This Saturday, the Police ended a pro-Palestinian camp set up at Northeastern University in Boston and arrested a hundred people who had been protesting there since Thursday. However, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, from Austin to Boston, passing through Chicago, the movement of university students in the United States continues, who began demonstrating last week against the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
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One by one, this Saturday, April 27, the Massachusetts state police evicted the students from the tents starting at 6:00 local time (10:00 GMT), which did not reduce the tension due to the university protests against of the Israeli siege on Gaza, extended throughout the United States in recent weeks.
Those who identified themselves with their Northeastern University student ID are free, but 102 individuals were charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.
“The State Police is committed to protecting people's rights to assembly and free speech in a safe manner, as well as protecting the safety and property of all parties involved,” the Massachusetts Police said in a statement.
Renata Nyul, vice president of Northeastern University's communications department, said there were “infiltrated” members who were not enrolled at the university who uttered “violent anti-Semitic slurs.”
Students detained on campus will be subject to “disciplinary procedures” – according to the university – but “not legal measures.”
Columbia, the beginning of the fight
Other pro-Palestine camps have spread to different universities in the United States, for example in Boston, also at Tuft University, and in Cambridge, at Harvard.
Your idea is the same: They seek a definitive ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and for the US Government to interrupt economic and military aid to Israel.
On April 17 it all began at Columbia University with the installation of the first camp. The next day, Columbia President Minouche Shafik called the police, who arrested 108 students accused of breaking and entering, which outraged some teachers and generated more cohesion in the student struggle, that became stronger.
Ten days later, the scenes across the country are the same: student groups set up tents on their campuses to denounce US military support for Israel and the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip.
Not only are there camps in the United States, they have also appeared abroad in solidarity with Columbia students.
The White House, Republican lawmakers and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have criticized them and called the protesters anti-Semitic. However, many Jewish students are among the organizers and reject the accusations.
Heated but non-violent debates sometimes break out between anti-Zionist Jews and pro-Israel students who visit the camp.
Where does this inspiration come from?
A week before students set up a pro-Palestinian protest camp on a Columbia University lawn, some of them took an optional course called 'Columbia 1968' about protests against the Vietnam War.
Frank Guridy, the Columbia history professor who has taught the class since 2017, along with a couple of his students stopped by the camp on the New York City campus on April 25 to discuss the parallels in a session called: '1968: Continuing the Struggle', as protesters listened while sitting on mats on the grass outside their tents, eating free food on paper plates from a community kitchen.
The group of students interviewed former participants of the 1968 protests, according to some of their participants, for lessons on how to build support for a protest movement.
In 1968, his predecessors, outraged that Columbia had disciplined six students who were against the school's ties to weapons research and the university's plans to build a racially segregated gymnasium near Harlem, occupied several campus buildings and They took the acting dean hostage for a day. The police violently ended the occupation, a week later, with the arrest of nearly 700 students.
With Reuters, AFP, EFE and local media.
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