NEWS ANALYSIS: PROTESTS, STARTED BY STUDENTS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, HAVE GROWN IN SPITE OF POLICE REPRESSION. WHAT COMES NEXT?

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NEWS ANALYSIS

The pro-Palestinian protests ignited by students at Columbia University in New York City four weeks ago now include at least 183 schools on four continents. 

Already they've changed the 2024 US presidential campaign by undermining Pres. Joe Biden's bid for re-election, impacted foreign policy by causing an ugly public split between Israel and the U.S. over Israel's plan to invade the Palestinian City of Rafah and resulted in mass-arrests of protesters on college campuses on a scale not seen since protests in the 1960s.

Public officials and school administrators in the United States have largely responded to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations by treating them like criminal acts. They've unleashed police on more than 100 campuses in 39 states plus the District of Columbia. About 2,900 pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested as of May 7, according to a tracker published by criminal justice news blog The Appeal.

In New York City alone, at least 828 pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested since Apr. 18—when the nationwide crackdown began with the NYPD arresting 108 Columbia students, according to a Free Lance tally of arrests. It's cost the City an extra $53 million in NYPD overtime to police pro-Palestinian protests since Jan. 1, Deirdre Snyder, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Management and Budget, told the City Council on May 9.

Not all the student protests have been ended by police force. For example, protests were allowed at Vanderbilt and Cornell.

The Columbia students, like all the student-led protests nationwide, demanded their school divest from Israel. They parked their Occupy Wall Street-style protest camp on their school's quad in upper Manhattan, smack dab in front of its iconic Low Library steps, where the main graduation is ordinarily held—but not this year.

The protests at Columbia escalated largely because Columbia's president, the Egyptian-born Nemat Shafik, mismanaged them. 

Instead of bogging down the student initiative in long, endless "negotiations" or other bureaucratic maneuvering, she publicly declared unequivocally that the school "would not divest from Israel" in a Apr. 29 news release. The defiant move was akin to pouring gasoline on a fire. 

What happened next was entirely foreseeable and predictable.

Some of the students—joined by a handful of veteran activists—moved their protest inside: into one of Columbia's buildings on the other side of the quad from the original protest camp. The campus building they seized, Hamilton Hall, was also seized by students protesting against American intervention in Vietnam's civil war in 1968 and students protesting against South Africa's racist Apartheid government in 1985 and 1992.

"This escalation represents the next generation of the 1968, 1985 and 1992 student movements which Columbia once repressed yet celebrates today," protesters said in their own news release, published on social media.

Officials escalated again. Pres. Shafik summoned the NYPD back to campus. This time to break into the barricaded building and arrest the protesters inside. This time the NYPD sent SWAT teams in through a second-story window. They even fired a shot, allegedly by accident, and threw a flash-bang grenade—not by accident—at the protesters.

Then they took a victory lap on social media by posting videos of their dangerous escapades—as if they'd collared real, armed criminals. 

In effect, the NYPD endangered kids' lives to make a TikTok video.

In addition to being beaten with batons and falsely arrested, police have rammed motorcycles into pro-Palestinian student protesters. Protesters have also been tazed, tear-gassed, shot with pepperball guns and even denied police protection from violent pro-Israeli counter-protesters. Police on Long Island kept the mobile phones of students arrested for protesting at a state college there. 

Public officials and police have sought to deflect blame for inflicting violence on largely peaceful protesters by accusing unnammed "outside agitators" of fomenting dissent. The truth is, the students need more collaboration with veteran activists to avoid the mistakes all young protest movements can make.

The real "outside agitators" were Congress and elected officials who pressured school officials to clamp down. Some, like New York City mayor Eric Adams, exploited the protests in a cynical attempt to raise their public profiles by calling to "restore order." Instead of listening to the students' demands, negotiating and working towards compromise, they gagged and arrested them. 

The worst of these would-be dictators were Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark) who demanded the National Guard should be deployed. Hawley called the protest at Columbia “a days long, illegal pro-Hamas demonstration.”

To lend legitimacy to authoritarian repression of legitimate political dissent and discourage more people from joining the protests, public officials and cultural powerbrokers beholden to Israel branded criticism of Israel "anti-Semitic."

For example, the proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2023 would require federal officials to adopt a vague and broad definition of anti-Semitism that would allow school officials to ban criticism of Zionism—the name of the century-old political movement calling for Jews to live in a country where they amount to a majority of the population and control the government.

At the same time, Israel and its defenders flood sympathetic news media publishers and broadcasters with atrocity propaganda. On social media, influences like actor Michael Rappaport do the same. Rappaport has even repeated anti-Semitic tropes as offensive weapons in an attempt to silence opposition. While pro-Palestinian voices and viewpoints are suppressed on social media, Rappaport's militant pro-Israel videos seemingly evade censorship.

Even Democratic Pres. Joe Biden used his bully pulpit to denounce the wave of pro-Palestinian protests, branding them a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in a speech at the US Capitol to remember victims of the Holocaust on May 7.

Instead of focusing on the ongoing mass-murder of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, funded with American dollars and facilitated by American-made bombs, the entire ruling socio-political establishment in the US—Democrats and Republicans—is focused on the feelings of the people doing the killing, Israel and its supporters, instead of the people now being killed by the score.

