(Boston) About a hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators were briefly arrested Saturday by riot police at a Boston university and 69 others arrested for “trespassing” on a campus in Arizona, the latest episode of a student movement that has extends to the United States.
Starting ten days ago from Columbia University in New York, this new wave of support for the Palestinians and against the war being waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip has spread to a number of establishments, from California to New England in passing through the south of the country.
Law enforcement at Arizona State University (ASU) “arrested 69 people on Saturday after setting up an unauthorized encampment,” the establishment said, accusing “most of them of not be ASU students or staff.”
These people will be “pursued for illegal trespass”.
At the other end of the country in Boston, Northeastern University announced on X “the arrest of approximately 100 individuals by the police; students who presented their Northeastern U. cards were released (…) Those who refused were arrested.”
Tent village
PHOTO JOHN TLUMACKI, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Northeastern University police make arrests.
“Violent anti-Semitic insults” such as “killing Jews” had been uttered on campus according to the university, which announced a “return to normal” at midday.
There too, an “illegal” encampment was dismantled at dawn by police in riot gear and the university accused “professional organizers” of having “infiltrated a student demonstration”.
Furthermore, the presidency of Columbia, the New York epicenter of the student mobilization, announced overnight that it had given up on having the police evacuate a “village” of tents of 200 people on a lawn on its campus.
However, a leader of the movement is banned from access after anti-Zionist threats in a video dating from January. The young man later offered his “apologies,” according to CNN, which described the campus as “relatively quiet” on Saturday.
On the other hand, the situation has become tense at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), whose president resigned this winter after statements to Congress in Washington considered ambiguous on the fight against anti-Semitism. Following “credible reports of cases of harassment and intimidation”, the presidency ordered the immediate dismantling of a camp.
And in California, Humboldt Polytechnic University will remain “closed” for the rest of the semester due to the “occupation” of two buildings, according to a press release.
In neighboring Canada, a camp was set up for the first time at McGill University in Montreal where the movement has been going on since February and which is worried about “a risk of escalation and confrontation”.
Riot police
Images of riot police arresting students, at the call of university leaders, went around the world.
They echo the uprising on American campuses during the Vietnam War. Even the painful memory when the Ohio National Guard opened fire in May 1970 at Kent State University, killing four peaceful students.
The solidarity movement with Gaza took a political turn seven months before the American presidential election, between allegations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and defense of freedom of expression, a constitutional right in the United States.
The country has the largest number of Jews in the world behind Israel (some six million) and also millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
All week across the United States, pro-Palestinian students and activists were arrested and most often released without prosecution.
And in these gatherings, left-wing and anti-Zionist Jewish students support the Palestinian cause, keffiyeh on their shoulders, even denouncing a “genocide” allegedly perpetrated by Israel.
PHOTO NICOLE CRAINE, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Pro-Palestinian demonstration at Emory University in Atlanta
But other young American Jews express their discomfort and fear in the face of anti-Semitic slogans.
Thus, Skyler Sieradzky, 21, from George Washington University in the capital claimed this week that he had been spat on when he arrived with an Israeli flag.
“They call us terrorists (…) But the only tool we have is our voices,” replied “Mimi”, a student at Columbia.
The war was triggered by the unprecedented attack on October 7 on Israeli soil by Hamas commandos which resulted in the death of 1,170 people, mainly civilians, according to an AFP report based on official Israeli data.
In retaliation, Israel promised to destroy the Islamist movement, and its vast military operation in the Gaza Strip left 34,388 people dead, mostly civilians, according to Hamas.
reference: www.lapresse.ca