The Gaza protest at Columbia rages on, despite over 100 arrests

The pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia, New York is shaping up to be one of the most significant student protests in the US in decades.

Last Wednesday (March 17), students set up around 50 tents on the university’s campus to protest the invasion of Gaza, call for a ceasefire, and demand that the university financially divest funds from the state of Israel.

On Thursday, almost 100 students were arrested, after college administrators called the police. In videos from the scene, helmeted NYPD officers are shown detaining groups of students, with 108 arrested in total (as reported by the BBC). A student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, points out that this is the first time mass arrests have taken place on the campus since 1968, during protests against the Vietnam War.

In a statement on the protest and arrests, shared with faculty on Thursday (April 18), Columbia University president Dr Minouche Shafik said that she hoped it would “never be necessary” to authorise the NYPD to clear the encampment. “I took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances,” she continued, citing “an abundance of concern for the safety” of the campus. “The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies.”

New York mayor Eric Adams also shared a statement via a news conference on Thursday, suggesting that demonstrators had violated university rules by occupying the campus’s South Lawn for more than 30 hours, and refusing to leave despite “numerous warnings”. According to the student group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, the lawn was previously designated a “free-speech zone” under university guidelines.

In response to the arrests made at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Palestine Solidarity Working Group has launched a petition addressed to Shafik, as well as Columbia University’s deans and board of trustees. The petition supports the protesters’ demands for transparency and divestment, as well as calling for no more suspensions or arrests.

Far from dying down, the controversy continued to rage over the weekend. Today (April 22), Columbia President Minouche Shafik announced in an email to faculty and the student body that classes would be held virtually (for at least one day) and that anyone who can work from home should do so. She described herself as “deeply saddened” by what is happening on campus and said she wanted to “sit down and talk and argue and find ways to compromise on solutions.”

This effort to quell tensions has not been well-received by those involved in the protests. One Columbia grad student responded on Twitter, “why would we talk to someone who had made our lives miserable? She can’t even say the word Palestine.”

Now on its sixth day, the protest at Columbia has spiralled into a nationwide controversy, and inspired solidarity events at universities across the world, including Harvard, MIT and Yale (which also saw at least 16 students being arrested.) The White House released a statement yesterday condemning the protestors. “While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous. And echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organisations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable,” the statement read. 

A rabbi at Columbia also warned Jewish students to go home, arguing that campus had been made unsafe by “extreme antisemitism,” and Shai Davidai, a business professor, has accused the protests of being terrorists (an accusation which was endorsed by the state of Israel’s official Twitter account.)  There have been reports of several antisemitic attacks on campus, including one attack. 

But many Jewish students at Columbia have rebutted this characterisation of the protests, and several of the protesters arrested were themselves Jewish. One of them, sophomore student Iris Hsiang, a sophomore student who is Jewish, told The New York Times that it was the college – rather than her peers – which had made her feel unsafe, and all for the crime of “sitting and singing on the lawns.”

Jonathan Ben-Mencham, a PHD student, told CNN that “Columbia students organising in solidarity with Palestine – including Jewish students – have faced harassment, doxxing, and now arrest by the NYPD. These are the main threats to the safety of Jewish Columbia students.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “student protesters have led interfaith joint prayers for several days now, and Passover Seder will be held at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment tomorrow. Saying that student protesters are a threat to Jewish students is a dangerous smear.”