Police arrested around 150 protesters at pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Yale and New York University on Monday night (23), while Columbia University announced that classes will be held remotely for the rest of the semester.
On the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, authorities arrested at least 47 protesters on Monday night, the university reported in a statement. The arrested students will face disciplinary measures.
In downtown Manhattan, police clashed with protesters at New York University. There were reports of officers using pepper spray as protesters attempted to prevent a police car from leaving the scene with detained students. More than 100 people were arrested.
The officers then moved to a camp near the university shortly after nightfall. There, hundreds of protesters defied the university’s warnings that they would face consequences if they did not vacate the square. A video on social media shows police dismantling tents at the protesters’ camp.
The police crackdowns at Yale and NYU occurred after Columbia University witnessed a major faculty strike on Monday in solidarity with students who were arrested last week after organizing a campus protest, demanding that the elite institution sever ties with companies associated with Israel.
Bassam Khawaja, a professor at Columbia Law School and supervising attorney at the school’s human rights clinic, told the Guardian that he was “shocked and horrified that the president immediately went to the New York City police department.”
“This was, by all accounts, a non-violent protest,” he said. “It was a group of students camping on the lawn in the middle of campus. It’s no different from everyday life on campus.”
Following the crackdown at Columbia, students across the US launched their own protests in solidarity, many of them urging their universities to support a ceasefire in Gaza and sever ties with companies associated with Israel.
Students from Brown University, Princeton, and Northwestern held protests on Friday and over the weekend.
Students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Emerson College, both in the Boston area, started their own camps.
Other institutions that saw protest actions include Boston University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Robert Kraft, a major donor to Columbia University and owner of the NFL’s Patriots football team who funded the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life at Columbia, announced on Monday that he would withdraw his support “until corrective actions are taken” on campus.
Amid a diversity of viewpoints on the Columbia campus, some Jewish students joined the pro-Palestinian protesters, others stayed away, and some said they feel unsafe.
Columbia University President Nemat Minouche Shafik called the New York police last week to dismantle a camp of students on her main lawn.
She has been criticized both for not cracking down on the growing protests and for how she did crack down, appealing to the city’s police department to arrest students. She is facing calls to resign from some members of Congress, primarily Republicans, but also Democrats.
Source: The Guardian