A wildfire of campus protests is raging across American universities as an unprecedented student uprising condemns Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Demonstrations have exploded from coast to coast, with hundreds of arrests and no signs of this unrest smoldering out.
At the heart burns Columbia University, the insurgency’s crackling epicenter. Protesters have planted their flag, vowing to dig in their encampment until administrators buckle under their demands to sever all ties with the Israeli academic world and strip any funds linked to the Jewish state. It’s a revolutionary stance mirrored at occupation camps stretching nationwide.
“We’re in this for the long haul until Columbia makes the moral choice,” says pro-Palestinian organizer Sara Abunimer, her voice straining over the chants echoing across campus. “No more complicity in oppressing the Palestinian people!”
But just whose side is moral? This conflagration has united Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Americans, all drawn by Molotov cocktails of conviction over gut-wrenching violence half a world away. Each believes their truth must spark change at the institutional level.
For university leaders, it’s a powder keg contained by a thin veneer of order. Responding with either chaos or restraint, they’re united only in struggling to extinguish these insatiable flames of protest.
At Southern California, some 100 arrests gave way to canceling their commencement ceremony over “new safety measures.” In Georgia, Emory University protesters endured blitzes of pepper balls that sparked outcry from lawmakers against “excessive force.”
In Boston, well over 100 cuffed at Emerson College after their own occupation. And a trickle of encampments keep flaring up – UCLA’s ignited Thursday, with Northeastern University’s inspired a resolute human chain blockade.
“This movement grows louder with each blast of apathy from administrators turning a blind eye,” defies Layla Kardan, a senior protesting at Northeastern. “Palestinian cries can no longer be smothered or snuffed out.”
As images of searing violence proliferate from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, America’s academic fabric now risks going up in smoke too. Each side senses an existential urgency to their cause, pouring gasoline on dimming hopes for a ceasefire.
Columbia’s faculty senate is poised to strike back against their president’s crackdown on demonstrators. Threatening disciplinary purges, Brown University identified 130 students accused of bucking protocol in its anarchy. Everywhere, cries of injustice and free speech fan the embers burning here at home.
With neither side blinking, this nationwide student insurrection has all the combustible elements to keep raging. Dousing its revolutionary spark may prove infinitely more complex than the Middle Eastern crisis driving these impassioned campus protests.
