Precisely 56 years to the day after the 1968 pupil occupation at Columbia College was violently cleared by the New York Police Division, a whole bunch of law enforcement officials moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday evening 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 bunch who had damaged in and occupied it the evening 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 Warfare and Columbia’s plans to increase its campus into Harlem. This time, college students had been protesting the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has killed about 34,000 folks, in keeping with well being officers there, and making an attempt to power 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 operate, college students compelled the hand of directors, who introduced within the police to arrest them. Each instances, the scholars had occupied Hamilton Corridor.
The handfuls of arrests on Tuesday had been the fruits 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 bunch 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 realm 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 following 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 a whole bunch 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. Not less than 108 college students had been arrested. However a few of the a whole bunch of supporters who remained merely moved to the following 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 evening, the scholar protesters from the encampment, fortified by a whole bunch 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, mentioned the occupiers had been an “autonomous subgroup” made up of “college students who felt betrayed by the college and their stubbornness to have interaction in negotiations,” mentioned Mahmoud Khalil, a lead negotiator for the scholar coalition.
About 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, protesters smashed a window to achieve 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 woman who was killed in Israel’s struggle towards 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 news conference with high police officers and mentioned the police believed that the takeover of the campus constructing was most probably the results of steerage from “skilled outdoors agitators.”
“We’re seeing the ways altering in a method that’s endangering public security,” mentioned the police commissioner, Edward Caban. Mayor Adams added that protesters ought to go away earlier than the state of affairs on campus escalated. “This should finish now.”
Final Friday, Dr. Shafik had mentioned it will be counterproductive to carry 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 outdoors the college gates.
A whole lot of officers started coming 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 principle 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 go away the premises,” the police informed bystanders on campus, blocking most from viewing the raid.
Exterior 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 scholar’s arms sure 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 towards college students simply outdoors 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 mentioned in an announcement: “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 mentioned that Columbia public security personnel had been compelled out of the constructing throughout the occupation and {that a} member of the college’s amenities workers had been threatened. “We won’t danger the protection of our neighborhood or the potential for additional escalation,” she mentioned.
The college, she mentioned, had decided by the morning that this was a legislation enforcement matter, and echoing the police, she mentioned that she believed “the group that broke into and occupied the constructing is led by people who usually are not 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 mentioned 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 take care of order and guarantee encampments usually are not reestablished.”
Olivia Bensimon, Karla Marie Sanford, Eryn Davis, Maia Coleman, Anna Betts, and Connor Michael Greene contributed reporting.