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18th Annual CODEPINK Mother’s Day Bridge Walk for PEACE!
Sunday, May 12, Noon
11:45: Gather at the Welcome Center Plaza, on the East (Hill) side of the San Francisco end of bridge.
(IMPORTANT: Arrive 30-40 min. EARLY, as “The Authorities” purposely close nearby parking lots to discourage participation!)
NOON: March Begins
1:30 P.M.: Short Rally after the March on the bridge.
In light of U.S. complicity in the ongoing genocide and forced starvation of the people of Gaza, we will put Palestine front and center. With over 12 thousand children killed and tens of thousands of children hungry and near famine in Gaza alone, not to mention the urgent crisis for the children of Sudan, Ukraine, and Haiti, this is an urgent call for the global family to rise up for humanity.
· FOOD NOT BOMBS! DEMILITARIZE NOW!
· FOOD to GAZA, not Weapons to Israel.
· NO TAX $$ for GENOCIDE
· Not Another Nickel, Not Another Dime, No more Money for Israel’s Crimes.
· Diplomacy Not War!
Let’s again pay tribute to the original meaning of “Mother’s Day,” a global call to ABOLISH WAR:
We’ll read: Julia Ward Howe’s (1870) Mother’s Day Proclamation
Bring your mamas and grandmamas, sons, daughters, and grandchildren—the entire family, and friends too! War is not healthy for children and other living things!
Bring your Kaffiyeh’s, Palestinian Flags, and signs that speak for you.
(Note: Authorities may restrict you from taking flags on the bridge—wear it as a cape!)
Signs larger than 2x3 ft. may also be restricted.
Bring a simple treat to share to celebrate 18 years of CODEPINK bridge walks, and our Bay Area community’s commitment to peace and justice.
We’ll sing John Lennon’s Imagine, one of Bay Area Troubadour Francis Collin’s favorite songs!
Francis Collins Presente!
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See Gaza Strip Access Restrictions.pdf since 2007 at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gaza_Strip_Access_Restrictions.pdf** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”
*** The death toll in West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to PA’s Ministry of Health on April 22, this is the latest figure.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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Boris Kagarlitsky is in Prison!
On February 13, the court overturned the previous decision on release and sent Boris Kagarlitsky to prison for five years.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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We are all Palestinian
Listen and view this beautiful, powerful, song by Mistahi Corkill on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwuhbLczgI
Greetings,
Here is my new song and music video, We are all Palestinian, linked below. If you find it inspiring, please feel free to share with others. All the best!
Mistahi
We are all Palestinian
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Labor for Palestine
Thousands of labor representatives marched Saturday, December 16, in Oakland, California. —Photo by Leon Kunstenaar
Video of December 16th Labor rally for Palestine.
Bay Area Unions and Workers Rally and March For Palestine In Oakland
https://youtu.be/L9k79honqIA
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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Just Like The Nazis Did
By David Rovics
After so many decades of patronage
By the world’s greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
After crushing so many uprisings
Now they’re making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their Final Solution
Just like the Nazis did
They forced refugees into ghettos
Then set the ghettos aflame
Murdering writers and poets
And so no one remember their names
Killing their entire families
The grandparents, women and kids
The uncles and cousins and babies
Just like the Nazis did
They’re bombing all means of sustaining
Human life at all
See the few shelters remaining
Watch as the tower blocks fall
They’re bombing museums and libraries
In order to get rid
Of any memory of the people who lived here
Just like the Nazis did
They’re saying these people are animals
And they should all end up dead
They’re sending soldiers into schools
And shooting children in the head
The rhetoric is identical
And with Gaza off the grid
They’ve already said what happens next
Just like the Nazis did
Words of war for domestic consumption
And lies for all the rest
To try to distract our attention
Among their enablers in the West
Because Israel needs their imports
To keep those pallets on the skids
They need fuel and they need missiles
Just like the Nazis did
They’re using food as a weapon
They’re using water that way, too
They’re trying to kill everyone in Gaza
Or make them flee, it’s true
As the pundits talk of “after the war”
Like with the Fall of Madrid
The victors are preparing for more
Just like the Nazis did
But it’s after the conquest’s complete
If history is any guide
When the occupying army
Is positioned to decide
When disease and famine kills
Whoever may have hid
Behind the ghetto walls
Just like the Nazis did
All around the world
People are trying to tell
There's a genocide unfolding
Ringing alarm bells
But with such a powerful axis
And so many lucrative bids
They know who wants their money
Just like the Nazis did
There's so many decades of patronage
For the world's greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
They're crushing so many uprisings
Now they're making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their final solution
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
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Free Julian Assange
Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange
Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count. We are to believe we are represented in this country. This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well. Please take this action as often as you can:
Find your representatives:
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Leave each of your representatives a message individually to:
· Drop the charges against Julian Assange
· Speak out publicly against the indictment and
· Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges:
202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard
Leave a message on the White House comment line to
Demand Julian Assange be pardoned:
202-456-1111
Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST
Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:
202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line
202-514-2000 Main Switchboard
Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Leonard Peltier Update—Experiencing the Onset of Blindness
Greetings Relatives,
Leonard is in trouble, physically. He is experiencing the onset of blindness. He is losing strength in his limbs. His blood sugar is testing erratically. This, on top of already severe conditions that have become dire. Leonard has not seen a dentist in ten years. His few remaining teeth are infected. He is locked down, in pain.
