Student protests over Gaza war go global: NPR

LONDON – A growing global student movement to occupy university campuses has continued to coalesce and expand in recent days, following dramatic scenes involving pro-Palestinian protesters and police caught on camera at American universities.

Student groups in the United Kingdom, France and Mexico, among others, have sought to erect what many of them call “solidarity camps,” prompting a variety of responses from university and local authorities.

Students’ efforts to pressure institutional leaders, and in some cases national policymakers, to change their positions on Israel’s military actions reflect widespread anger among young people in both rich and developing countries. developing countries.

These protests continue against a backdrop of sustained violence in the Gaza Strip, the continued failure of negotiations led by Qatar, Egypt and the United States to achieve a new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and renewed threats from Israeli leaders to launch a ground offensive in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza.

A common demand among many of the protesters is that their educational institutions cut ties with companies that do business with the Israeli state or, in some cases, end collaboration agreements with universities in Israel.

The concerns of students in the United Kingdom, for example, seemed to echo the focus of an increasingly prominent national campaign to end British arms exports to Israel. Earlier this week, hundreds of activists surrounded a government business office in London and protested at British aerospace manufacturer BAE Systems’ facilities elsewhere in the United Kingdom, leading to arrests..

This came just days after the United Nations’ highest court in The Hague rejected Nicaragua’s arguments that Germany should immediately stop military transfers to Israel.

The protest against arming Israel is particularly pronounced at the University of Warwick in central England, where a coalition of students and staff built an encampment in a central campus square on the afternoon of Thursday, April 25, demanding the institution’s relations tough on companies that supply military material to Israel. .

“The University of Warwick has one of the largest partnerships with arms companies of any university in the UK,” says Fraser Amos, a student member of the group called Warwick Stands For Palestine. “We have been campaigning for the last few months for a university to sever these ties; an overwhelming majority of students voted in November to do so, and we have seen 27,000 Palestinians die since then. And so we have been forced to take this action.”

Warwick acknowledges that it maintains academic and research partnerships with companies involved in the production of weapons systems or components used in weapons, including Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and Moog.

In a statement, university spokesperson Bron Mills told NPR that “the university is working to begin conversations with protest organizers about the demands that have been made.”

But so far, few of the student campaigns have been successful.

France’s elite Sciences Po university has been rocked by protests over the past week, but administrators on Thursday began what participants described as an “emotional” dialogue with students to try to calm the situation.

“It’s good to have these debates, because we are in a school that all the time says that we have to debate about politics, we have to discuss,” said student Ismail El Gataa, shortly after participating in those conversations with university authorities.

Despite the students’ specific demands, Sciences Po management says it will refuse to cut ties or investigate its relationships with four Israeli universities. With the overnight occupation of a school auditorium until Friday morning, student activists responded that their demonstrations would continue, although much more peaceful and less conflictive than in the United States.

“I feel like the context here and in the United States is different,” El Gataa said. “Unfortunately, what I’ve seen in the United States is that there is a lot of extremism in some environments.”

But on Friday morning, police units began gathering outside the Sciences Po campus, just as they had done at another major Paris university, the Sorbonne, after authorities requested their help in evacuating students.

Another group, Goldsmiths for Palestine, was created in November last year at Goldsmiths University in London, when students began striking, encouraging the university management to make a statement condemning the circumstances facing Palestinians and to divest from a company called Nice Ltd. that sells surveillance equipment to the government for use by police units and prison systems.

Postgraduate student Danna Liu Macrae says her decision this week to occupy part of the university library was quite specific to Goldsmiths, where students had broken up a previous camp after university management offered to discuss their concerns, but later became disillusioned with those efforts.

“We had participated in multiple meetings with them and they had made some commitments from which they withdrew, without giving much explanation,” says Liu Macrae, speaking of the latest occupation of the library. “It made sense for us to put pressure on them again to be accountable and make sure they live up to their commitments.”

Pro-Palestinian protests at American universities have drawn largely positive reactions from contemporaries and peers elsewhere, without much sign of the pro-Israeli counter-protests seen at several American universities.

At the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known as UNAM, megaphones at the country’s largest university blared across the campus Thursday as students pitched several tents in front of the university’s administrative buildings to protest military actions. of Israel in Gaza.

Mexican geography student Alexa Carranza says she was encouraged by the university protests in the United States, particularly because she had long considered American students to be apathetic to global injustice. “Seeing them wake up inspired me,” she says.

Thursday was the first day of protest, with students demanding that the State of Mexico, not just their own university, completely sever diplomatic relations. “Sever ties with Israel,” a small crowd chanted, while some students painted signs reading “Long live Palestine.”

At the University of Warwick, where police and university authorities have largely kept the situation calm, Fraser Amos says the treatment of American student protesters has been “appalling” and his group wants to show “full solidarity” with similar camps from Columbia University in New York to the University of Texas at Austin.

For Samir Ali, a student at Goldsmiths in London, students like her are at the forefront of this moment, in this moment of global mutual support. “We see ourselves as part of that collective struggle and part of that collective student movement,” she says.

It’s an emotional kinship for Ana Jiménez, an 18-year-old UNAM student who grew up in Guerrero, a Mexican region devastated by a drug-related conflict. She says she can relate very powerfully to the Palestinian children caught up in the Gaza conflict.

“We need global solidarity, an empathetic world,” says Jiménez. “When you’re young, you have no choice but to be a revolutionary.”

Eleanor Beardsley contributed reporting from Paris. Eyder Peralta contributed to this report from Mexico City.