The NYPD intervened soldier Tuesday night at Columbia University, the epicenter of pro-Palestinian mobilization on American campuses, to dislodge protesters who had barricaded themselves in the building since the night before. All the protesters were evacuated from the campus, according to US media.
American student anger has spread over the past two weeks from major universities on the East Coast to those in California, through the South and the center, reminiscent of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.
Police entered using a ladder
In New York on Tuesday evening (Wednesday around 03:30 Paris time), dozens, if not hundreds, of police entered the campus with the help of an emergency vehicle with a ladder.
Helmeted officers, climbing a ladder, then entered the occupied building through a window.
Dozens of people, some in keffiyeh, were arrested and put into police buses. Outside the campus, crowds chanted “Free Palestine!” “.
“Yesterday’s events on campus left us with no choice,” wrote university president Minouche Shafik. in a letter published is asking the NYPD to step in on the fringes of this private Manhattan business.
Intervention at the University’s request
For two weeks, she and many other university leaders across the country faced protesters, sometimes only a few dozen, who occupied their campuses to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas.
In her letter to the NYPD, Minouche Shafik asks law enforcement to “maintain a presence on campus until at least May 17 to maintain order and ensure that no camps are set up.” ยป
On the night from Monday to Tuesday, several dozen protesters barricaded themselves in the Hamilton Hall building. The building was renamed “Hind’s Hall” by the pro-Palestinian group Columbia University Apartheid Divest in honor of a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza. On their Instagram account, the group condemned the “invasion” of the campus.
On Monday, Columbia’s presidency began administratively “suspending” students who refused to leave the charter “village.”
Clashes on the UCLA campus in California
Clashes broke out on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) between pro-Palestinian protesters who are camping on the institution’s campus and dozens of counter-protesters.
Los Angeles police “immediately responded to a call (from university authorities, ed.) for campus assistance,” a city spokesperson wrote on X.
According to several American media, rocket fire was fired at the tents.
The student movement is shaking up politics
Six months before presidential elections in a polarized country, this student movement has provoked a strong reaction from the political world. Joe Biden “has to do something” against these “paid agitators,” Republican nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday night on Fox News. “We must put an end to the anti-Semitism that plagues our country today,” he added.
“While Columbia University is thrown into chaos, Joe Biden is absent because he is afraid to address this issue,” wrote House Republican leader Mike Johnson on X in the evening. He has long called for the departure of his president, Minouche Shafik.
“Forcibly occupying a university building is the wrong approach” and is not “an example of a peaceful demonstration,” thundered John Kirby, spokesman for Democratic President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, before the police action.
Pro-Palestinian protesters are demanding that their universities cut ties with benefactors or companies linked to Israel. Columbia refuses.
Brown University reaches settlement with protesters
But another elite Northeast campus, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, announced a deal with students: canceling the camp in exchange for the university’s October vote on possible “divestment of companies that enable and profit from the genocide in Gaza.”
Across the United States, footage of law enforcement brutalizing campus riots has gone viral around the world. Since last weekend, hundreds of students, teachers and activists from around twenty universities have been arrested, some arrested or detained.