COMMUNIQUE #7

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Columbia University unleased the NYPD to crush a pro-Palestinian protest on the lawn of its main campus today, April 18, 2024. The students were protesting against Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian land, its Apartheid-like oppression of Palestinian citizens within Israel and their school’s investments in Israel.

The Ivy League school’s action was not the first time its responded to peaceful protest with an anti-Democratic, anti-academic exercise of power.

The 1968 Columbia Student Revolt ignited that spring when students discovered their school was supporting American military intervention in the Vietnam Civil War. There was also controversy over a segregated gymnasium to be constructed in nearby Morningside Park.

Students occupied university buildings in protest, until their school asked the NYPD to remove them by force. Here’s how protesters themselves saw the revolt, as told in the pages of The Movement, the official magazine of one of the group’s that help organize the protests, Students for a Democratic Society.