen faces from being kicked repeatedly by police.”

The second time the police were called onto campus followed a visit by House leader Mike Johnson, a Republican from Los Angeles, ostensibly to meet Jewish students out of concern for their safety, where he told the media in front of booing students that Columbia should “control… these lawless agitators”, failing which its president should resign and the National Guard be called in. On many of the dozens of campuses in the United States now protesting the genocide of Palestinians, students and teachers recalled the murders of students on the Kent State, Jackson State, and University of South Carolina campuses in 1968 after the government called in the National Guard.


 



The protestors being attacked on university campuses are joined by students, teachers and staff at over 200 universities worldwide, according to provisional lists gathered by the media, including Palestine solidarity encampments on campuses in Australia, Canada, France, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Yemen, Japan, Argentina and the United Kingdom.

In the United States alone it is a student, teacher, intellectual mobilisation unseen since the colonial war on Vietnam.

The police action in the past days prompted fears of a more brutal crackdown on campuses where protests and encampments are still underway. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, Los Angeles tweeted at the time of writing that protestors had just prevented the LAPD from entering their campus, while counterprotestors were tearing down their encampment:

Besides evicting students from their dorms during final exams (reportedly including many who weren’t at the protest, and others, including Palestinian nationals, who weren’t on campus that day) and denying them access to bathrooms, food and water, Columbia’s “disciplinary” actions against international students also put their visa status in jeopardy. The police violence and mass arrests on April 30 followed faculty offers to negotiate with the students that they said in a statement had been “rebuffed or ignored” by the administration.

At the New York University downtown, alumni and student organisations demanded that their university shut down a campus in Tel Aviv which “bars Palestinian students, faculty and affiliates from accessing academic opportunities at the site because of their ethnicity,” contradicting “NYU’s principles of academic freedom and egalitarianism.”

The alumni letter also asked that NYU, particularly its Tandon School of Engineering, reconsider its involvement in arms research and development and to cease collaboration with arms manufacturers – the United States is Israel’s largest weapons supplier while India is its largest customer.

Police also stormed the encampment at the City College of New York uptown where the NYPD chief was seen lowering the Palestinian flag and raising the American flag as the surrounding police who had just attacked teenagers cheered. As these encampments were being raided, another was set up by the students of Fordham University midtown (which police were taking down at the time of writing) while students at Brown University in Rhode Island announced that their administration had agreed to vote on divesting from the Israeli occupation.


 

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Asked what should be done about the war on Palestine, Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs told the media: “What should be done about it is straightforward… What the government of Israel is doing is unconscionable, world opinion is united against Israel, the problem is the United States remains complicit in these war crimes… What of course a strong, effective US president would do would be to stop the flow of munitions, if those munitions are used for slaughter, for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, which is exactly what's happening… We need to stop the absolute war crime policymaking of the Israeli government, and that can be done by saying, as the US has on other occasion, No more arms!”

Former faculty member and historian Robin Kelly in an open letter to Shafik said he was “appalled by your draconian, unethical, illegal, and dishonest actions toward your own students and faculty.”

“In the name of keeping students safe, you bring the NYPD on campus to break up a peaceful encampment, thereby endangering hundreds of student protesters—many of whom are Jewish students and students of color—and the campus community at large. Given the NYPD’s racist record, the fact that you would subject Black, Latinx, Arab and South Asian students to police repression suggests that you are either unaware or indifferent to the trauma our communities have experienced with the police.

“And your administration’s decision to evict students from their dorms, strip them of their meal cards, and have them charged with trespassing is nothing less than vindictive. After taking their tuition and fees, you render them houseless and potentially food insecure. How does this make students safe?”

Kelly countered the rhetoric of “lawlessness” by pointing to the administration’s double standards in taking no action against those who had attacked student protestors earlier in the week by dousing them with a toxic chemical fluid, or suspended faculty members like business school assistant professor Shai Davidai, “who targets and identifies antiwar students on his social media account, putting their safety in jeopardy”.

In the growing climate of unity between university faculty and students, Kelly pointed to Shafik’s targeting of teachers as well, including postcolonial queer theorist Joseph Massad and law and sexuality scholar Katherine Frank, in Shafik’s televised statements to a Congressional committee before the police were sent in. He said: “You are keeping no one safe, except for your donors, trustees, and Columbia’s endowment. Among these same trustees and donors are persons who have vowed to punish these students by blocking them from future employment.” Recalling Shafik’s earlier positions at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, he said: “Universities are not supposed to resemble dictatorships or Fortune 500 companies”.

Noting that a number of US university administrations had invited police brutality on their faculty and students Kelly concluded:

“This is a dark day for U.S. higher education, especially at a time when right-wing extremists are waging war on academic freedom and all manner of critical studies. Yet, as the courageous students you had arrested and suspended have been saying, it is a much darker day for the people of Palestine. Gaza’s universities are now rubble, many of its faculty, staff, students, and administrators—including three university presidents—have been killed, and most of its libraries, archives, and bookstores destroyed. These students are risking their futures to demand that universities divest their holdings from Israel and weapons manufacturers, and that their leaders act in an ethical manner—in how they invest, how they relate to their own neighboring communities, and how they treat students, faculty, and staff.

“In other words, they are doing what you should be doing: leading. It is time to follow their lead”.