Talk to student protesters across the country, and their anger is clear: They are galvanized by the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and will risk arrest to fight for the Palestinian cause.
For most of them, the war is being waged in a country they have never set foot in, where the dead – 34,000 so far, according to local health authorities – are known to them only through what they have read or seen on the Internet. .
But for many, the issues are closer to home, and at the same time, much larger and broader. In their eyes, the conflict in Gaza is a struggle for justice, connected to issues that seem far away. They say they are motivated by policing, mistreatment of Native Americans, discrimination against Black Americans and the effects of global warming.
In interviews with dozens of students across the country last week, they described, to an impressive degree, the broad lens through which they see the conflict in Gaza, which explains their urgency — and their impatience.
Ife Jones, a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta, connected her current activism to the political right-wing movement of the 1960s, which her family was involved in.
“The only thing missing was the dogs and the water,” Ms Jones said of the current push back against protesters.
Many protesters rejected calls from university administrators, chained themselves to benches and occupied buildings. Now, the protesters have faced a harsh crackdown, with hundreds of arrests in the past 24 hours at several schools, including Columbia University.
With pro-Israeli students stepping up their counter-protests on a number of university campuses, the atmosphere could become even more tense in the coming days.
In interviews, the language of many protesters was also characteristic. Students liberally peppered their explanations with academic terms such as intersectionality, colonialism, and imperialism, all to argue that the plight of the Palestinians is the result of global power structures that thrive on prejudice and oppression.
“As environmentalists, we pride ourselves on seeing the world through intersecting lenses,” said Katie Rueff, a freshman at Cornell University. “Climate justice is everyone’s issue. It affects every dimension of identity, because it is rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism — things like that. I think that’s very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine.”
Jawuanna McAllister, a 27-year-old Ph.D. candidate in cell and molecular biology at Cornell, pointed out the name of the student group she’s affiliated with: the Coalition for Mutual Liberation.
“It’s in our name: mutual liberation,” Ms McAllister said. “This means that we are an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial organization. We believe that none of us can be free and have the respect and dignity we deserve unless we are all free.”
Almost all protest groups want an immediate ceasefire and some sort of divestment from companies with interests in Israel or the military. But because everything is connected, some protesters have other issues on their agenda.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, students like Nicole Crawford are demanding the school sever its relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department, along with calls for more transparency about the school’s investments. Ms Crawford, 20, said she connected the plight of Gazans with the plight of other oppressed people around the world.
“When you’re part of any oppressed group, especially people who experience direct state violence, like being part of the Pan-African diaspora in the United States, which is based on the enslavement and dehumanization and degradation of African peoples, that politicizes you,” she said. Mrs. Crawford.
At Emory University, protesters occupying the campus block chanted “Free Palestine,” along with “Stop Cop City,” referring to a large police and fire training center being built on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Ari Quan, a 19-year-old Emory freshman from Columbia, SC, who uses the pronouns they and them, acknowledged that he had not followed the Gaza conflict closely, but said there was considerable overlap between the movement for greater justice in policing and the pro-Palestinian feeling. They were moved to join the campus protests after seeing their friend pushed to the ground by the police.
“I would feel bad if I didn’t participate,” they said. “Seeing the police becoming more militarized is hard for me to imagine.”
The student movement in support of the Palestinians has been building for decades with connections to other issues. Students for Justice in Palestine, a loosely-knit confederation that began to emerge in the early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, consciously invited other activists—environmentalists, opponents of American intervention in Latin America, critics of the Gulf War. – expanding the team base.
Today, the group’s national steering committee claims more than 200 autonomous chapters, most of them in the United States. And they often collaborate with other groups of students.
Coalition building is a source of strength and pride, giving protesters the sense that much of the world is with them.
But scholars say this current movement, which has angered many pro-Israel students and alumni, is quite different from the movements against apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War.
In the 1960s, during protests against the Vietnam War, there was no constituency that felt attacked as an ethnicity, said Timothy Naftali, who teaches public policy at Columbia, though he acknowledged that student soldiers or those in ROTC would have been targeted.
“I would imagine that these protests now create a sense of insecurity in a much greater way than the anti-war protests during Vietnam,” Mr. Naftali said.
Much of the divide today centers around Hamas and anti-Semitism.
In interviews, many students declined to participate when asked about Hamas, the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel that killed 1,200 people. Many simply said the attacks were horrific.
But Lila Steinbach, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, acknowledged that the attacks stirred up complicated emotions. He knows people who were killed and held hostage in the attacks. Like many of the protesters, she was raised Jewish.
“What happened on October 7 was a test of my politics, as someone who is committed to liberation and decolonization,” he said, adding, “It’s hard not to condemn all the violence that Hamas is committing.”
However, he added, “I also know that the violence of the Israelis and the violence of American imperialism and the conditions cultivated by these factors are responsible for the reproduction of terrorism. When you grow up in an open air prison and you’re an orphan and you’re told it’s the Israelis’ fault, why don’t you believe them?’
Anti-Semitism, nearly all of the student protesters said, is a real concern.
But they said they just don’t see it around them — not in their camps, not among the other protesters, not in their chants, like “from the river to the sea.” (In their view, “from the river to the sea” is not a call to destroy the state of Israel, but a call for peace and equality.)
On Sunday, a few dozen protesters hung around the encampment at the University of Pittsburgh. Alexandra Weiner, 25, a faculty member in the university’s math department, said she grew up attending Tree of Life Synagogue, where a white nationalist killed 11 worshipers in 2018.
While some counter-protesters had called the camp anti-Semitic, he said: “I have not experienced or heard a single sentiment of anti-Semitism.”
Later that day, hundreds of protesters marched on campus, calling for a ceasefire. After a brief standoff with the police, two were arrested. On Tuesday the camp was gone.
Alan Blinder, Neelam Bohra, Patrick Cooley, Jill Cowan, Jenna Fisher, Sean Keenan and Cole Lewison contributed to the report.
