By George Binette

University campuses in the United States have long been ideological battlegrounds in the nation’s ‘culture wars’, but since last October the reality of Israel’s unrelenting war on Gaza and its people has fuelled passionate protests on a scale not witnessed since the height of the movement opposing the US war on Vietnam.

On 17th April students at Columbia University in New York City established a miniature tent city on a lawn outside a main campus building. They set up the encampment as an expression of solidarity with the people of Gaza and to back demands for an immediate ceasefire and divestment of Columbia’s Israel-linked investments.

Within 48 hours Columbia’s already embattled president, the Egyptian-American economist, Minouche Shafik, who had previously been vice-chancellor at the London School of Economics and a deputy governor at the Bank of England, had asked New York’s police department to intervene and evict the campers. The cops, many clad in riot gear, duly obliged and arrested over 100 including several Jewish students. All those taken into custody are currently out of jail, but the university administration has suspended many of the students and evicted some, if not all, of those who had student accommodation. In-person classes have ceased for the remainder of the academic year with teaching once more online.

Since the initial police raid, a new encampment has sprung up elsewhere on the Columbia campus, while dozens of protests inspired by the Columbia student activists have taken place across much of the US, with nearly two dozen other campuses witnessing the erection of makeshift camps by 24th April. In addition to Columbia, five (Brown, Cornell, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Yale) of the other six elite Ivy League institutions have now seen encampments. Several other universities have seen demonstrations. While still concentrated in the northeast, the wave of protests has become national.

The movement is far from homogenous, with precise demands varying from campus to campus. Some have simply demanded an end to investments in corporations supplying weaponry to the Israeli military such as Lockheed-Martin, the principal manufacturer of US fighter jets for which BAe is a contractor, and RTX, formerly Raytheon, producer of Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Others have gone further and called for divestment from all shareholdings in companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine, including the likes of Airbnb, along with the termination of exchange programmes with Israeli universities.

At least 15 campuses have seen protesters arrested since 17th April. Police broke up encampments and made mass arrests at New York University and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut on 22nd April. Later in the week, police in Los Angeles dismantled an encampment at the University of Southern California (USC).

The USC authorities had earlier fuelled anger after cancelling a speech by the class of 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a student in biomedical engineering and a Muslim woman of South Asian heritage. A pro-Zionist group on the campus, Trojans for Israel (USC’s sports teams carry the “Trojans” moniker), had trawled her social media posts and found pro-Palestinian tweets. The panic-stricken university management has now cancelled the main graduation ceremony and withdrawn invitations to all commencement speakers including the ground-breaking tennis star, Billie-Jean King.

In Boston, police descended on an alleyway encampment by students at Emerson College Wednesday (24th April) night, arresting 108 protesters, with documented allegations of grossly excessive force. The city’s Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, widely seen as a progressive, has so far backed the cops’ actions. Another protest camp has since sprung up at the city’s Northeastern University.

Demonstrators at Atlanta’s Emory University claim that police used tear gas and even rubber bullets in clearing a ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’, which had also become a focal point for opposition to the construction of ‘Cop City’, a police training centre spread across 171 acres on the city’s outskirts.

Brutal reactions to student protests have also come in Texas where at the state university’s main campus in Austin both local police and state troopers were deployed to smash a peaceful student protest. Local media reported the arrest of 34 students and alumni along with two journalists including a Fox News employee. The police action had the public backing of Governor Greg Abbott, frequently mentioned as a potential Trump running mate.

Abbott is hardly alone among Republican politicians in urging harsh crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protest. A group of 27 Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri have published a letter to the Biden administration’s Education Secretary and Attorney General calling for the restoration of “order to campuses that have been effectively shut down by anti-Semitic mobs that are targeting Jewish students.” Cotton and Hawley have explicitly called for the deployment of the National Guard, evoking for some memories of the killing of protesting students by Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio in 1970.

The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose own job security seems precarious, went to the Columbia campus to denounce the student protests and even suggested that Minouche Shafik should resign from the university’s presidency if she could not “restore order.” The previous weekend, Johnson had helped steer a series of “foreign aid” bills through the House of Representatives including some $17bn (£13.7bn) for Israel’s military with a further $9bn earmarked for “humanitarian” relief.

The day following Johnson’s grandstanding, the Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar appeared at Columbia to accompany her daughter, one of the student protesters arrested the week before. Omar, who represents a Minnesota district, is a member of “the Squad” and a forthright opponent of Israel’s war. While hardly typical of Congressional Democrats, Omar was far from alone in voting against the release of still more money for Israel’s war machine. Three dozen other Democrats also said “no” to the package, a figure which would have been almost unthinkable six months before.

The still small, but significant, shift among Democratic Party politicians partly reflects the impact of months of unprecedented protest both on campuses and far beyond, with a transformed stance among several US unions, not least the United Autoworkers, also exercising some influence. Opinion polling suggests a clear majority of US voters and an overwhelming 77% of Democrats back a ceasefire, with an unprecedented level of public sympathy. The April Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 12^th Congressional District saw a first-term “Squad” member score an easy victory despite prominent attacks on her stance against Israel’s war.

While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu may brand the campus protests as “anti-Semitic” and even compare them with the atmosphere at German universities in the 1930s, an increasing number of Jewish Americans reject such rhetoric. Fissures in the once monolithic support for Israel among 7.6 million Jewish people in the US had already developed before last October. The growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, founded in 1996, and the more recent IfNotNow, which opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, which preceded the current war, highlight the rejection of the pro-Zionist narrative among a substantial layer of younger Jews.

So far, the Biden administration has had little to say about the student protests and maintains that it is attempting to exercise a restraining hand on the Netanyahu war cabinet even as it continues to pour billions to the IDF. Biden has paid a modest political price to date with campaigns in Democratic Party presidential primaries persuading many voters to cast “uncommitted” ballots. As in August 1968, Chicago is the host city for the Democrats’ convention, where Biden will doubtless be confirmed as the party’s candidate. Whether or not the spectre of the ’68 protests and their savage suppression haunts Joe Biden is unknown, but the very real prospect of mass abstention or votes for third party candidates just might cost him re-election and ironically propel Donald Trump back into the White House.

George Binette is a Massachusetts native. He is a former Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer and writes in a personal capacity.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_Columbia_pro-Palestine_protest_16.jpg Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. Author: SWinxy, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.