As always, Leonard’s fortitude remains astonishing. He is not scared of dying. He does not want to die in lockdown.
Our legal team has an emergency transfer underway. They are going to extraordinary lengths. We must get a top ophthalmologist to him. Thanks to your calls, the BOP did see him. They told him a specialist would be 8 - 10 weeks out.
Leonard does not have eight to ten weeks. He needs emergency care immediately.
If you can, please donate to this GoFundMe. Every penny matters. If you cannot, please share. If you are so inclined, go to www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org and contact the officials listed.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-leonard-peltier-get-medical-care-freedom?utm_campaign=p_cp+fundraiser-sidebar&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer
As always, thank you for your support.
Dawn Lawson
Personal Assistant Leonard Peltier
Executive Assistant Jenipher Jones, Esq.
Secretary Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee
1-800-901-4413
dawn@allfiredup.blue
www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
Leonard Peltier Update - Not One More Year
Coleman 1 has gone on permanent lockdown.
The inmates are supposed to be allowed out two hours a day. I have not heard from Leonard since the 18th.
The last time I talked to Leonard, he asked where his supporters were. He asked me if anyone cared about these lockdowns.
Leonard lives in a filthy, cold cell 22 to 24 hours a day. He has not seen a dentist in ten years. I asked him, “On a scale of 1 to 10, is your pain level at 13?” He said, “Something like that.” Leonard is a relentless truth-teller. He does not like it when I say things that do not make sense mathematically.
That is why Leonard remains imprisoned. He will not lie. He will not beg, grovel, or denounce his beliefs.
Please raise your voice. Ask your representatives why they have abdicated their responsibility to oversee the Bureau of Prisons and ensure they adhere to Constitutional law.
Uhuru, The African People’s Socialist Party, has stepped up for Leonard. NOT ONE MORE YEAR.
Fight for Free Speech – YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8GDeGv90E
Leonard should not have spent a day in prison. Click “LEARN” on our website to find out what really happened on that reservation:
www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Mr. Kevin Cooper
C-65304. 4-EB-82
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system.
See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings
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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) ‘Decisions Under Fire’: Campuses Try a Mix of Tactics as Protests Grow
Some colleges that initiated police crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests have since taken a different tack. Others have defended the move. Hundreds have been arrested.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Alan Blinder and Neelam Bohra, April 27, 2024
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Boston, Alan Blinder from Atlanta and Neelam Bohra from Austin, Texas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/us/college-protests-police-response.html
At an encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, police officers detained about 100 people and took several tents down on Saturday. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Wearing riot helmets and carrying zip ties, Boston police officers moved in one day this week and surrounded a group of pro-Palestinian protesters on a grassy patch of Northeastern University’s campus. Six police wagons were idling nearby, and an officer had issued a terse warning. Mass arrests looked imminent.
Then, without explanation, the riot police packed up and left.
The sudden end to the standoff produced cheers from the protesters, and confusion for those who had been bracing for chaos. In recent days, police officers have rushed in to break up student encampments at the University of Southern California, Emerson College in Boston and Ohio State University. At Emory University in Atlanta, officers used pepper balls and wrestled protesters to the ground, ultimately arresting 28 people.
