With dozens of college campuses in the United States taking part in the protests against the war in Gaza, hundreds of student protesters have been arrested for trespassing and setting encampments around campus while others face suspension from their respective universities.
BBC reported that since the October 7 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s retaliatory assault, students have launched rallies, sit-ins, hunger strikes and, most recently, encampments against the war.
They are demanding that their schools, many with massive endowments to financially divest from Israel.
Student activists say that companies doing business in Israel or with Israeli organizations are complicit in its ongoing war on Gaza. And so are the colleges that invest in those companies.
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Speaking to NPR, Frank Guridy a professor of history at the University of Columbia, which has been the center of student activism since the war against Gaza began and seen about 100 of it’s students arrested in the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests.
“As in 1968, the Columbia students of 2024 are absolutely galvanized by what’s transpiring in Gaza, in the Middle East,” he said.
“In that sense, it is an uncanny resemblance to what transpired in the late sixties in this country, where U.S. students and other people in this country were inspired to speak out and mobilize against what they saw as an unjust war in Vietnam,” he added.
Even with no direct connection with the 1968 antiwar protests students still use the then protest as a sign of inspiration explain Guridy In a statement.
In the past week the pro-Palestinian protests have not only spread across American universities but also in the UK , Australia and France with a call for a cease-fire and a stop of continued support for Israel’s war on Gaza terming it as “complicity” with the war which has then seen about 34,000 people dead and many others displaced.
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