Des Freedman reports on a wave of occupations, walkouts and encampments is taking place across US universities in protest at Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza

Students have been calling for an immediate ceasefire and demanding that their universities divest from weapons manufacturers and defence contractors with links to Israel for many months.

However, the decision earlier this month by around 100 students at Columbia University in the heart of New York to camp out on the lawns of the college has transformed the situation. Last Thursday, Columbia’s President, Minouche Shafik ordered the New York Police Department to break up the camp and arrest all those taking part in what was an entirely peaceful protest in solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Shafik is the epitome of the modern corporate university boss. She has held senior roles at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She was permanent secretary at the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011 and deputy governor of the Bank of England from 2014 to 2017. She then took up the role of Director of the London School of Economics before moving to Columbia in 2023.

There has a huge and militant response to her decision to call on the cops to break up the protest. Faculty walked out on Monday in support of the students with academics in the Sociology Department issuing a public statement calling on the university ‘to immediately reverse the suspensions and allow the affected students to return to their dorms and their courses’. Academics also pledged to keep their courses open to these students and to mark their work as normal.

The response from students was even more dramatic with hundreds pouring onto the campus to occupy the space once again and, this time, in even greater numbers than before.

Spreading like wildfire

Since then, students from other universities have taken similar actions. We have seen new camps set up across the country including at the New School in New York, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Emerson College, Vanderbilt University and Tufts.

There have been walkouts and occupations at Stanford, American University in Washington DC, University of Maryland, California State Polytechnic University and Swarthmore College. At Rutgers University in New Jersey, a tent city was set up for a week with the undergraduate student government calling on Rutgers to divest from Israel.

The action has now spread to high school students in cities including Chicago Seattle and Portland.

A violent response

The response to this surge of pro-Palestinian solidarity has taken two forms: first, severe repression and second, familiar accusations of antisemitism.

Hundreds of academics and students have now been arrested at New York University (NYU) and Yale as well as Columbia for daring to occupy their own spaces. At NYU, hundreds of cops arrived in riot gear and arrested 130 students and 20 faculty. Paula Chakravartty, an NYU professor, told Counterfire that ‘it was the most violent response to protest that I have ever seen in my 30 years of life in the academy. The cops were paramilitary’. Faculty and students were both charged with the criminal offence of ‘trespassing’ on their own university campus.

The NYU branch of the American Association of University Professors immediately condemned the police action and challenged the lie that the protest was in any way intimidating or violent.

‘The point of the protest was to express support for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, to publicize NYU’s complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people, NYU’s investment in the weapons manufacturing that facilitates such genocide, and NYU’s legitimation of the Israeli state policy of settler colonialism with its site in Tel Aviv… NYU Leadership’s decision to call the NYPD was capricious, unwarranted, and without justification. It would have been unconscionable under any circumstances, but is all the more so given that a large proportion of the protestors were people of colour, and NYPD are known for their particular history of brutality toward Black and Brown people. The police arrived en masse, in full riot gear, with buses and vans and the clear expectation of making mass arrests.’

The statement also made it clear that ‘at no time was anyone on the [NYU] Plaza either violent or antisemitic in speech or behaviour.’

This relates to the second feature of the attack on pro-Palestinian solidarity: that it is motivated by deep-rooted antisemitism. Huge amounts of media coverage have been devoted to the desperate attempts by one particularly vehement pro-Israeli Columbia professor, Shai Davidai, to paint the protestors as anti-Jewish hate mobs. This will have come as a surprise to those Jewish students celebrating Passover from inside Columbia’s Gaza encampment.

Attacks on free speech

This is a familiar part of the anti-Palestinian playbook. Conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish hatred, ‘Antisemitism on Campus’ is now the preferred frame for mainstream media rather than the actual horror of genocide taking place in Gaza or the very real threat of antisemitism where it takes violent form . So we are seeing ‘task forces’ and ‘action plans’ set up in universities including Columbia, NYU and Harvard which are more likely to curb justified criticism of the Israeli state than they are to root out antisemitism and Islamophobia.

As a fantastic (if rare) op-ed piece in the New York Times by two NYU professors put it:

‘At universities across the country, any criticism of Israel’s policies, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, organized calls for a cease-fire or even pedagogy on the recent history of the land have all emerged as perilous speech…the atmosphere at college has become downright McCarthyite.’

The solidarity movement with the people of Gaza is growing rapidly in the face of severe repression, media misinformation and the erosion of free speech. Not for the first time, universities are in the middle of all this. In 1968, Columbia students occupied whole sections of their campus to protest against US involvement in the Vietnam War and their own institution’s complicity with military occupation. They too were faced with terrible repression in their opposition to capitalism and war. Yet their actions changed Columbia’s policy on weapons research and its relationship to the defence establishment and was an important part of widespread resistance to the Vietnam War.

In the midst of this latest violence, resistance is spreading. As another NYU academic told Counterfire:

‘What has emerged at campuses across the country is a demand for universities to divest from their complicity in Israel’s campaign of genocide and occupation. Columbia and NYU’s decision to send the NYPD to brutally arrest their own students and faculty – including Jewish students and faculty – makes it clear this is neither about anti-semitism or safety. It is about treating those who believe their universities can do better as dangerous and unwelcome threats.’