Fareed Taamallah

Late on Tuesday evening the head of Columbia University sent in the New York Police Department to violently clear an occupation of university buildings where students were protesting US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This is the latest twist in an unprecedented rise in student demonstrations across American universities in support of justice in Palestine and demanding an end to the Israeli occupation.

The wave of student protests is taking place in prestigious American universities including Columbia, Brown, Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, University of Minnesota, University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, and many others across the country.

Scores of students have been arrested. US House speaker Mike Johnson suggested calling in the National Guard.

Students at Columbia occupied an academic building, renaming Hamilton Hall (after the former US president and enslaver) to Hind’s Hall after Hind Rajab, the five-year-old Palestinian girl who was found dead in February, two weeks after pleading for help and being trapped for days under Israeli fire. The last time the building was taken over was in 1968 by students protesting against the Vietnam War.

Palestinians in the occupied territories are following with great interest the “Student Intifada” across US campuses, where students are demanding their universities divest from companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Palestinian university students who witness similar oppression by Israeli forces on a daily basis are horrified by the scenes of repression and violent attacks on these students by US police forces. The same goes for the verbal attacks from American politicians, who accuse them of fuelling hatred and “antisemitism”.

I am the father of two university students. The younger one studies at a Palestinian university in the West Bank and she is exposed daily to the harassment and abuses of the occupation. The older one studies at an American university in the US, where I mistakenly believed he would be safe from such oppressive policies.

While I worry about the future of my children and their colleagues both in Palestine and the US, I am proud of their efforts and am in solidarity with the brave university students.

A new generation

What is happening at these universities gives Palestinians great moral support amid escalating Israeli aggression.

This responsive young generation has gained a deeper understanding of the issue through social media

It further inspires hope that the protests are an indication of the emergence of a new generation that does not believe the Zionist narrative or receive its information from mainstream media outlets in the West.

Rather, this responsive young generation has gained a deeper understanding of the issue through social media and, as a result, can see the truth and form an opinion independent of its predecessors.

It may be too early to tell whether these protests will lead directly to the end of the Israeli occupation and the cessation of continued US support for Israel. However, the determination and political commitment of the students may signal future changes in American foreign policy.

In the mid- and long-term, the hope is that these young individuals will someday hold influential positions, especially as many of the protesting students’ families are among the political, economic, and academic ruling class in the US. And perhaps by influencing their families, their impact might be immediate.

The political elites in the US have long demanded and promoted themselves as the custodians of private, academic, and political freedoms worldwide, especially freedom of expression and freedom to assemble and demonstrate. However, they have failed miserably in upholding these claims, showing their true faces when it comes to criticism of Israel.

These ruling elites have instead demonised the demonstrations, starting with US President Joe Biden, passing through the speaker and members of the US House of Representatives as well as some major financiers and mainstream media. They accused the demonstrators of demagoguery, hatred, and antisemitism, the ready-made accusation against anyone who opposes Israeli policies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the pro-Palestinian protests at universities in the US as “horrific”, labelling the student protesters “antisemitic” and insisting that the demonstrations “have to be stopped”.

What makes this charge particularly ridiculous and empty is the fact that a significant number of the student demonstrators are Jewish anti-war activists, along with their Black, Latino, Asian, white, Arab, and Muslim colleagues. Observers will not fail to notice the diversity of ethnic and religious communities showing up for Palestine at every protest, which is not limited to Muslims and Arabs only.

Profound changes

Perhaps the million-dollar question is whether the repression and continued arrest of students around the country will threaten this movement or instead contribute to its growing popularity and expansion.

To answer this question, we may point to similar demonstrations that American universities witnessed in the late 1960s against the Vietnam War, which American security forces tried to suppress with overwhelming force.

However, the suppression led to the demonstrations increasing in momentum and expanding in scope until the war ended. Likewise, the demonstrations that took place in American universities in the 1980s against the apartheid regime in South Africa did not stop until the US government was forced to end its support and the racist system fell.

Perhaps the violent repression against the students that US police, politicians, and university administrators are supporting will have the opposite effect and embolden the students further rather than silence them.

The calls for freedom, justice, and an end to the genocide and occupation in Palestine will reverberate across all American universities. Indeed, the number of Gaza encampments increased exponentially not just in the US but around the world after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik summoned the police to the campus to disperse the protesters by force.

