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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Gaza: Student anger sweeps the West!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

College protests are sweeping America as students occupy campuses in solidarity with the Palestinians. The protests began when students at Columbia University in New York occupied their campus last month and kicked off a wave of student-led Palestine solidarity protests across the USA. At least 2,000 American students have now been arrested – 200 at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) this week.

Meanwhile fierce fighting continues in the Gaza Strip as the United States and its lackeys talk up their latest “peace plan” as a “very generous” Israeli offer to end the conflict when, in reality, it’s just the same old offer of a temporary truce and a prisoner exchange that the Palestinian resistance has turned down time and time again.

Riot police have moved in on the Gaza solidarity encampment at the UCLA campus this week, making arrests and violently dismantling the peaceful protest camp. Students reported serious injuries as the officers raided the camp, shooting rubber bullets and flashbangs to disperse the protesters. The police also made dozens of arrests at the Gaza solidarity encampments at Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Arizona. In New York, the police moved in on Fordham University protesters just hours after they set up their encampment at Fordham’s Lincoln Square campus.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, defended the police raids and claimed “outside agitators” were trying to “radicalise young people”.

On Columbia’s campus, faculty members addressed students including the PalestinianAmerican historian, Prof Rashid Khalidi, who told the student rally “this is the conscience of a nation, speaking through your kids, through young people, who are risking their futures, who are risking suspension, expulsion, criminal arrest, in order to wake people up in this country”.

Plenty of workers have joined the Columbia protests in New York. And thousands of Columbia faculty and staff walked out in protest against Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s decision to send in the notorious New York police’s Strategic Response Group to brutally arrest hundreds of their students for peaceful protest.

Students have set up 75 Gaza solidarity camps in centres of learning across the United States. Now it’s spreading throughout the Western world with protest camps springing up in Britain and other parts of Western Europe as well as Australia and Canada. And in a co-ordinated move across American academia, the police and the state militias have been sent to break up the protest camps in a desperate attempt to stifle the mass movement in support of the Palestinians.

But academics facing dismissal and students expulsion for taking part in Palestine solidarity actions have been offered free places in Iranian universities. Mohammed Moazzeni, the head of Shiraz University, a major Iranian seat of learning, told his students that violence had been unleashed to “contain this raging movement” but “students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars province are also prepared [to show similar solidarity]”.

In Britain students have long called on their universities to divest from Israel in response to the Zionist aggression in Gaza. Now they’re setting up their own protest camps. The first was set up at Warwick University last week. London students have taken over the library at Goldsmiths College and occupations have begun in Newcastle, Bristol, Sheffield and Warwick.

Students in Leeds have followed vowing to camp “indefinitely” outside of the student union. Manchester students have set up a camp demanding that the university end its partnership with arms companies cut its ties with Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.