Pro-Palestinian student protests spread across world
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations continue in universities across the United States, as they also spread to schools in Europe and Australia.
In the second week of protests calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, thousands of students are calling on dozens of universities to divest from Israel.
The students at a growing number of US colleges are gathering in protest encampments with a unified demand of their schools: Stop doing business with Israel — or any companies that support its ongoing war in Gaza.
The demand has its roots in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a decades-old campaign against Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
Some universities have been forced to cancel their graduation ceremonies, while others have seen entire buildings occupied by protesting students.
One of the latest to join the movement is The City University of New York (CUNY), where hundreds of students have set up an encampment on campus with banners with slogans like “No More Investment in Apartheid”.
“Young people are really starting to show up and demand that schools are held accountable for their relationship with the Israeli colonization,” Gabby Aossey, a student organizer at the CUNY protest told Al Jazeera.
Across the US, university leaders have tried, and largely failed, to quell the demonstrations. The police have intervened violently, with videos emerging from different states showing hundreds of students – and even faculty members – being forcefully arrested.
At Columbia University, where more than 100 pro-Palestinian activists were arrested by armed police officers on campus about a week ago, university leaders said in a statement on Friday that if the university calls the New York Police Department again, it would “further inflame what is happening on campus”.
Jewish activists join
protests
Some university leaders and state officials have strongly condemned the protests, calling them “anti-Semitic”.
Demonstrators reject the accusation, with many Jewish activists and some Orthodox Jews joining the ranks.
“As a child of Holocaust survivors, it disturbs me to my core to see my own people perpetrating something that we’ve been through,” Jewish antiwar protester Sam Koprak told Al Jazeera at a campus gathering.
The protests, which have sprouted all around the globe in the near seven-month period since the start of the war on Gaza, continue to spread this week outside the US as well.
In Iran’s capital, students and staff of Tehran University have held a rally in support of growing protests on US campuses.
The demonstrators on Saturday also condemned violent US police attacks on students.
In Berlin, activists set up a camp in front of parliament to demand the German government stop exporting arms to Israel. At the renowned Sciences Po university in the French capital Paris, protesters on Friday blockaded a central campus building, forcing classes to be held online.
The latest pro-Palestine rally in Sweden on Saturday saw people marching in the streets to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Boycott Israel”.
Hundreds gathered on Saturday afternoon in central London in solidarity with Palestinians.