This led to a domino effect of solidarity at many other universities.

We understand the anger of the peaceful student protesters accused of ‘terrorism’ only because they dared call for freedom and an end to the occupation

We, as Palestinians who have suffered from the scourge and oppression of the occupation, are more than aware of the natural reaction against persecution. We understand the anger of the peaceful student protesters accused of “terrorism” only because they dared call for freedom and an end to the occupation.

We raise our hats out of respect for them, as these protests in the universities and streets of the western world and the Global South keep the flame of hope burning in the souls of our people who long for freedom and justice.

These protests indicate profound, radical changes that separate an ageing American generation that blindly supports Israel and a new generation that promotes justice in Palestine and demands an end to the Israeli occupation and to the war on Gaza.

They represent the future of America and its bright face, the emergence of which we have long awaited.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

US Senator Bernie Sanders has said that attention should be focused on Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza rather than pro-Palestinian protests across US college campuses.

“It is time to not simply worry about the violence we are seeing on American college campuses but to focus on the unprecedented violence we are seeing in Gaza, which has killed 34,500 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000, 70 percent of whom are women and children,” Sanders said on the Senate floor.

His remarks came as student protests over Israel’s war on Gaza have spread to many college campuses after being inspired by demonstrators at New York’s Columbia University.

Hundreds of students have been arrested on campuses, with protests demanding universities divest from Israel and condemning the war on the besieged Palestinian enclave.

“I suggest that CNN and maybe some of my colleagues here may take your cameras, just for a moment, off Columbia and off UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles). Maybe go to Gaza and take your cameras and show us the emaciated children who are dying from malnutrition because of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s policies,” Sanders said.

‘Growing Islamophobia’

“Show us the kids who have lost their arms and their legs. Show us the suffering that is going on over there,” he added.

Turning to the protests across US college campuses, Sanders said he condemns all forms of violence, whether it is committed by people who support Israel’s war policies or by people who oppose those policies, adding that all forms of bigotry in the US must be condemned and eliminated.

“We are seeing a growth of antisemitism in this country, which we must all condemn and work to stop. We are also seeing a growth of Islamophobia in this country, which we must all condemn and stop,” he added.

Sanders reiterated that it is “not antisemitic” to hold Netanyahu and his government accountable for their actions.

(Source: AA)

Feras Abu-Helal

Democracies — with all their faults and shortcomings — generally tend to allow their citizens the right to protest. Even if the authorities use violence to break-up protests, which we have already seen on some US university campuses, or incite against those taking part, as has been seen in the UK and Europe, protests are still allowed, and are often vindicated if and when the issues in question are brought out in open court.

In the Arab world, however, the issue of the legitimacy of the regimes and their very nature has yet to be resolved. The Arabs have not gone through the wars and unrest that produced the nation states in Europe and North America resulting, eventually, in democratic governments which, ironically, prop up the regimes in the Arab world which deny their citizens the rights of protest and freedom of speech that Westerners claim to be sacrosanct in their own countries. If Arab students tried to replicate what is happening on US campuses, the blood would be flowing in no time at all.

We know this from the crushing of the first wave of Arab popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring, which saw the counter-revolutions increase the brutality of the Arab regimes against their own people.

The “nightmare” of freedom for the Arab world was banished. Nevertheless, those occupying the thrones fear the return of this nightmare, so crack down on any popular protest whatsoever in case it turns into a protest against the regimes themselves. This makes the price of protest very high; protesters, quite literally, put their lives on the line. In many Arab countries, if they survive the police and army volleys, they face sham trials that don’t meet international standards of justice, and long prison sentences, or even execution. Young people lose their future no matter what happens, and step into the unknown if they organise or take part in demonstrations.

American students are not more “Arab” than their Arab counterparts. They simply know that the price that they are likely to pay for taking part in pro-Palestine protests is not so prohibitive. Arab students, meanwhile, do not know what high price they will have to pay if they carry out their duty towards what is supposed to be the Arab world’s main cause: Palestine. Nevertheless, students in Lebanon have staged a “rare” anti-Israel protest. It will be interesting to see where this leads to.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the US has been a fertile environment for social movements. Indeed, the culture of protest in the US and Europe dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Protests contributed to the emergence of labour unions and social reform. In the US from the 1950s onwards the civil rights movement emerged to defend the rights of African Americans, and the stars of the great Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King Jr rose and shone brightly before being cut short by assassins’ bullets. Then various social movements prospered, such as the women’s rights movements, to the point that “social movements theory” emerged in America before it spread to Europe.

