How Gaza protests have gripped American universities

Good morning. It’s only student politics, you might say: a collection of undergraduates staging protests on campus, making demands of university administrators, and registering a futile objection to a faraway crisis. Why should anyone else be interested?

But the protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza that have convulsed Columbia University in New York are becoming harder and harder to dismiss, reminiscent to some of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of 1968. They have set off a wave of similar protests across the US, and now even in the UK. They have drawn attention to the extent of US support for Israel, and lent credence to claims that college administrators listen more closely to hostile Republicans than their own students and faculty.

Sign up here for the Guardian’s daily newsletter, First Edition

On Tuesday night, police in riot gear arrested 119 people at Columbia, and counter-protesters launched a violent attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles. On Wednesday, police launched operations to dismantle protests in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, Louisiana and Arizona – and a few minutes ago, there were reports that hundreds of police in riot gear were surrounding the UCLA encampment.

All of this suggests that US college campuses are now the site of a major confrontation over free speech and the war in Gaza that is only likely to grow. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Bassam Khawaja, a human rights lawyer and lecturer at Columbia Law School, about why he supports the protests, what they are seeking to achieve, and how they have escalated to a crisis point. Here are the headlines.

In depth: ‘This escalation didn’t come out of nowhere’

Protests began at universities across the US soon after the Hamas attack of 7 October, and spread as Israel’s invasion of Gaza intensified. Columbia, a potent symbol of the power of student activism thanks to its students’ key role in Vietnam and anti-apartheid protests, was at the centre of the movement from the start.

As early as November, Columbia suspended chapters of two groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students For Justice in Palestine, over an unauthorised walkout. Instead of quashing the protest, that action prompted the formation of a coalition of dozens of student organisations, under the CU Apartheid Divest (CUAD) umbrella. Now made up of 100 student-run groups, CUAD has called on the university to sell holdings in companies with significant financial ties to Israel.

It was CUAD that organised a protest encampment earlier this month – and it was the arrest of more than 100 protesters as their tents were cleared two weeks ago that ratcheted tensions up further. Columbia president Minouche Shafik requested the NYPD’s presence, calling the encampment “a clear and present danger”, and in doing so crossed the Rubicon.

“It was essentially students studying in tents,” Bassam Khawaja said. “It’s laughable to say that it was a danger.” Sending in the NYPD two weeks ago was, he said, “certainly an escalation – but it didn’t come out of nowhere. All the way through this, Columbia has chosen to escalate.”

What’s happened at Columbia this week

After the encampment was broken up, some of those who were involved simply started another on the next lawn over. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, after the university started to suspend students who had refused to leave, a group of about 60 protesters – described by CUAD as an “autonomous subgroup” – moved to occupy Hamilton Hall, an academic building, and barricaded the doors. (New York magazine has an interesting set of pictures from inside the occupation.)

Columbia told the protesters that they would face expulsion, and issued a statement claiming that they were “led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university”; Joe Biden condemned the occupation. Once again, Shafik authorised the NYPD to come in, later highlighting the apparent presence of “outside activists” in a statement released on Wednesday. Police in riot gear marched on the campus and cleared the new encampment.

At least 50 officers used an armoured vehicle with a mechanical ramp to gain access to the second floor of Hamilton Hall. They used so-called “flashbang” grenades to disorient the occupiers, arrested them, and took them away in buses. According to student newspaper the Columbia Spectator, officers “threw a protester down the stairs in front of the building and slammed protesters with barricades”. You can see the location of the occupied building and encampment below.

Here’s how Adam Tooze, the renowned economic historian and Columbia faculty member, described the scene as a police vehicle arrived:

On an order from their commander, the police pushed. They pushed hard. Very hard. They move fast, as quickly as their bulk and equipment would allow, maximizing momentum. The officers use waist-high steel barriers as plows to drive the protestors back and to pin them in side streets and against walls …

The scene was static. But I would not be honest if I did not say that my stomach churned watching it. The sheer force of the movement, the relentless and sudden drive of the steel barrier against human bodies, moved the air.

“People are absolutely furious,” Khawaja said. “The university has now twice called the police on the students who are supposed to be under our care. There is a good reason we don’t bring police on to campus – the NYPD has a history of violence against protesters. The administration knew, or should have known, that they were putting these students at risk.”

What the students want

At Columbia and elsewhere, they want to see a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza – but more locally, they make the case that their universities should divest from companies with links to Israel.

In this piece, Tooze points out how opaque Columbia’s financial reporting is – but also notes that the publicly known assets in question are worth a few million against a total endowment of almost $15bn. The real point, he argues, is to highlight “the way that a powerful educational institution like Columbia is embedded in networks of power and influence”.

There have also been documented cases of antisemitism. Although most appear to have been linked to protests just off campus by demonstrators unaffiliated with Columbia, some Jewish groups at the university hold the student organisations responsible for fomenting an atmosphere in which such abuse is more likely. Apartheid Divest has condemned and disowned such incidents and called the perpetrators “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us”.

Others have argued that it is unreasonable to tar the entire movement with the comments of a few. “Antisemitism has no place on a college campus,” said Khawaja. “There have been unacceptable incidents. But the idea that this is an antisemitic movement is simply incorrect. We have to have no tolerance for antisemitism, but [we want] to be able to speak up for Palestinian rights.”

How university administrators have handled it

The Columbia encampment began in April – deliberately timed to coincide with Shafik’s trip to Washington. She was there to testify to a Republican-led committee that is keen to point out what it sees as tolerance of antisemitism on campuses – and she would have been keenly aware that the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have already been forced to resign after their own disastrous evidence sessions.

Shafik was viewed by many at Columbia as having been bulldozed into surrendering any defence of academic freedom. “Her testimony was shameful,” Khawaja said. “She capitulated to very extreme positions from the right, she commented on confidential disciplinary hearings, and she didn’t defend free speech. It created an enormous amount of tension.”

Not every university has responded in the same way: at Brown, for example, an encampment ended after the university governing body agreed to hold a vote later this year on divestment. “We’ve seen other universities deal with this in a much more productive manner,” Khawaja said. “But at Columbia, because there has been escalation at every turn, it is very difficult now to de-escalate.”

How the protests have spread

Police had been called in from Princeton to the University of Utah. In Austin, Texas, governor Greg Abbott sent in state troopers on horseback to disperse a peaceful protest; in Georgia, at Emory University, police used pepper balls, stun guns and rubber bullets, and arrested 28 people. (Read Timothy Pratt’s grim and vivid piece about the fallout there.)

As this email is sent, more than 1,500 people have been arrested on more than 30 campuses across 23 states, while many other schools have seen protests that did not lead to arrests. CNN has an up-to-date map. This Washington Post piece gives a detailed sense of how the movement has spread, and how crucial the confrontation between students and the Columbia authorities has been as a catalyst.

The events of Tuesday night felt like a crucible of how intense the confrontations have become – and how they may continue to escalate. Not far from Columbia, at City College of New York in Harlem, 173 people were arrested. At UCLA, fights broke out after a large group of counter-protesters attacked an encampment there (above), launching fireworks into the camp and throwing wood and a metal barrier at those inside it. Dani Anguiano reports that protesters and journalists on the scene said that police looked on for hours before intervening.

“On the one hand, the students have been quite uncomfortable at generating so much media attention – they want the focus to be on Gaza, while doing what they can within their own institutions,” Khawaja said. “But this is a country with a long history of college protests that have shifted the course of our history – and they know that history.”