Students Vow To Continue Struggle as Israel Closes in on Rafah

The student movement remains undeterred by police repression and focused on solidarity with Gaza as Israel moves forward with attacks on Rafah.

“We send our solidarity to the brave comrades in Palestine resisting this latest chapter of zionist aggression,” reads a dispatch from the Popular University 4 Gaza, a project of the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization which unites pro-Palestine students across North America.

“Here, nothing will suffice but escalation. Who are we to sit back and quibble while our Palestinian brothers and sisters resist slaughter? Palestinians in Gaza call for strikes, disruptions, blockades and action. By any means necessary is not a slogan. Our movement, reignited on campuses across the world, must spread to the streets. Even as the state continues to crack down on our protest, making dozens of fresh arrests in California and New York City in the past 24 hours, we are not cowed. State violence only demonstrates the just nature of our cause,” the students write.

A week after the New York City Police Department finished demolishing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University and brutally repressing the building occupation of Hind’s (formerly Hamilton) Hall, students continue to move the movement forward around the US and across the world. Columbia University administration canceled commencement after calling in NYPD to brutally suppress student protests, resulting in altercations in which an officer fired a gun into Hind’s Hall.

Several encampments have emerged across the United Kingdom and Europe, including in Berlin, where students staging a sit-in at Berlin’s Humboldt University were violently arrested by police. The German government has created a uniquely hostile environment for the Palestine solidarity movement, going as far as banning the keffiyeh, instructing Palestinian students to register as “stateless”, and imposing a travel ban on world renowned Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta.

Students have also launched encampments at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the University of Barcelona, and Birzeit University in the West Bank.

📍Birzeit University 🇵🇸
*FALASTEEN HAS ENTERED THE CHAT*
images from @ Nazzal.BZU on Instagram #StudentIntifada pic.twitter.com/eD8BL8gARH
— National Students for Justice in Palestine (@NationalSJP) May 7, 2024

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to successfully defeat an attempt by Cambridge police to sweep their encampment yesterday, due to mass support from the surrounding community including high school students who marched to MIT to protect the camp.

BREAKING: High school students from across Boston walk out of class to join the MIT student encampment in response to the increasing police repression.
Eleven high schools, including private high school Boston Latin, have walked out to stand with Gaza. pic.twitter.com/f0U1e0YDOJ
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) May 6, 2024

Police blocked off the encampment to surrounding protesters and supporters, threatening to sweep the encampment by 2:30 pm. However, demonstrators surrounding the camp defiantly hopped over the gates and formed a human chain to protect campers, effectively deterring police from moving in.

“People started jumping the fence into the encampment, and that energized people to push further,” Nishad Gothoskar, a steward of the MIT Graduate Student Union, told Peoples Dispatch. “They collapsed all of these high, high gates that they put up all around the encampment, at which point 100 plus people flooded into the encampment and formed a circle, retaking the encampment that they had been forced out of.”

According to Gothoskar, the outpouring of support for MIT had in part to do with the looming threat of the invasion of Rafah at the time, which materialized the next day.

“Some people might see these encampments, if they’re shut down by the police, as a defeat for the struggle. But the encampments are just like one manifestation. Even if the encampments were to fall, the struggle on campus would continue,” Gothoskar said.

Columbia Crackdown Led by University Prof Doubling as NYPD Spook

Outside agitators?
Authorities have accused the student movement of being infiltrated by so-called “outside agitators.” Particularly critical has been Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, where students have launched encampments at several schools, including Columbia University, New York University, the City College of New York, the New School, Fordham University, and others. “There is a movement to radicalize young people and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it,” Adams claimed.

NYC-based organizations such as the People’s Forum have been accused of being outside agitators by various right-wing media outlets including the New York Post, which accused the organization of urging “anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University to channel the deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.”

The People’s Forum responded: “It is absurd to reduce the students’ courage, on display in over 100 campuses nationwide, to outside instigation from either TPF or of any Palestinian solidarity organizations that are rallying to support them. The students are risking suspension, expulsion, arrest, loss of housing and so much more based on their own convictions and sense of outrage. They are seeing their own schools and tuition money supporting an ongoing genocide and doing everything they can to stop it.”

(Peoples Dispatch)

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