This theoretical framing and accumulation of experiences led to the creation of models of protest that can be conveyed from one generation to another and developed according to the tools of each era, but with a long and sustainable legacy of protest movements.

The Arab countries did not go through such a process. Yes, there have been massive demonstrations over the years, addressing Palestine and other Arab issues, as well as national matters such as the hunger uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries, and then, of course, came the Arab Spring. However, no permanent and continuous protest movement has ever emerged, or been allowed to emerge, with legacy or historical experience that generations could benefit from and build upon.

If we look at the UK as another example, we see anti-war and pro-Palestine movements founded in the early years of the millennium which have been protesting and campaigning continuously ever since. They have formal structures and employees and work constantly to mobilise and advocate for the issues they espouse. Experience has accumulated and been passed on to younger generations.

Almost no social movements have flourished in the Arab world except the Islamic movements.

These are now suppressed, though, often with great brutality, with members and leaders imprisoned or worse. They are no longer able to lead in matters of social reform and protest in Arab states.

Arab students do not love Palestine less than their Western counterparts, nor are they less “Arab” in any sense, but they do not have the experience accumulated by protest movements in the West, nor do they have the organisations or structures to drive these movements forward. Protests need organisers and leaders to frame their demands. Demonstrations without leaders are simply mobs, and the Arab world now lacks such leaders. The authorities in the Arab countries have seen to that. Leaders and potential leaders are either in exile, in prison or in their graves.

The problem, then, is not the Arab students’ Arabism and their love for Palestine, but the absence of leaders to guide them and lead their protests and campaigns.

Is it possible to change this situation? Of course. Social media is playing a hugely important role in raising awareness and organising. Networks thus developed can be an alternative to traditional hierarchical organisations and social movements in creating a mass movement in support of Palestine. This can present a legacy that inspires a new experience for Arab students, not only for the sake of Palestine and its people, but also for the freedom of the Arab nations themselves.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Edward Helmore

Student protests on US university campuses over Israel’s war on Gaza showed little sign of letting up over the weekend, with protesters vowing to continue until their demands for US educational bodies to disentangle from companies profiting from the conflict are met.

In what is perhaps the most significant student movement since the anti-Vietnam campus protests of the late 1960s, the conflict between pro-Palestinian students and university administrators has revealed an entire subset of conflicts.

The drone of helicopters over New York’s Washington Square Park on Monday previewed the arrival of the strategic response group (SRG), the New York police department’s specialist counter-terrorism and political protests division, which set about arresting more than 120 New York University students and faculty members who had been circulating on a campus sidewalk to the chant of: “Israel bombs, NYU pays, how many kids have you killed today?”

After several years of semi-seasonal student marches through the city to voice positions on topics from racial justice to global heating to gun control, protests over the Israel-Gaza war are the latest headache for authorities. New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, blamed the NYU protests on “professional agitators”; the university fenced off the square where students customarily gather.

Several days earlier, and more than 100 blocks uptown, Columbia University officials had warned student members of the Gaza Solidarity encampment on the quadrangle of the Ivy League college that while they had a right to protest, they were not allowed “to disrupt campus life or harass and intimidate fellow students”.

But then, contentiously, the SRG was called in. Officers arrested – and later released – more than 100 students, inflaming a larger political debate surrounding the university president, Minouche Shafik, in the job less than a year. Students demanded Shafik resign because she had called the police on to campus – actions that supercharged the spirits of student protest nationally – while accusations of antisemitism have mounted, both against protesters and against Shafik for, her critics say, not sufficiently protecting Jewish students.

Joe Biden joined congressional voices on both sides of the aisle calling the protests “antisemitic”.

The House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, who had just pushed through a $26bn aid package for Israel, came to Columbia on Wednesday to demand that the solidarity encampment be dismantled. “Get off our campus!” one student yelled. “Enjoy your free speech,” Johnson hit back.

At Columbia, some organizers blamed antisemitic rhetoric on outsiders unaffiliated with the university piggybacking on the protesters. “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us,” said Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine. “We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand against non-students attempting to disrupt our solidarity.”

