Pro-Gaza Movement: Columbia University Postpones Campus Evacuation

Ultimately it won’t be this Friday. Columbia University has pushed back a deadline for pro-Palestinian students to evacuate a campus occupied to protest the war in the Gaza Strip.

The office of the president of New York University, where the movement began more than a week ago, returned to a deadline of midnight local time (that is, 6 a.m. in France this Friday morning) to begin dismantling the tent city housing about 200 students. gathered.

“Negotiations have progressed and are continuing as planned,” university President Minouche Shafik’s office said in a statement late Thursday. “We have our own requests, they have theirs,” the presidential office continues, denying the need for police intervention.

“They call us terrorists, they call us violent. But the only tool we have is our voices,” said one student attending the pro-Palestinian rally, introducing herself as Mimi.

Widespread movement

The pro-Palestinian American student movement began at Columbia University in New York. Dozens of arrests were made there last week after university officials used police to end an occupation that some figures accused of stoking anti-Semitism. Protests then continued on campus Wednesday.

Since then, the student movement has become widespread. Some of the world’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, were affected. More than 200 protesters were arrested on Wednesday and Thursday at universities in Los Angeles, Boston and Austin, Texas, where about 2,000 people gathered again on Thursday.

The new camp was created on the campus of George Washington University in the capital. At UCLA, more than 200 students set up a mini-village of about thirty tents barricaded with pallets and signs.

Kaya Shah, a 23-year-old political science student, expressed enthusiasm for the movement’s expansion within the AFP. “What we’re seeing on other campuses is great,” she said, “it shows how many people support this cause.” According to Keith Belgium, a professor at the University of Austin, the campus should see “freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas.” “And if the university cannot tolerate this, then it is not worthy of the name,” she adds to AFP.

Biden ‘supports free speech’

Near the pro-Palestinian rally, about thirty students organized a counter-demonstration. Jasmine Rad, a Jewish student at the University of Texas, says pro-Gaza demonstrations are “dangerous for Jewish students.”

Scenes across the country follow each other and are similar: students set up tents on their campuses to denounce US military support for Israel and the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. They are then forced out, often with force, by police in riot gear at the request of university officials.

USC University in Los Angeles, where 93 people were arrested on Wednesday, announced Thursday it was canceling its main graduation ceremony this year, officially due to “new security measures.”

Jason Miller, an adviser to Donald Trump, took advantage of this information, saying on X that “under Joe Biden, your graduation ceremony will not be guaranteed” to take place. The White House, for its part, assures that Joe Biden, who hopes to be re-elected in November, “supports freedom of speech, debate and non-discrimination” at universities.