On quads and lawns from coast to coast, colleges are grappling with a groundswell of student activism over Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. Administrators are having to make controversial decisions over whether to call in the police, and are often criticized regardless of the route they take.
“They don’t seem to have a clear strategy,” said Jennie Stephens, a professor at Northeastern who attended the protest there to support the students. “I think there’s this inclination to kind of control what’s happening on campus, but then that’s balanced with the optics — or the violence, or the real harm — done to students or faculty or staff or others if there are arrests.”
Hundreds of protesters have been arrested across the country. Police and protesters have reported being injured at some college demonstrations, but in many cases, the arrests have been peaceful, and protesters have often willingly given themselves up when officers move in.
At Northeastern on Thursday, about 100 protesters had linked arms in a circle around a half-dozen tents on a lawn known as the Centennial Common.
The dean of students and the university police had warned protesters that they would be considered trespassers if they did not produce a student ID. The dean then went around the circle asking students for the cards; some showed them, but many did not.
A university spokeswoman, Renata Nyul, said in an email that the Boston Police Department had ultimately made the decision for its officers to leave without making arrests.
Then, around dawn on Saturday, Massachusetts State Police officers arrived and began to arrest protesters after all, putting them in zip-tie handcuffs and taking several tents down. The State Police said that 102 protesters who had refused to leave were arrested and would be charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Ms. Nyul said Northeastern had made the decision to have the protesters arrested after the demonstration was “infiltrated by professional organizers.” She also said that someone in the protest had said “kill the Jews” the night before. Protesters denied both claims.
A video appeared to show that it was a pro-Israel counterprotester who used the phrase, as part of his criticism of the protesters’ chants. In response to that video, Ms. Nyul said that “any suggestion that repulsive, antisemitic comments are sometimes acceptable depending on the context is reprehensible.”
The mass arrest at Northeastern was the second early-morning crackdown on protesters at a Boston campus in less than a week. Early on Thursday, city police officers had stormed a student encampment in an alleyway at Emerson, a small private college downtown, ripping down tents and throwing students — who had formed a barricade and refused to leave — to the ground.
The police arrested 118 people there, infuriating some students who said that the university had failed to protect them. But city officials defended the operation, saying it was necessary to clear the alley, which includes a public right of way.
“The issue was just around fire hazards that were being created with the tents, and the public health and safety risks that were happening there as well,” Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, told WCVB-TV.
Pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses have swiftly multiplied since Columbia University students launched theirs this month. They have at times drawn ire from students and faculty who complain about what they see as antisemitic chants and a lack of safety for Jewish students, and off campus, from supporters of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
So far, more than 34,000 Palestinians have died during the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza, a response to an attack led by Hamas on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 people were taken hostage.
At Columbia, where the president was already under fire from Republicans in Congress, the administration took an aggressive approach at first, calling in the New York Police Department, which arrested more than 100 people and removed tents. But students quickly returned, pitching new tents and vowing to stay.
This time, rather than calling in the police again, Columbia officials are negotiating with the protesters.
“We called on N.Y.P.D. to clear an encampment once, but we all share the view, based on discussions within our community and with outside experts, that to bring back the N.Y.P.D. at this time would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus, and drawing thousands to our doorstep who would threaten our community,” Columbia leaders said in a campus message on Friday night. “Having said that, we also need to continue to enforce our own rules and ensure that those who violate the norms of our community face consequences.”
But at Emory, where the police arrested students and faculty members on Thursday, the university’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, said flatly afterward that the institution would “not tolerate vandalism, violence or any attempt to disrupt our campus through the construction of encampments.”
Harvard has tried a different approach. The university restricted access to its historic Harvard Yard, allowing in only those who showed a university ID, and suspended a pro-Palestinian group, saying that it had held an unauthorized demonstration.
But the group and its supporters set up an encampment in the yard nonetheless. On Wednesday night, the mood was serene, with a couple of campus police officers sitting in cars at the edges of the yard and students passing through. Still, the university has faced criticism from some prominent alumni, including its former president, Lawrence H. Summers, who said that allowing the tents to stay up was a “profound failure.”
Like Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin sought to pre-empt students’ planned encampment, warning that it was unauthorized, and students gathered anyway. Unlike at Harvard, administrators responded with force. Dozens of police officers, many in riot gear or on horseback, pushed through throngs of protesters on Wednesday to block off the campus’s main lawn, ultimately booking 57 people into the county jail.
