In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/us/pro-palestinian-college-protests.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ok0.wg9E.d1SyQRzxqH54&smid=url-share
h“It’s in our name: mutual liberation,” Ms. McAllister said. “That means we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist organization. We believe that none of us can be free and have the respect and dignity we deserve unless all of us are free.”
Almost all protest groups want an immediate cease-fire, and some kind of divestment from companies that have interests in Israel or in the military. But because everything is connected, some protesters have other items on their agenda.
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“When you are a part of any oppressed group, especially people that are experiencing direct state violence like being part of the Pan-African diaspora within the United States, which is built on the enslavement and dehumanization and degradation of African peoples, that does politicize you,” Ms. Crawford said.
At Emory University, protesters occupying the campus quad have chanted “Free Palestine,” along with “Stop Cop City,” referring to a large police and fire training compound being built on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Ari Quan, a 19-year-old Emory first-year student from Columbia, S.C., who uses the pronouns they and them, acknowledged not having followed the conflict in Gaza especially closely, but said there was considerable overlap between the movement for greater justice in policing and pro-Palestinian sentiment. They were moved to join the demonstrations on campus after seeing their friend pushed to the ground by the police.
“I would have felt bad if I wasn’t involved,” they said. “To see the police become more militarized is hard for me to imagine.”
The student movement in support of Palestinians has been built over decades by linking to other issues. Students for Justice in Palestine, a loosely connected confederation that began to emerge in the early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, consciously invited other activists — environmentalists, opponents of American intervention in Latin America, critics of the Gulf War — broadening the group’s base.
Today, the group’s national steering committee claims more than 200 autonomous chapters, most of them in the United States. And they often work with other student groups.
Coalition building is a source of strength and pride, giving protesters a sense that much of the world is with them.
But scholars say this current movement, which has outraged many pro-Israel students and alumni, is starkly different from the movements against apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War.
In the 1960s, during demonstrations against the Vietnam War, there was no single constituency that felt attacked as an ethnicity, said Timothy Naftali, who teaches public policy at Columbia, though he acknowledged that student soldiers or those in the R.O.T.C. would have been targeted.
I would imagine that these demonstrations now are creating a feeling of insecurity in a much bigger way than the antiwar demonstrations during Vietnam did,” Mr. Naftali said.
Much of the divide today is centered around Hamas and antisemitism.
In interviews, many students declined to engage when asked about Hamas, the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel that killed 1,200 people. Many simply said that the attacks were awful.
But Lila Steinbach, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, acknowledged that the attacks stirred up complicated emotions. She knows people who were killed and taken hostage in the attacks. Like many of the protesters, she was raised Jewish.
“What happened on Oct. 7 was a test of my politics, as someone who is committed to liberalization and decolonization,” she said, adding, “It’s hard to not condemn all of the violence being committed by Hamas
Yet, she added, “I also know that the violence of the Israelis and the violence of U.S. imperialism and the conditions cultivated by those actors are responsible for breeding terrorism. When you grow up in an open air prison and you’re orphaned and you are told that Israelis are at fault, why wouldn’t you believe them?”
Antisemitism, almost all the student protesters said, is a real concern.
But they said they just do not see it around them — not in their encampments, not among the other protesters, not in their chants, such as “from the river to the sea.” (In their view, “from the river to the sea” is not a call to wipe out the state of Israel, but a call for peace and equality.)
On Sunday, a few dozen protesters hung around the encampment at the University of Pittsburgh. Alexandra Weiner, 25, a faculty member in the math department at the university, said that she grew up attending the Tree of Life Synagogue, where a white nationalist gunned down 11 worshipers in 2018.
While some counterprotesters had called the encampment antisemitic, she said, “I have not experienced or heard a single sentiment of antisemitism.”
Later that day, hundreds of protesters marched on campus, calling for a cease-fire. After a short standoff with the police, two were arrested. On Tuesday, the encampment was gone.
Bravo for them, THEY WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETER PLACE. SOME ONE HAS TO DLO IT!