There are exceptions, and bright spots. 

Union Theological College, a partner with Columbia, voted to divest on May 9. Trinity College Cambridge, the University of Cambridge's wealthiest constituent college, also voted to divest from arms companies. The United Methodist Church voted to divest. Brown University agreed to hold a vote on whether to divest.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) charged Israel was committing "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians. Rapper Macklemore dropped a surprise protest anthem. The US Government's own lawyers told Pres. Biden to stop bankrolling bombs to Israel—or be charged with war crimes.  And the United Nations General Assembly voted to let Palestine enter as an independent state. Symbolic, but also significant.

Most surprising of all, a Conservative Supreme Court justice went renegade and spoke out to defend the protesters.

“Support for freedom of speech is declining dangerously, especially where it should find deepest acceptance,” Justice Samuel Alito said during a commencement speech at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio on Saturday. A university, he said, should be “a place for reasoned debate.” But “today, very few colleges live up to that ideal.”

“Go out boldly and change the world,” Justice Alito added.

Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, more than 35,000 of its pre-war estimated population of 2.3 million have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militia led by Hamas launched a cross-border raid into Israel. They killed about 1,200 Israelies and kidnapped another 200 to hold as hostages.

Most of the Palestinian civilians killed by Israel have been women and children. Only about 15,000 were combatants. Countless more are entombed in rubble. Another 78,000 have been wounded. Children are orphans. People are starving, to death. 

The war between Israel and the Palestinians over the land both claim for their homeland goes back at least 76 years to 1947. That's when Israel declared independence. The Israeli Declaration of Independence lays claim to all the land in "Eretz-Israel." That includes the West Bank and Gaza.  

Palestinians call the founding of Israel the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. That's because about 700,000—a majority of the prewar population—fled or were driven from their homes by the Israeli military or armed Zionist militia during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed. Israel refused to allow them to return after the war because it would have created a Palestinian majority within Israel's borders. 

In 1967, Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. 

Since then, the Palestinians living in the West Bank have been subject to military occupation while Israel steadily increases both the number of settlements and settlers. Some Palestinians remain inside Israel and are Israeli citizens but these are subject to racist discrimination and Apartheid-like segregation—so much so that the US Government recognizes it by regularly granting immigration waivers to Palestinian scholars. 

One of them even teaches at Columbia.

Israel withdrew its military forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005. Instead of integrating the Palestinians into Israel, Israel built a wall around Gaza and enforced a naval blockade on its Mediterranean side. Two years later, Hamas fairly won election—an election Pres. George W. Bush insisted take place. 

Combined with strict border control by Egypt, Israel effectively turned Gaza into an open-air prison. What Israel doesn't let in, has to be smuggled in. Palestinians in Gaza swore resistance. They took up arms, rebelled and waged an insurgency against Israel. Until the Oct. 7 cross-border raid, the Palestinians' main weapons were rockets—alaunched from Gaza into Israel. 

Israel has been led for 17 of the last 28 years by its current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. "Moving the grass" is what military strategists call Netanyahu's strategy for dealing with the Palestinians. Broadly stated, it means that when the Palestinians attack, Israel kills as many "terrorists" including civilian noncombatants as it can before international pressure stops it.

This time, Israel hasn't stopped. 

Pres. Biden finally withheld a shipment of American bombs when, fearing a massacre, Prime Minister Netanyahu insisted Israel's army would invade the City of Rafah—where most of the survivors of Israel's onslaught have taken shelter. 

Israel was defiant and promised to invade Rafah anyway.

"If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone," Netanyahu declared in response.

The Israeli Prime Minister has successfully trapped the American president in a Catch 22. Whatever Pres. Biden does, it benefits Israel. Biden's damned to risk losing enough Democrat votes to lose re-election if he does provide more bombs to Israel, but he's also damned by Republicans and risks losing Jewish support for not just him but for Democrats in general if he does not. 

A second Trump presidency would be better for Israel than a second Biden term. 

Mort Klein, President of America's oldest Zionist organization, accused Pres. Biden of helping fund Hamas's Oct. 7 attack.

"We helped fund Hamas by funding Iran. Biden has been a disgrace as a president," Klein told The Free Lance on Monday. "He has helped fund terrorism."

Does Pres. Biden see the trap he’s caught in? How will he get himself out of it?

Perversely, the more Palestinians Israel kills, the greater the likelihood Biden loses—given all the protests. 

Those protests continued over the weekend at college commencement ceremonies nationwide. 

At Duke, dozens of students walked out on a speech by comedian Jerry Seinfeld—whose wife funded counter-protests that resulted in attacks on pro-Palestinians protesters. They also walked out at Virginia Commonwealth University on Gov. Glenn Youngkin—who set police on them. 

On the other side of the country, 100s of students about to graduate the University of California, Berkeley chanted a phrase condemned as anti-Semitism by supporters of Israel: "Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!"

All the pressure seems to have at least slowed Israel’s war machine, for now.

In response to Pres. Biden’s pausing of big bombs and artillery shells to Israel, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote this week on the Israel Security Assistance Support Act. The Act condemns Pres. Biden’s decision to pause that shipment of weapons and requires  their “expeditious delivery” to Israel. 

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House “strongly, strongly" opposes the bill on Monday. 

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