As US student protests for Gaza continue, thousands of people gather in Brooklyn.
Reuters, New York City -Demonstrators called for a stop to civilian losses in Gaza, and their protests, which began with Jewish Passover Seders, spread to campuses across the United States and filled Brooklyn's streets.
The increasing demonstrations are a reaction to the recent large arrests of protesters at several East Coast institutions, and they reflect the growing discontent in the United States, which has long been Israel's most significant friend, with the way the war with Hamas is going.
For months now, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have trailed President Joe Biden, a self-professed "Zionist." Protests on college campuses have recently developed into encampments that attract faculty and students from a variety of backgrounds, including Jewish and Muslim ones, and that offer musical performances, interfaith prayers, and teach-ins.
On Tuesday, a sizable protest in a Brooklyn street came to a standstill when New York police started to arrest individuals for disruptive behavior and hold those who would not move with zip ties.
The use of police force to quell opposition was denounced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which said that it compromised academic freedom.
Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR in New York, stated in a statement that "defaming and harming Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian students based on suspiciously incendiary words that a few anonymous, masked individuals have made outside of campus" is also unacceptable.
Prominent Republican members of the US Congress have been among the protest critics who have escalated charges of antisemitism and harassment by certain protestors. Concerns about free speech have been expressed by civil rights advocates, such as the ACLU, regarding the arrests.
Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors have engaged in heated verbal and physical altercations, especially in the public thoroughfares surrounding Columbia. As a result, House Republicans have demanded that Biden take further action to safeguard Jewish students on Tuesday.
According to a number of university demonstrators Reuters spoke with, rogue provocateurs attempting to sway the protests' message are to blame for the off-campus confrontations.
"In Gaza, there are no more universities. Thus, we made the decision to take back our university for the people of Palestine "Soph Askanase, a Jewish student at Columbia who was detained and suspended for his protests, stated. "Islamophobia, racism, and antisemitism—especially racism directed towards Arabs and Palestinians—come from the same cloth."
Some students accused colleges of not defending their freedom to demonstrate or defend human rights.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia, stated, "As a Palestinian student, I too did not feel comfortable for the past six months, and it was as a direct result of Columbia's one-sided words and inaction."
In support of demonstrators at other campuses, students at the University of California, Berkeley, a university renowned for its student activism in the 1960s, erected tents.
Los Angeles native Milton Zerman, 25, a second-year law student at Berkeley, claimed that vicious behavior has targeted Jewish and Israeli students.
"It is understandable why Israeli students are so reluctant to come here," Zerman said. "As an Israeli student on this school, you feel like you have a target on your back, you feel uncomfortable."
More than 100 demonstrators were detained by New York police last week at Columbia University, and more than 120 on Monday at New York University. In an effort to ease tensions, Columbia canceled in-person classes at its Upper Manhattan campus on Monday.
Columbia announced on Tuesday that classes would be hybrid for the remainder of the year, allowing students to attend both in-person and online.
Later, the president of the university gave organizers until midnight to "go on with a plan to remove" the pro-Palestine campsite.
Cal Poly Humboldt, a public university in Arcata, California, was forced to close its doors after Palestinian demonstrators took over one of its buildings.
Police removed an encampment off the institution of Minnesota campus in St. Paul when the institution requested that they do so, citing trespassing laws and university policy infractions.
PROTESTS FOR PASSOVER
Reaffirming their faith and distancing themselves from the Israeli government's war strategy, some Jewish demonstrators claimed that they were using the second night of the weeklong feast of Passover, a holiday feast when families gather and celebrate the biblical account of the Israelites' freedom from Egyptian slavery.
"What Israel is doing does not seem to me to be self-defense. Having left her family behind 120 miles (190 km) away to attend the protest in Brooklyn, Katherine Stern, 62, of Woodstock, New York, remarked, "I see incredible, just unbelievable human rights breaches."
Protesters urge the US to stop providing military aid to Israel, or at the very least condition it on improving the situation of Palestinians, and university endowments to divest from Israeli interests.
On October 7, gunmen from Hamas stormed Israel, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping many more, according to Israeli estimates. The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that over 34,000 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel's onslaught, forcing virtually all 2.3 million residents of Gaza to flee and creating a humanitarian disaster.
The highest-ranking Jew in the U.S. government, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer, is an Israel-supporting senator from Brooklyn. Approximately 2,000 protestors gathered in a plaza next to Shumer's residence, yelling "Stop arming Israel," "Stop funding genocide," and "Let Gaza live."
Using Jewish and other cultural music and song, the organizers raised awareness of Canadian writer and peace activist Naomi Klein, who used her Jewish heritage to criticize Zionism and refer to it as a "false idol."
To applause, Klein remarked, "We demand emancipation from the project that connects genocide in our name." "We aim to relocate Judaism from an ethnostate that wishes for Jews to live in constant fear... or that we flee to its stronghold, or at the very least, continue to provide them with contributions and weaponry."
(Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Bill Berkrot, David Gregorio, Heather Timmons, and Gerry Doyle; Reporting by Jonathan Allen, Cath Turner, and Julia Harte in New York; Nathan Frandino in Berkeley, California; Kanishka Singh in Washington; Brendan O' Brien in Chicago; and Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico)