With the end of Columbia’s semester next week, US university officials may be hoping that the protests will die down. But students have said they plan to continue until their demands are met for the school to divest from companies they say profit from Israel’s war, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and to end its partnership with Tel Aviv University.

On Friday, after a deadline for clearing the camp had passed with little progress in negotiations between the protesters and the faculty, Columbia opened up its campus to the press.

Protesters said the university had given loose assurances that police would not be called in to remove them.

But with commencement ceremonies honoring graduating students due to start on 15 May on the same lawn now transformed into a sit-in, they said they would stand by their demands that the university disclose and divest from investments “furthering genocide”, stop further investments and grant amnesty to arrested students who had been thrown out of their dormitories and denied access to the cafeteria.

Majd, a student involved in the campout for the past week, said it had been tense when there was a threat of forcible removal along shifting deadlines. “That’s been kind of exhausting but we’re good now that we know that the school has confirmed there is no more threat of NYPD coming on to the campus.”

As NYU and Columbia protests came off the boil, university campuses across the US picked up the slack: at the University of Texas at Austin, state troopers in riot gear took 34 protesters into custody; at the University of Southern California, officers struggled to break up a protest camp.

The encampment at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which had expanded throughout the week, was the site of a skirmish on Sunday as counter-protesters became increasingly vocal and visible on campus.

The tone turned ugly at around midday when members of two groups of protesters clashed – shoving one another and shouting, and in some cases trading punches.

After the clash, the UCLA campus police department said it had dispatched more officers to the scene, and that city police were not involved. A representative of the campus police said no arrests had been made.

At Yale, university police arrested 45 protesters on Monday. After protesters rejected orders to leave, police charged them with criminal trespassing. That came one day after 14 students ended an eight-day hunger strike designed to pressure the university to divest. At Emory University in Atlanta, police were filmed violently arresting students and faculty.

The New York Times columnist Charles M Blow has suggested that the current atmosphere, given the clear generational divide on the issue of US support for Israel, could summon the ghosts of 1968, when college protests against the Vietnam war spilled into the national political domain, culminating in violent clashes between the national guard and protesters at the Democratic national convention in Chicago.

Antiwar groups are planning large protests at the party’s convention this summer – also in Chicago. Hatem Abudayyeh, head of the US Palestinian Community Network, has said this will be the “most important” convention since the tumult of the late 60s.

Jim Sleeper, a writer and former lecturer at Yale, warned that the protests may be twisted by adults seeking to score political points by weaponizing accusations of antisemitism.

“We have this phenomenon of older people who are ginning this up, playing the antisemitism card,” Sleeper said, “and the same people who were in 2015 complaining about liberal colleges turning students into crybabies are now doing the same thing but about antisemitism.”

Students, he added, may be “romantically valorizing Palestine, but they’re not vicious antisemites”.

A resident undergraduate college is a civil society on training wheels, he pointed out, saying: “The kids are away from home for the first time, feeling adult, testing things out, combining idealism with the politics of moral posturing, and they do that in the safety of these quadrangles. And there are excesses, hurling words at each other, and there’s always an element of dramatization.”

But, Sleeper added, “if you have leaders who are inculcating the right things, then people will agree”.

The historical precedents are becoming more overt. In 1969, Harvard called in the police to clear anti-war protesters, as Columbia had done a year earlier. Both events produced pictures of bruised and bloodied students. In a 1970 incident seared in the US national memory, the national guard at Kent State University in Ohio opened fire on students protesting the war, killing four.

At Yale, on the other hand, President Kingman Brewster, later US ambassador to the UK, sided with the students, refused the police access to the campus, and opened it up to protesters.

Brewster later inflamed the Nixon administration by saying, before the trial of three Black Panthers who had exploded three bombs at the Yale hockey rink, that he was “skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States”. Henry Kissinger reportedly mused that Brewster’s assassination would benefit the country.

Sleeper said that Brewster’s approach worked: “Maybe we’re finding that some university presidents now are not closely enough in touch with their students and could be a little bit more canny and sophisticated in building trust and doing something affirmative.”

Outside Columbia’s main gates on Thursday, campus security and police were refusing entry to non-students and faculty.

