In today’s newsletter: As Columbia makes headlines for its crackdown, with the help of the NYPD, on academics protesting the war in Gaza, Professor Bassam Khawaja explains how discontent has grown.
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You could say it’s simply student politics: an organization of college students organizing campus protests, making demands on university administrators, and registering a futile objection to a distant crisis. Why might anyone else be interested?
But the protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza that rocked Columbia University in New York are increasingly hard to ignore, reminiscent of some of the 1968 anti-Vietnam War protests. They have sparked a wave of similar protests across the United States, and now even in the United Kingdom. They drew attention to the U. S. reach for Israel and gave credence to claims that university leaders pay more attention to hostile Republicans than to their own academics and professors.
On Tuesday night, police arrested another 119 people in Columbia and counterprotesters launched a violent attack on a pro-Palestinian camp at the University of California, Los Angeles. On Wednesday, police began operations to dismantle protests in New York, Texas. , Wisconsin, Louisiana and Arizona, and a few minutes ago, reports indicated that a bunch of equipped police surrounded the UCLA camp.
All of this suggests that U. S. school campuses are now the scene of a primary about loose speech and the war in Gaza, which will only intensify. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Bassam Khawaja, a human rights lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School, about why he supports the protests, what they seek to achieve, and how they have escalated to a crisis point. Here are the titles.
On the orders of their commander, the police set out. They drove hard. Very hard. They move quickly, as fast as their volume and apparatus allow, maximizing their momentum. The police use waist-high metal barriers, like plows, to push protesters back and them into side streets and in front of walls. . .
The static scene. But it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t say that my abdomen turned when I looked at it. The sheer force of movement, the relentless, sudden thrust of the metal barrier opposite human bodies, moved the air.