War in Gaza once again inflames American universities

The war in Gaza is once again inflaming U.S. universities, where pro-Palestinian protests are gaining strength as the Israeli offensive continues with no immediate ceasefire in sight. Around 100 students were detained last week at Columbia University in New York; on Monday, police arrested at least 47 people at Yale, in actions that university officials have justified as the result of a difficult balance between freedom of expression, toughness against anti-Semitism, and the need to guarantee the security of all students. With the campus encampments and confinement of students extending as the celebrations for the Jewish Passover began this Monday, the White House itself issued a statement to comment on the matter.

At Yale, protesters gathered in tents in one of the central squares of the campus for four days, and blocked traffic on Monday to demand that this elite university divest from the military industry and companies that benefit from the war in the Gaza Strip. According to the university newspaper Yale Daily News, the police arrested more than 47 people, including students, professors, and other people not related to the institution.

At Columbia, tempers were still hot following the incidents of last Thursday, when more than 100 people were detained at a similar protest. It was the first time that the police had entered the campus of the elite university to arrest students since 1968, in the midst of protests against the Vietnam War. The university has suspended several of the arrested students.

On Monday, Columbia also canceled its in-person classes and moved lectures online, while recommending students not residing in the campus residences stay away for safety reasons. After noon, a group of faculty members demonstrated to protest against the arrests and demand that the university readmit suspended students.

Columbia University President Minouche Safik sent a message to the institution’s staff and students saying she was “deeply saddened by what is happening on our campus [...] The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days.”

Similar protests are taking place at other prestigious universities across the country, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Emerson, Tufts, Brown and Stanford, on the West Coast. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, dozens of students gathered at The Diagonal, the center of the campus, to protest. At New York University, dozens of students barricaded themselves in tents in Gould Plaza, in front of their Business School: “America sponsors genocide,” “Stop all aid to Israel,” read their banners in images distributed on social media.

At Harvard, administrators were planning to keep the Yard closed throughout the week and warned its students against any temptation to gather to protest.

Protests at American universities are not new. Since the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, in which nearly 1,200 people died, and the beginning of the war in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians according to Gaza health authorities, demonstrations have taken place with more or less intensity.

The demonstrations, followed closely by Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, have triggered appearances in Congress by several of the presidents of major universities, including Safik herself. One of these addresses, by administrators from the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Harvard, cited by the Education Committee of the House of Representatives, aroused strong controversy when, in response to a question from hardline Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, they avoided specifying whether they would take action against students who used anti-Semitic language. The controversy grew for days until it triggered the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.

The police charge against Columbia students last week has given new impetus to the protests that were already underway, and unleashed new ones where they had not yet occurred or had died out over time.

Now it is Columbia President Safik who finds herself in the eye of the storm. On the one hand, progressive groups are criticizing her reaction on Thursday. On the other, the hard wing of the Republican party, which has a long history of confrontations and suspicions towards university presidents they consider to be excessively liberal, accuses her of permissiveness against anti-Semitism. The 10 Republican representatives from New York, led by Stefanik, an ally of former president Donald Trump, have signed a statement demanding Safik’s resignation.

The protests, which have also attracted participants unrelated to universities, have tested the balance between the desire to defend freedom of speech and the obligation to create a space in which all students and workers can feel safe, administrators say. Some Jewish students claim that they no longer feel safe on their campuses and that incidents and feelings of anti-Semitism are on the rise. The White House itself issued a statement on Sunday condemning incidents of anti-Semitism.

But participants point out that many of the protesters are Jewish themselves. “Columbia students organizing in solidarity with Palestine — including Jewish students — have faced harassment, doxxing, and now arrest by the NYPD. These are the main threats to the safety of Jewish Columbia students,” Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD student, told CNN. “Saying that student protesters are a threat to Jewish students is a dangerous smear.”