Columbia University pro-Palestine protests spark police riot response

Members of the public yelled “shame on you” as they watched on from the road below. Multiple people were eventually led out of the university and into law enforcement buses parked nearby with their hands bound in zip ties.

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The raid was the culmination of weeks of tension at Columbia, which began on April 17 when students set up the first encampment. They demanded the university sever ties to Israel, including the divestment of investments that support weapons manufacturing and an end to a dual-degree program in Tel Aviv.

Amid growing pressure from Congress over a rise in antisemitism on college campuses, Columbia president Minouche Shafik – a former deputy governor of the Bank of England – called in police that day to break up the encampment.

Since then, encampments and protests have sprung up at dozens of institutions from coast to coast, resulting in the arrests and suspensions of hundreds of students at college campuses such as Yale University and the University of Southern California to Texas State University.

Maryam Alywan was one of the students arrested at Columbia when Shafik called in the authorities in mid-April.

The 22-year-old said she knew there would be risks involved in protesting, “but it was still a shock to be carried out in zip ties, quite literally by my own university, for setting up tents and calling for an end to genocide”.

“My wrists had cut off circulation, I had bruising afterwards, they denied us water, and we were in there [detained] for about eight hours just because of the sheer volume of people they had to process,” Alywan told this masthead.

“But even as I say this, I don’t regret it. What the people of Palestine are experiencing is so much worse.”

Other students, however, took a different view. One graduate, who did not wish to be named for fear of being targeted, said she felt uncomfortable by some of the contested slogans protesters used, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

Another expressed frustration this morning when he was not allowed to enter the campus because it had been locked down to everyone but students who live inside any of Columbia’s seven dormitories.

‘It’s gonna be bad’

Outside the university at lunchtime on Tuesday, pro-Palestine demonstrators called for an “intifida” (rebellion) – a term President Joe Biden has condemned as hate speech. A small group of pro-Israel supporters stood nearby, with barricades separating the two groups.

Among them was US actor and comedian Michael Rapaport, who is Jewish and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“Just like I said on January 6 [the day of the 2021 capital riots] they need to start arresting people,” he told this masthead.

“All these universities have failed, and the long-term effects of this – for Jewish people, for free thinking, for anti-semitism – it’s gonna be bad.”

The issue has also become a political powder keg for Joe Biden as Republicans seize on the issue ahead of November’s election.

Speaking to reporters at his hush money trial on the other side of the city, former US president Donald Trump decried the unrest on university campuses across America, describing them as “the Biden protests”.

He also later joined his party colleagues in calling for Shafik’s resignation.

“The Biden protests that are going on are horrible,” Trump said. “He’s got to get out and make a statement because the colleges are being overrun in this country.”

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The president has not commented personally on the protest, however White House spokesman Andrew Bates put out a statement saying the president “respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful”.

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