Students are out for Palestine, dramatically in the form of the encampments at universities across not only in the US but across the world. These encampments are part of an international wave of solidarity with Palestine, opposing genocidal attacks by the Israeli state. They have also helped spark signs of workers’ political action.
The student occupations have already won some partial demands. However, these struggles don’t come about without pushback from those who seek to defend the status quo. This comes from campus administrations and police, but also from far-right thugs and Zionists who seek to defend Israel’s aggression and bombardment of the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
Attacks at UCLA
The encampments spread rapidly after police were called into Columbia University on April 30. Much attention has been paid to the University of California system, which has been at the sharp end of repression and shown some of the most advanced resistance. The UCLA encampment was faced with a violent nighttime attack, which university leadership, campus security, and police ignored for hours. Two days later, the police attacked the encampment themselves.
As Robin D.G. Kelly wrote in the Boston Review:
Between April 25 and May 2, UCLA experienced the worst episode of both anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian/Islamophobic/racist violence in the university’s century-long history. White nationalists and neo-Nazis joined forces with Zionists (including some saying they were Israelis) to attack UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, whose residents included a large number of Jewish students. The assailants were not affiliated with the university. One neo-Nazi was heard shouting, “we’re here to finish what Hitler started,” without any apparent protest from the self-identified Zionists. At least one person present has been identified as an associate of the Proud Boys.
On the night of April 30, the assailants chanted “USA, USA” and played the Israeli national anthem while kicking and punching students, swinging wooden planks, macing people, and shooting fireworks into the encampment. Students behind barricades managed to defend their tents that night, despite at least 15 being injured. This violence happened without intervention from the university. Meanwhile, there have been numerous reports of harassment and brutality from the LAPD against students of UCLA, some involving such innocuous activities and chalked slogans on the sidewalk showing Palestine solidarity.
On May 2, police entered UCLA in full riot gear, using flash bangs, rubber bullets, batons and tear gas (in probable violation of Assembly Bill 48 on use of less-lethal weapons). Students resisted for hours but the police finally brought down the encampment with arrests of 210 people. The UCLA student newspaper the Daily Bruin reports that a medic the night of the police sweep “said they evaluated over a dozen students for rubber bullet injuries.”
This violence has deepened many students’ resolve and the camp was reestablished a few weeks later in response to constant police harassment against them on school grounds while protesting their tuition money going to a genocidal regime hellbent on the destruction of Palestinian people.
On May 15, United Auto Workers (UAW) local 4811 that representing University of California academic student employees, graduate students, and academic and postdoctoral researchers voted to authorize a strike, citing the deployment of riot police on campuses and the “unchecked violence” in the demolishment of the UCLA encampment as an unfair labor practice. At the time of writing, they have struck at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and UCLA, with San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Irvine to join the “stand up strike” the first week of June.
Attacks in Arizona
Similar violent events have happened in the Phoenix area and Tucson, Arizona where administration members have harassed women of color and police have violently taken down peaceful encampment occupations. They beat students and academic workers then arrested them for peacefully protesting. Students complained that they pay tuition and have had access to use these areas as they see fit, including to protest. Jonathan Yudelman, a former postdoctoral researcher and economics professor at Arizona State University (ASU) was rightfully fired for the verbal harassment and assault of a woman of color wearing a hijab on campus grounds just trying to pass through, not even involved with the protests or ASU encampment.
I myself witnessed the destruction of the University of Arizona (U of A) encampment in Tucson where I was protesting with others in solidarity for Palestine and showing solidarity to the U of A students and academic workers in their encampment. They were violently raided by the Tucson Police Department (TPD) and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) at 4am on May 1. Cops fired pepper balls and tear gas at protesters to clear the encampment.
Alongside the TPD and PCSD were numerous pro-Israel spectators heckling the encamping protestors, calling them numerous derogatory names, and even yelling slurs at many trans activists on the scene. Students have speculated that some of them are frat boys at U of A, and some could be neo-Nazi, but they have not been identified yet. What is primarily important is the fact these events happened in response and reaction to the rise of student and working class militancy against the status quo. Six people were arrested at U of A, 24 at Northern University at Flagstaff, and 72 at Arizona State at Tempe.
Attacks around the country
There have been similar scenes around the country. At the University of Texas at Austin in April, state troopers, some on horseback and others marching in military uniform, entered the campus to intimidate a student walkout and protest for divestment. They arrested 57, but had to later drop the charges. The next week, Austin police and state troopers in riot gear dragged dozens of students from a new encampment, knocked a disabled person from their wheelchair, and used pepper spray and flash bangs against a crowd of supporters, arresting another 79.
When Columbia students started a second occupation at Hamilton Hall (now Hind Hall) they immediately faced brutality by the NYPD. “They kicked us in the chest, in the guts, in the head, in the face. multiple people have concussions, lacerations, broken ankles,” related one student. At the same time, 173 were arrested as officers shoved and pulled people to the ground in clearing the largely minority campus at City College of New York. The NYPD also made a show of throwing Palestinian flag to the ground, and re-raising the US flag.
Multiple students were injured during violent overnight arrests of over 100 from the encampment at Emerson College in Boston. At the Emory University encampment in Georgia, 28 were arrested in a violent operation by police, using a chemical irritant, tasers, and reportedly rubber bullets. Protesters and students spotted and photographed snipers on the roof of buildings pointing at crowds at Ohio State University and Indiana University Bloomington.
The chair of philosophy at Emory, Noëlle McAfee, was herself arrested when she objected to a 20 year old student being repeatedly “pummeled” by Georgia police. Dartmouth history professor and former head of Jewish studies Annelise Orleck was knocked to the ground and arrested while she stood with other faculty concerned about the 90 student protestors arrested there.
A review by the Marshall Project reports that “Police have frequently used aggressive and militarized tactics in arresting nearly 3,000 people tied to the pro-Palestinian protests” and that “some protesters have reported stitches, broken bones, and concussions from interactions with police.”
Violence by — increasingly militarized — police forces is nothing new in the United States. Yet activists familiar with the waves of student activism over decades will recognize this level of repression and use of police on campuses is a real escalation. It is partly a reflection of the real impact our movement is having, but also presents a real danger. It takes place in the context of a “new McCarthyism” around Palestine on campuses resulting in student suspensions and firing of professors for what had been recognized as protected speech.
Read Part II of this article here, which looks at why this level of violence is occurring now, where it comes from, and its wider context.
By Nathaniel Hort in Arizona, with additional reporting from Eric Fretz in New York and Clare Fester in Los Angeles.
Marx21 US 