More than half of US states join campus movement

Ordinary people from all over the world are increasingly demanding that Israel be completely isolated. Students in the United States have taken action, through the encampment movement, in an attempt to force their universities to sever any links with the Zionist entity.

The student protests have spread and been repelled with excessive force being deployed by the authorities in response to these peaceful demonstrations.

On April 17, at four in the morning, anti-genocide protesters boldly infiltrated the campus at Columbia University on New York’s Upper West Side. They pitched protest tents and declared that the university must divest from Israel, ending its complicity in the genocide in Gaza.,

This was not the first student action over Gaza, as campuses all over the world have seen protests since the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, but the encampment lit a fuse that ignited action all over the US and indeed internationally, including Columbia.

Encampments sprang out at five university campuses in New York alone with protests at dozens of campuses and encampments on campuses at more than half of all US states.

The aim of all the protests is to demand divestment from the Zionist entity, including, through shared ownership and investments, research links to arms firms complicit in genocide, and links to Zionist universities in occupied Palestine.

At Columbia, the NYPD were called in after only a day of protest. By the end of the month, an attempt to clear the students altogether led them to escalate the protest and to occupy the symbolically important Hamilton Hall.

This was the same building occupied by students protesting the Vietnam War in 1968, and those protesting the apartheid system in South Africa in 1985.

The students immediately renamed it to Hind’s Hall in commemoration of the young six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was murdered by the occupation forces alongside family members in a destroyed car in Gaza mere days after she had called emergency services begging to be rescued.