Support movement for Gaza | Electrical tension on American campuses

(Los Angeles) Hundreds of arrests, riot police facing students who do not let up: the tension remains electric Thursday on American campuses, prey to increasingly tense demonstrations against the war in Gaza.

From Los Angeles to New York, from Austin to Boston, from Princeton to Harvard, the pro-Palestinian American student movement is growing by the hour.

The scenes across the country follow one another and are similar: students set up tents on their campuses, to denounce the military support of the United States for Israel and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

Then they are dislodged, often in a muscular manner, by police officers in riot gear, at the request of their prestigious universities.

Wednesday evening, more than a hundred demonstrators were arrested near Emerson College, a university in Boston. Thousands of miles away, mounted officers apprehended students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Despite this, the movement is growing.

In the early hours of Thursday, a new encampment was set up in the US capital Washington, where a demonstration is planned for the morning.

National Guard

“Millions of Palestinians in Gaza sleep in the cold every night without access to food or shelter,” explains Yazen, an American-Palestinian student, to justify his participation in this movement.

For more than a week, the 23-year-old student has been sleeping every night on a lawn at Columbia University in New York.

It was from this university that the protest started about a week ago – before spreading across the country, in particular thanks to very strong mobilization of students on social networks.

It was also from this campus that a Republican leader in Congress Mike Johnson threatened to ask Joe Biden to mobilize the National Guard on campuses, which he said were plagued by a “virus of anti-Semitism”.

A part of American society in fact accuses American universities of anti-Zionism – allegations which cost the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs this winter.

Mike Johnson’s warning, however, resonates painfully in the United States: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State University on anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Four students were killed.

The White House has so far refrained from mentioning this scenario, simply assuring that the Democratic president, who hopes to be re-elected in November, “supports freedom of expression, debate and non-discrimination” in the universities.