One visitor, Saba Gul, 39, who attended MIT in the early 2000s, said that it had once been “completely OK” for universities to be in bed with defense technology industries but that this generation was saying no: “Young students are showing us the power of people. If you’re siding against a national student movement, you are on the wrong side.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced plans to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in the Gaza Strip, which human rights advocates and other experts have warned could amount to genocide.

Speaking to a crowd marking International Workers’ Day in Bogota on Wednesday, Petro said countries cannot be passive in the face of the crisis unfolding in Gaza.

“Here in front of you, the government of change, of the president of the republic, announces that tomorrow we will break diplomatic relations with the state of Israel … for having a government, for having a president who is genocidal,” Petro said.

A left-wing leader who came to power in 2022, Petro is considered part of a progressive wave known as the “pink tide” in Latin America. He has been one of the region’s most vocal critics of Israel since the start of the Gaza war.

In October, just days after the conflict began, Israel said it was “halting security exports” to Colombia after Petro accused Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant of using language similar to what the “Nazis said of the Jews”.

Gallant said the country was fighting “human animals” in Gaza, as he ordered a total siege of the territory following the deadly attacks on southern Israel on October 7.

A month later, Petro accused Israel of committing “genocide” in the besieged Palestinian enclave, drawing more ire from Israeli officials and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

And in February, Colombia suspended Israeli weapons purchases after Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians scrambling for food aid in Gaza — an event Petro said “recalls the Holocaust”.

The Colombian president’s comments on Wednesday come amid growing concerns about a possible Israeli ground offensive into the southern city of Rafah, which United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said would mark an “unbearable escalation”.

More than 34,500 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip to date, and the enclave faces a continued humanitarian crisis, with experts warning of famine.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government about Colombia’s plans to cut diplomatic ties with the country.

Meanwhile, in early April, the Colombian government requested to join a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide.

“Colombia’s ultimate goal in this endeavour is to ensure the urgent and fullest possible protection for Palestinians in Gaza, in particular such vulnerable populations as women, children, persons with disabilities and the elderly,” the country said.

The UN’s top court ruled in January that Palestinians faced a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to prevent any such acts.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese also said in late March that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.

“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” Albanese said in a report.

Israel has denied accusations of genocide, calling Albanese’s report an “obscene inversion of reality”.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

McDonald’s reported a modest increase in quarterly profits on Tuesday despite a boycott stemming from Israel’s deadly war in Gaza expected to drag on sales for the foreseeable future.

While the boycott is not “getting worse,” Chief Executive Chris Kempczinski does not have a timeframe for a return to normal conditions.

“We’re not expecting to see any meaningful improvement in the impact until the war is over,” he told analysts on a conference call.

Sales of McDonald’s were dented after its Israel franchise in October announced it had given thousands of free meals to the Israeli army.

That move was followed by relief pledges to Gaza from McDonald’s Kuwait and McDonald’s Qatar, both of which are managed separately from the Israeli business.

Most McDonald’s restaurants in the Middle East are operated under a franchise agreement in which the corporate parent does not invest capital, McDonald’s said in a securities filing.

Earlier this month, McDonald’s agreed to acquire Alonyal, which has over 30 years built the McDonald’s brand to 225 restaurants in Israel, employing more than 5,000 people.

McDonald’s has described the boycott’s greatest impact as in the Middle East, while also pointing to effects in markets like Malaysia and Indonesia and in parts of France where the Muslim population is higher.

The big fast-food chain experienced a dip in comparable sales in “International Developmental Licensed Markets,” which comprises emerging markets.

“The continued impact of the war in the Middle East more than offset positive comparable sales in Japan, Latin America and Europe,” McDonald’s said of the division.

Overall, profits in the first quarter rose seven percent to $1.9 billion on a five percent increase in revenues to $6.2 billion.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, while companies tied to the country have seen global boycotts against them, including Starbucks.

The chain scored higher comparable sales in the United States – where results were boosted by “strategic” price increases – and in the “International Operated Markets” division, where gains in Britain and Germany compensated for negative sales in France.

Chief Financial officer Ian Borden said sales in the United States and in many other large markets will probably be “below” the historical range in 2024 due to the cumulative effects of inflation on customers.

“Affordability is clearly an area where consumer expectations are heightened,” Borden said. “Obviously (consumers) are getting hit across their full basket of goods and services by all the inflationary impacts.”

(Source: The New Arab)