On Wednesday May 7 demonstrators rushed through Butler Library’s security gate at Colombia University in New York at about 3:00 p.m., hanging banners, tagging shelves with graffiti, chanting pro-Palestine slogans, and renaming it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” a reference to the Palestinian writer who was killed by the Israeli army in 2017.
The Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) released a statement criticizing the school’s treatment of student activists and explaining the occupation.
“Despite Columbia’s transformation of the university into a dystopian site of surveillance through its carceral expansion of cameras, wifi and ID tracking, externally contracted security, disciplinary processes, and arresting power for Public Safety officers, it still failed to quell the student movement,” it reads. “The Students outsmarted the university, exposing the cracks in their broken system. In the spirit of our martyr Basel al-Araj, the Popular University will educate our comrades towards revolutionary consciousness—taking back our university to practice a liberated, demilitarized education. Students know that resisting genocide is their moral imperative, and history is on their side.”
Students at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York launched a demonstration at their campus the same day.
Students at Johns Hopkins University launched an encampment on the same night as the Columbia occupation, but say they shut it down after police “caused multiple injuries” on campus.
Earlier this week, University of Washington (UW) protestors occupied a campus engineering building on May 5. The Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return (SUPER) organized the action to demand that the school sever its ties to Boeing over the company’s connections to Israel. The group demanded the university cut ties with Boeing due to the company’s military contracts with Israel.
“WE DEMAND: UW will no longer be complicit in genocide. WE DEMAND: that our tuition money and our research not be used to fund and fuel genocide,” read a statement from the group. “Students have occupied the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building and declared that this building, renamed the Shaban al-Dalou Building will not be used to fund genocide, but to meet the needs of students and community.”
In a clear show of their intent, the new Interdisciplinary Engineering Building, which was funded in part by Boeing, sustained $1 million in damages.
Also on May 5th, seven students from California State University, Long Beach, launched a hunger strike as part of an organized protest across four CSU campuses: San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Jose State. In total, twenty-five students are striking for Gaza. They join a wave of nationwide protests demanding an immediate end to the United States’ arming and facilitating a genocide in Gaza by Israel.
The seven strikers announced on the campus their commitment to refuse food until their institution divests from companies that supply weapons, military equipment, and surveillance technology, among other demands, to Israel’s military. In addition, they call on their campus administration to pressure other CSU presidents and the Board of Trustees to do the same.
“This is part of a larger student movement to ensure that California State Students’ tuition, and Universities’ investments, are not complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people,” read the statement by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at CSULB.
Similar hunger strikes and encampments have spread to campuses in the Los Angeles area. Thirty miles north in Eagle Rock, ten Occidental College students began their hunger strike protest in April. Like the students in Long Beach, their demands included protecting students from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and providing a Sanctuary Campus for non-citizen students.