Pro-Palestinian protests are spreading like wildfire across US universities, ... trends now
The drums have been beating for nearly a fortnight at Manhattan’s Columbia University, the noise reverberating around the campus of one of America’s most prestigious seats of learning.
It is energising some students and academics but putting others on edge, for the drums are the accompaniment to ceaseless chants about the virtues of the Palestinian cause and the wickedness of ‘colonial’ Israel.
Protesters insist they are demanding only peace in Gaza and an end to the humanitarian crisis there, and complain that anti-Zionism shouldn’t be confused with anti-Semitism. However, many of the slogans and placards tell a very different story: ‘Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall’; ‘There is only one solution, intifada revolution’; ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘By any means necessary’.
They call, implicitly or explicitly, for the extinction of Israel.
As student protests, and mass arrests by police breaking up those protests, have this week spread like wildfire across the US to at least 30 campuses and rising, many say America is witnessing a crisis in academia that has been years in the making – and might yet spread to the UK.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have launched a wave of protests on campus condemning Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip, including at New York University
Political alarm has reached the White House, where Joe Biden called on Americans to condemn the ‘alarming surge of anti-Semitism’ on college campuses and elsewhere.
Yet student protests are growing, feeding off each other. Every time police arrive on a campus to end an illegal protest, three or four more sprout up in response at universities elsewhere. It is rapidly becoming a nationwide movement and drawing comparisons with the Vietnam War protests more than 50 years ago.
Critics say that American university chiefs are reaping the whirlwind of years of pandering to woke Left-wing students with whom they frequently agree and, in the specific case of Gaza, losing their moral authority by failing to come down hard on anti-Jewish hate speech when the conflict first erupted. They’re also accused of indoctrinating students to believe that Jews are white and therefore oppressors, while Israel is a colonialist state and therefore illegitimate.
And while protest sympathisers insist the students are simply exercising their rights to free speech, others counter that by disrupting classes with loudhailers and inflammatory chants, and refusing to stop until their anti-Israel demands are met, this is simply a crude exercise in coercion and intimidation.
The situation is so serious at Columbia – an Ivy League institution founded under George II which was originally named King’s College – that a campus rabbi has urged Jewish students to stay at home rather than risk being harassed and abused.
Minouche Shafik, who is the president of Columbia University, told Congress that she was fighting anti-Semitism on her campus
Earlier this month, Columbia’s embattled President, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born Anglo-American and former deputy governor of the Bank of England, told Congress that she was fighting anti-Semitism on her campus. She said several Columbia academics were already under investigation, including Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad who caused outrage when he described aspects of the October Hamas attack on Israel as ‘awesome’.
A senior colleague of hers at Columbia, Claire Shipman, testified bluntly: ‘We have a moral crisis on our campus.’
Following the Congress hearing, Baroness Shafik - also a former vice-chancellor of the LSE - returned to New York and called in the police after students had been filmed expressing anti-Semitic abuse and support for Hamas.
Officers in riot gear made more than 100 arrests as they cleared a large tented camp on the university’s lawn that protesters have called the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ and had been set up in breach of Columbia’s demonstration rules. Undaunted, protesters responded by rebuilding the encampment, only bigger, and have vowed they won’t disperse until Columbia agrees, among other demands, to cut academic and financial ties with Israel. Columbia has pledged it won’t use the police again after its university board accused Baroness Shafik of heavy-handedness.
But some of Columbia’s 5,000 Jewish students say they’ve been targeted, vocally and even physically, by the protesters, some of them troublemakers not even connected to the university.
The victims say that simply wearing a Jewish star on their clothing has been enough for demonstrators - many hiding their faces behind Middle Eastern keffiyeh scarves - to throw liquids at them and scream in their face. One photographed a protester holding up a sign in front of Jewish students that referred to an armed wing of Hamas and read: ‘Al-Qasam’s next targets’.
And such is the sulphurous state of higher education and the fierce cultural wars being waged at universities that abuse, harassment and protests at Columbia - traditionally a hotbed of student activism with large numbers of both Jewish and Arab students - is rapidly being replicated dozens of times over.
At Yale, where pro-Palestinian protesters have turned part of its campus into a ‘Liberated Zone’, second-year student Sahar Tartak says she and a friend were hounded at a protest there after being identified as ‘visibly Orthodox Jewish students’.
She was treated in hospital after a demonstrator waved a Palestinian flag in her face, jabbing her in the eye. ‘It’s really painful to realise your peers have joined the Nazi Party,’ she said.
Sahar Tartak was treated in hospital after a demonstrator waved a Palestinian flag in her face, jabbing her in the eye
Riot police have arrested hundreds more protesters at universities