But by evening, almost all state and local police officers had disappeared. Students quickly returned and gathered with picnic blankets before leaving for the night.
Jay Hartzell, the university’s president, said in a statement that administrators had prevented the planned protest out of fear that students would try to “follow a pattern” and “severely disrupt a campus for a long period.” In messages that were obtained under a public information request, Mr. Hartzell told a lawmaker that he had asked for help from the state police force because the school’s police “couldn’t do it alone.”
As of Friday night, about 300 of the university’s 3,000 faculty members had signed an open letter of no confidence in Mr. Hartzell. “President Hartzell needlessly put students, staff and faculty in danger. Dozens of students were arrested for assembling peacefully on their own campus,” it said.
On Thursday, another protest at the university was scheduled, but the scene was much more calm, with university administrators handing out fliers with rules for protesting. One administrator told students that the police had assured her that they would not arrest students unless they tried to put up tents or stay past 10 p.m.
Kathy Zoner, who was the police chief at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., for nearly a decade until 2019, said that university administrators often hoped to avoid responsibility for the police response to protests, but that they themselves often made the final decision on what to do.
She said protesters who came from outside the university can be hard to deal with because they cannot be threatened with academic consequences and might be more intent on agitation than dialogue. The recent tent encampments can be a particular problem for administrators who are focused on the school’s optics, Ms. Zoner said.
“This is the big concern, right? That these encampments will be there forever, whatever that means, and that it becomes a reason for people to not choose your university or college to attend,” she said. “And face it: Colleges are businesses. Not-for-profit or for-profit, they’re a business. They have a bottom line and have to be attentive to it.”
That is just one issue facing administrators in a crisis. Daniel W. Jones, a former chancellor of the University of Mississippi, said students, faculty members, elected officials, parents and donors all offer often starkly different advice on how the university should respond.
“I think the biggest tension is around, am I going to act in the best interests of students on my campus, or the best interests of my board, the politically interested people and alumni broadly?” he said.
Nicholas B. Dirks, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, said there were few more challenging decisions for a university leader than whether to summon the police, in part because outside law enforcement officers may use tactics far different from those of a campus police force.
“University presidents are assumed to have total power and control, so bringing in an external police force, you know the first thing that’s going to happen is you lose control over the situation,” said Dr. Dirks, who was a senior administrator at Columbia before he took charge at Berkeley in 2013.
At Berkeley, he said, he had been extremely reluctant to bring in off-campus police officers except when there appeared to be credible threats of violence.
“You’re in a kind of crisis situation, so you are balancing what is partial, always incomplete information with a kind of time urgency where you really feel you have to make very, very quick decisions, and it’s not the best time to make clear calls,” Dr. Dirks said.
“They are decisions under fire,” he added.
Reporting was contributed by Karla Marie Sanford and Eryn Davis from New York, Matthew Eadie from Boston and Sean Keenan from Atlanta.
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2) How the U.S. Humanitarian Pier in Gaza Will Work
By Elena Shao, Mika Gröndahl, Anjali Singhvi and Marco Hernandez, April 26, 2024
A humanitarian pier the U.S. military will bring to the Gaza Strip is currently being assembled and is expected to be ready to receive initial shipments of food and other aid early next month, according to military officials. The effort to deliver aid to the enclave through a maritime corridor, which was announced in March, will involve an elaborate, multistep process.
1. Procurement of aid
2. Inspection in Cyprus
3. Sea journey to Gaza
4. Transfer to U.S.-built pier
5. Distribution within Gaza
A thousand American soldiers and sailors will be involved in the pier project, a senior military official said in a Pentagon call with reporters on Thursday. The pier will initially enable the transfer of about 90 truckloads of aid per day, the official said, and will eventually ramp up to 150 truckloads per day at full capacity.
U.S. authorities have said the pier is intended to supplement, not replace, existing aid deliveries over land. U.N. data indicates that land-based deliveries have risen slightly in recent weeks but still fall far short of vast need in the enclave. Dozens of Gazans have died from causes related to malnutrition and dehydration, and the United Nations’ World Food Program has said half of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million is starving.
Once aid reaches the shore, relief organizations that will distribute it within Gaza will face familiar dangers and obstacles amid ongoing Israeli bombardment.
