Pro-Palestinian supporters continue to demonstrate from a protest encampment on the campus of Columbia University on April 29, in New York City.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Protesters in a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University defied a 2 p.m. deadline to clear out of the Ivy League school’s quadrangle on Monday, prompting the administration to hand out suspensions to quell the two-week-old protest that has spread to dozens of universities.
In a notice to the protesters earlier in the day, the university’s administration threatened to deem the students trespassers and potentially hold them back from graduation or expel them if they refused to leave.
But as the deadline passed, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the camp, including a group in orange safety vests with “faculty” printed on the back. At a news conference, encampment leaders said the protest would go on.
“It is against the will of the students to disperse,” Sueda Dolat, an organizer, told reporters. “We will not be moved unless by force.”
At an evening press briefing, Ben Chang, a spokesperson for the school, said the university had begun suspending students.
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The encampment began on April 17. The university, located in Upper Manhattan, had police arrest more than 100 protesters, but the camp swiftly came back in a new location. Since then, the university has been trying to negotiate an end to the protest, which has resisted multiple previous deadlines set by the school.
The protests, which oppose Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip after October’s Hamas-led attack on the country, have spread across the United States, with encampments at Harvard University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University, among other schools. In Canada, McGill University and the University of British Columbia have had similar tent villages spring up on campus.
At some universities, police swept in to arrest protesters. In Austin, at the University of Texas, officers in tactical vests and carrying truncheons grabbed demonstrators and loaded them into a van on Monday, then used pepper spray and flash-bangs to disperse a crowd that blocked the vehicle from leaving. At the University of California, Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators clashed.
At Yale, where a previous tent village had been cleared out by police, protesters set up a new one nearby despite threats of suspensions and arrests by the administration. Near Chicago, Northwestern students cut a deal that will allow a protest to continue until June 1, but with most of the tents dismantled and demonstrators confined to a specific area.
A pro-Palestinian protestor is arrested at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, on April 29.SUZANNE CORDEIRO/Getty Images
Protesters want university endowments to pull their money from Israeli companies, as well as businesses that fuel the country’s military, such as weapons manufacturers. They are also demonstrating more broadly against U.S. support for the Israeli government, including a US$26-billion military aid package passed last week by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
In a statement Monday, Columbia president Minouche Shafik said the university “will not divest from Israel” but would have an academic body consider student divestment requests. She said the protest was a “noisy distraction” ahead of final exams and graduation. The quadrangle the camp occupies is used for commencement ceremonies.
“One group’s rights to express their views cannot come at the expense of another group’s right to speak, teach and learn,” Ms. Shafik said.
The university president has been under pressure from politicians and wealthy donors to end the encampment. Twenty-one Democratic members of Congress on Monday called for the school to disband the camp. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, visited the school with a similar message last week. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who helped fund a Jewish student-life building at Columbia, said he would stop donating.
Protesters, meanwhile, accuse the school of trying to stifle freedom of speech.
“By paying the tuition that we did, we assumed the institution would stand on our side and protect us, not call police on its own students,” Jin Hai, 24, a Columbia master’s student, said as she stood next to the encampment last week. She said protesters objected to their money helping Israel. “Tax dollars are going to the government to fund an atrocity.”
Pro-Palestinian hold a short rally after marching around the "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" in the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 29, in New York City.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia alumna who is supporting the camp, said protesters had watched the disaster unfolding in Gaza and wanted to do something about it. “People are at a loss for what they do concretely to end this violence,” she said. “We think of universities as places where we study and learn, but they have a strong impact on world governments.”
She said the university arresting students was “despicable.”
“It really shows that they’re far more interested in their donors than in the lives of their students,” she said.
Opponents of the encampment describe it as antisemitic because of its denunciations of Zionism and chants by some protesters calling for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” Protesters, some of whom are themselves Jewish, draw a distinction between Judaism and Zionism.
One protest leader, Khymani James, was barred from Columbia’s campus last week after a video of him from January surfaced, in which he said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “be grateful I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” In a statement, he expressed regret for his comments. “What I said was wrong,” he said.
The university has locked all entrances to the quadrangle, allowing in only students, faculty and staff, and sometimes media, in a bid to stop the demonstration from spreading. Other protesters have gathered outside a nearby campus gate.
Emanuel Hernandez, 19, protesting at the gate last week, said he worried about a violent clampdown on the camp. He cited the Kent State shootings of 1970, when the National Guard killed four Ohio students during a Vietnam War protest.
“We’re trying to put as many eyes on the situation as possible so something like that doesn’t happen,” he said. He added that he hoped the Columbia protest would “lead to something bigger” and cause a widespread boycott of Israel.
With a report from Reuters
Adrian Morrow