Precisely 56 years to the day after the 1968 pupil occupation at Columbia College was violently cleared by the New York Police Division, lots of of law enforcement officials moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday night time to quell a distinct form of antiwar protest.
Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had been arrested as law enforcement officials entered Columbia’s fundamental campus, which was on lockdown, and cleared Hamilton Corridor of a gaggle who had damaged in and occupied it the night time earlier than.
It was a dizzying and, to many college students and school, disturbing 24 hours on campus.
Final time, college students had been protesting the Vietnam Battle and Columbia’s plans to develop its campus into Harlem. This time, college students had been protesting the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has killed about 34,000 individuals, in accordance with well being officers there, and making an attempt to drive the college to divest from firms with ties to Israel.
However the college students’ ways had been the identical: By escalating their protest to the purpose the place the college was unable to perform, college students pressured the hand of directors, who introduced within the police to arrest them. Each occasions, the scholars had occupied Hamilton Corridor.
The handfuls of arrests on Tuesday had been the end result of two weeks of intense turmoil on Columbia’s campus.
Tensions over pro-Palestinian demonstrations had been already excessive when Nemat Shafik, the Columbia College president, went to Washington, D.C., to testify earlier than a congressional committee on April 17 about antisemitism on campus. Then, whereas she was in Washington, a gaggle of pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrange a big tent encampment in entrance of Butler Library on the college’s fundamental quad to demand that the college divest from Israel.
They labeled the world their Gaza Solidarity Encampment and declared it a liberated zone, instantly quoting the 1968 protests.
Dr. Shafik, nonetheless in Washington, declared in a letter to the police the subsequent day that these protests had been “a transparent and current hazard to the substantial functioning of the College,” although by all accounts, the encampment had been nonviolent.
As lots of of scholars and different onlookers watched and rallied in help of the encampment, rows of law enforcement officials in riot gear entered campus simply after 1 p.m. At the very least 108 college students had been arrested. However a number of the lots of of supporters who remained merely moved to the subsequent garden and began a brand new encampment.
Practically two weeks later, on Monday, a faction of the protesters determined to escalate issues additional, after a breakdown in negotiations with Columbia and because the college started to droop college students who had not cleared the encampment by a day deadline.
That night time, the coed protesters from the encampment, fortified by lots of of different pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had arrived late that night, divided into teams. One group went to Hamilton Corridor.
The coalition organizing the encampment, Columbia College Apartheid Divest, stated the occupiers had been an “autonomous subgroup” made up of “college students who felt betrayed by the college and their stubbornness to interact in negotiations,” stated Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator for the coed coalition.
About 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, protesters smashed a window to realize entry to Hamilton Corridor and piled up barricades to dam the doorways. A crowd of scholars cheered. The protesters unfurled a banner renaming the constructing “Hind’s Corridor” in honor of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian lady who was killed in Israel’s struggle in opposition to Hamas in Gaza.
About 12 hours handed with the campus in close to full lockdown. Then, at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams held a information convention with prime police officers and stated the police believed that the takeover of the campus constructing was most certainly the results of steerage from “skilled exterior agitators.”
“We’re seeing the ways altering in a approach that’s endangering public security,” stated the police commissioner, Edward Caban. Mayor Adams added that protesters ought to depart earlier than the state of affairs on campus escalated. “This should finish now.”
Final Friday, Dr. Shafik had stated it might be counterproductive to deliver the police again to campus, given how doing so had solely led to extra protests, each at Columbia and on campuses across the nation. However inside an hour of Mayor Adams’s announcement, massive clusters of law enforcement officials in riot gear and with plastic handcuffs on their belts started massing exterior the college gates.
A whole bunch of officers started getting into the campus simply after 9 p.m. From the dorms above, there have been screams of “Disgrace on you!”
Contained in the campus gates, the police cut up into two teams. One group encircled the primary encampment on the West Garden, the place greater than 100 tents remained, looking every tent with flashlights. The opposite group headed towards Hamilton Corridor. “Go to dorms or depart the premises,” the police informed bystanders on campus, blocking most from viewing the raid.
Outdoors the campus, law enforcement officials had pulled a truck alongside Hamilton Corridor and prolonged a ladder to a second-story window. About 9:30 p.m., a column of about 30 officers started crossing the ladder and climbing into the constructing via a window.
Inside about 10 minutes, officers introduced the primary pupil to the campus gates, the coed’s fingers certain with plastic ties.
It was unclear what had occurred contained in the constructing, however college students who had been arrested filed away from campus and had been loaded onto buses with out resistance. There have been preliminary experiences of some police violence in opposition to college students simply exterior the constructing that would not instantly be verified.
By about 10 p.m., the operation was winding down. Officers eliminated banners studying “Scholar Intifada” and “Free Palestine” that had held on the constructing’s exterior.
Dr. Shafik stated in a press release: “We remorse that protesters have chosen to escalate the state of affairs via their actions. After the college realized in a single day that Hamilton Corridor had been occupied, vandalized and blockaded, we had been left with no selection.”
She stated that Columbia public security personnel had been pressured out of the constructing in the course of the occupation and {that a} member of the college’s services workers had been threatened. “We won’t danger the protection of our group or the potential for additional escalation,” she stated.
The college, she stated, had decided by the morning that this was a legislation enforcement matter, and echoing the police, she stated that she believed “the group that broke into and occupied the constructing is led by people who aren’t affiliated with the college.”
She and police officers didn’t specify who these people had been.
Columbia’s commencement is scheduled for Could 15, and Dr. Shafik has stated she doesn’t need pupil protesters to escalate their actions a 3rd time. To discourage them, she included a further request in her letter to the police on Tuesday asking them to “retain a presence on campus via at the least Could 17, 2024, to keep up order and guarantee encampments aren’t reestablished.”
Olivia Bensimon, Karla Marie Sanford, Eryn Davis, Maia Coleman, Anna Betts, and Connor Michael Greene contributed reporting.
