Standing Together
Encampment arrestees confront legal system with solidarity.
Underneath the blue tiles that spell out “Columbia University” at the 116th subway stop, someone recently painted in red, “Divest Now!” The art echoed chants at a picket line upstairs, outside the gates of Barnard College.
“One, we are the students
Two, we won’t stop fighting
Three, we want divestment now, now, now NOW!”
At a closed hearing underway on campus, several students faced hearings about the future of their academic careers, which they say were unfairly jeopardized due to their participation in protests against the genocide in Palestine.
The Columbia University Apartheid Divest student coalition says they are being “selectively isolated” by Barnard president Laura Rosenbury and the Barnard disciplinary office” at the same time the schools have neglected harassment and attacks targeting Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students.
But resistance to the ‘Palestine exception’ in higher education remains strong in New York as students say they’ve learned the “power wielded by collective organizing.”
This collective power shaped how they responded when Manhattan District Attorney’s office recently dropped 31 of the 46 criminal cases against people charged with occupying Hamilton Hall for 17 hours and renaming it Hind’s Hall after a six-year-old girl brutally killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
District Attorney Bragg cited the fact that many protesters wore masks, and lack of video footage and other evidence as the reason for the decision not to prosecute many of the students.
Thirteen others arrested in the building — many of them alumni — were offered deals that would have led their charges to be dismissed, but refused them “in a show of solidarity with those facing the most extreme repression,” said the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition.
But resistance to the ‘Palestine exception’ in higher education remains strong in New York as students say they’ve learned the “power wielded by collective organizing.”
Lack of specific proof was also given as the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office reason for dropping felony burglary charges against seven of the CUNY 22, a group of students and faculty arrested at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at City College after they refused to remove a Palestinian flag they had hung on a flagpole or take down their tents. Administrators called in the New York Police Department, who violently raided the peaceful protest with tear gas alongside CUNY police, who “broke the ankle of an undergraduate student, broke the teeth of two protestors, attacked and burned many students, faculty and at least one journalist with pepper spray at close range, and beat many more with batons” according to CUNY For Palestine.
The encampment’s demands included a call for CUNY to divest from Israel’s decades-long occupation of Pales- tine, just as it and Columbia had divested from apartheid South Africa. So far neither school has made this com- mitment and students say they continue to organize, nine months into Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza.
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