NYPD officers make arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the lawn of Columbia University on April 18, 2024, in Manhattan, New York.On Thursday, April 18, a swarm of NYPD officers in riot gear arrested 108 students at Columbia University in an attempt to dismantle an encampment of student protesters demanding Columbia’s full financial and academic divestment from Israel.
The protest encampment sprang up early in the morning on April 17, when some two dozen Columbia University students flooded the campus’s Butler Lawn under cover of darkness, stealthily erecting 60 tents in less than half an hour. Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were suspended by the university in November; currently, the New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal are suing the university for these groups to be reinstated. On January 22, at a pro-Palestine rally in front of Columbia’s Low Memorial Library, two pro-Israel students attacked protesters with a putrid chemical spray, resulting in eight hospitalizations.
Iqbal, who is Muslim, described being followed by NYPD’s counterterrorism unit from a rally at Columbia’s campus to Washington Square Park in February. “The official state account of Israel has tweeted at ,” she reported. She also described being doxxed on Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that lists identifying information and pictures of pro-Palestine activists.
“I’m called a self-hating Jew all the time,” they said. “They say I’m not a real Jew. I get people approaching me on campus to critique me. I’m sick of antisemitism being weaponized by the ADL , being weaponized by AIPAC , being weaponized by the Zionist lobby to attack majority people of color. All solidarity is intertwined. This discourse distracts from very real instances of antisemitism that we see … like the. I frankly find conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism to be antisemitic.
A statement by National SJP on April 4 reported that five Columbia students involved with pro-Palestine organizing were suspended and given 24 hours to vacate their dorms without any due process, which reportedly violates not only Columbia’s own policies, but also New York state law.
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