Hours after the police entry on Tuesday night at Columbia University, the place woke up on Wednesday in an atmosphere of calm. During the night, police displayed military might unmatched in recent memory, even using a vehicle to bridge and enter through a window into the student-occupied Hamilton Hall building. All to vacate the campus after its occupation by a small minority of pro-Palestinian students.
Nuanced calm. The memory of the tension that had been experienced during the night was more than visible throughout the area, west of northern Manhattan. A tension that, who knows, may be repeated, as happened on April 18 after another police operation that did not result in more gasoline.
This time it seemed different, with the students exhausted and the local police (NYPD) unwilling to let their guard down. Columbia is a fortress. The main entrances at 116th Street, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues are still occupied by the uniformed officers. The entire environment is surrounded by fences and law enforcement officers.
However, as the hours passed, the protesters returned to the Columbia gate on Amsterdam Avenue. There, students and teachers attacked the police and the rector Minouche Shafik.
His actions, having justified the request for police intervention due to the risk to the campus and the interruption of normal day-to-day activities, were the subject of criticism.
There are students who consider that she was incapable of seeking agreements with the protesters, did not make a single concession and put herself in the hands of “police brutality”, while many professors accuse her of having played the political game of the extreme right for her negotiating incompetence.
Meghnad Bose, a journalism student and one of the people authorized to be on campus during the police operation, reported that the police prevented them from working. “They put up a fence and didn’t let us get close to Hamilton Hall,” she lamented.
“There are people who were sad and others who were happy with the police,” explained Benson, a student who was in his campus room during the police operation. “I recognize the courage of the protesters, but I think it is good that everything goes back to normal,” he concluded.
Columbia has been the epicenter of the national protest and the police raid inside also marks the peak of the boiling point.
Mayor Eric Adams was belligerent in a press conference evaluating the operation, where he was satisfied with the performance of his agents. There were almost 300 detainees between the elitist Columbia (119) and the popular City College (173), located twenty blocks further north.
Adams maintained, without having shown any evidence so far, that the ringleaders of the camp and the occupation of the Hamilton Hall building, which took place on Monday night – the action that triggered the alarms – were outsiders who did not attend classes. . “These anti-Semitic protesters are agitators who came from outside to radicalize our young people and we are not going to allow it,” he said. “They are trying to disrupt our city and this will not happen,” he stressed.
“Blame me for being proud to be an American. “No one is going to make us give up our way of life,” added Adams, who was a police officer and a Republican before becoming a Democratic mayor.
The center’s administration and Rector Shafik have required the NYPD to maintain the fence until at least the 17th, after the party in which 15,000 students will graduate.
Calm, but not normal. From the outside, traffic around the campus seemed scarce this Wednesday. Classes were suspended and access to the campus was practically limited to students who have permission to sleep in campus buildings.
The police took down the large “Freedom for Palestine” banner that hung for almost 24 hours in Hamilton Hall. The tents disappeared after almost two weeks of functioning as the nucleus that has radiated protests from other university centers in the United States.
As of this Wednesday, there were more than 1,100 detainees in at least 26 university centers. Before the operation at Columbia, there were police interventions at the University of Texas or at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, with clashes between students and police.
The protests and clashes with the police were repeated on Wednesday at the University of Madison-Wisconsin or at Tulane (New Orleans). But the most serious incident occurred at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).
This time the police had to act to end the scuffle that occurred when a group of about 200 pro-Israeli youth tried to assault the pro-Palestinian camp. The attackers launched fireworks, used gas canisters, threw all kinds of objects and armed themselves with baseball bats or rackets. The campers responded with what they had at hand.
He stood between the two sides and neutralized the situation. There were 32 detainees, including 13 students and one faculty member, the university said in a statement.
The UCLA camp continued on Wednesday morning after the chaotic early morning. Classes, however, were cancelled.
The California Federation of Jews condemned the aggression of the pro-Israels, who sought to dismantle the pro-Palestine camp, and disqualified them. “They are not ours,” they emphasized.
