(RepublicanPress.org) – On April 17, the Columbia University branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posted a statement confirming their occupation of the center of the school’s uptown New York campus. The group also announced the launch of its so-called “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and demanded an end to the college’s “complicity in genocide.” A recent report indicated another NYC-based student group established a similar “Liberty Zone” on another school campus.
On April 21, the SJP chapter for The New School posted a notice on the group’s Instagram page calling on people to “show up now” to their encampment and support their encampment. Later that day, they posted an additional statement calling on community members to demand Donna Shalala, the university’s president, protect the pro-Palestinian protesters right to freedom of assembly, free speech, and academic freedom while they speak out against the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Another post from The New School SJP displayed a photograph of several protesting students sitting next to tents emblazoned with handwritten messages calling for a “free Palestine” and proclaiming the Gaza Solidarity Encampment a “liberated zone.”
The Instagram notice also included a statement explaining that the group staged the protest “in solidarity with their comrades at Columbia University” to protest their respective institutions’ “complicity” in Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Local media outlets reported that a group of as many as 20 pro-Palestine/anti-Israel students had “hijacked” the lobby of the Manhattan private research university’s campus. The protestors subsequently staged a “ramshackle sit-in” to show their support for the end of violence and genocide in Gaza. Likewise, New York University’s SJP chapter launched a similar protest at its Morningside Heights campus on April 22.
Mother Jones reported that the establishment of student encampments has expanded beyond New York City. For instance, on April 21, students from three Boston-based universities — Tufts, MIT, and Emerson College — staged similar protests. The following day, police officers in Haven, Connecticut, arrested several pro-Palestinian students protesting at Yale University. As many as 250 students had gathered at a 40-tent encampment the previous night.
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