1. Aid, primarily food, will be procured from countries around the world.
A majority of the aid will be food collected from several countries and transported to the Larnaca port in Cyprus.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is working closely with the military to coordinate plans for the pier, said some of the items that would come through the maritime corridor would include nutrient-dense food bars, sourced from Dubai; foods intended to treat severe malnutrition in children, sourced from Kenya; and relief supplies, including hygiene kits, sourced from Europe.
Military officials have said other countries and organizations will also contribute food and money.
2. Shipments will be inspected in Cyprus under Israeli oversight.
At the Larnaca port, Israeli representatives will be present as Cypriot authorities inspect items, according to an Israeli official with knowledge of the inspection plans.
The official said the standards for inspection would be the same as those at the land crossings into Gaza. Aid officials have said those inspections are exhaustive and sometimes arbitrary.
World Central Kitchen, a disaster relief nonprofit, has tested the maritime corridor twice before at a smaller scale in March. The loading, scanning and inspection process for those two ships took between two and three days each, according to Juan Camilo Jimenez Garces, a regional manager for the organization. The first ship, a partnership with the Spanish nonprofit Open Arms, carried about 200 tons of aid, while the second carried more than 300 tons.
3. The sea journey will take at least 15 hours.
The roughly 250-mile journey from Cyprus to Gaza normally takes about 15 hours, or a full day of travel, but it could take up to a couple of days depending on the weight of the cargo and the type of vessel. For example, the Open Arms ship, which towed its cargo on a separate platform instead of carrying it onboard, made the journey in about three days.
Ships can also be delayed because of unfavorable weather conditions. That was one factor that held up the second World Central Kitchen ship, Jennifer, for about two weeks at Larnaca after it was scheduled to depart.
4. Aid will be shuttled from a floating platform near Gaza to a pier anchored to land.
Gaza has no international seaport; Israel has for decades prevented the construction of one. Because waters near the shore are too shallow for large vessels to approach the humanitarian pier directly, the United States is also building a floating platform two miles off the coast, where ships carrying aid will first offload their cargo.
Smaller Army vessels, known as L.C.U.s (for “landing craft utility”) and L.S.V.s (for “logistics support vessels”), will transport the aid in batches from the platform to the pier.
At least 14 U.S. ships are involved in the building and operation of the pier, according to a military official — some carrying necessary heavy machinery and equipment. U.S. service members will build the pier at sea, using modular units eight feet wide and 20 or 40 feet long, and a long ferry will drag it to shore. It will then be anchored by Israeli forces on the shore in northern Gaza to ensure there are no U.S. boots on the ground.
Humanitarian aid officials involved in receiving and distributing the aid have pushed to keep their engagement with the Israeli military as limited as possible.
5. Aid will have to be taken into Gaza by truck, but safe distribution remains a challenge.
The World Food Program will help distribute aid inside Gaza after it arrives at the pier, the U.S. Agency for International Development said last week.
Trucks coordinated by aid groups will transport aid from a secure area near the pier to U.N. warehouses, of which there are more than 20 across Gaza, and then eventually to hundreds of community kitchens, shelters, smaller warehouses and other distribution points throughout the region.
A majority of the distribution points are in southern Gaza, where most of the population has been forced to evacuate, but demographers estimate that several hundred thousand people remain in the northern part of the enclave, where famine is imminent.
A small number of routes are available to the distribution trucks, because the Israeli military has limited road access and Israeli airstrikes have turned much of the landscape to rubble. As usual, the convoys will need to coordinate their movements closely with the Israeli military.
Aid officials have emphasized that the most efficient method of delivering aid into Gaza remains through land routes, and they have expressed concern that the pier might deflect attention from efforts to increase the amount of aid delivered over land.
Several previous attempts at delivering aid to Gazans have ended in deadly tragedy. This month, Israel struck a convoy belonging to World Central Kitchen, killing seven of the group’s aid workers. Israel has also bombed an aid warehouse on at least one occasion, a strike it said was targeted to kill a Hamas commander.
Aid experts say the hunger crisis in Gaza is human-made, citing the decades-long blockade of the territory by Israel and backed by Egypt, Israel’s near-complete siege after Oct. 7 and its tight restrictions on aid-truck entry ever since. The U.N. has said that Israel’s restrictions of aid, destruction of infrastructure and displacement of Gazans may amount to the use of starvation as a war tactic.
Israel has pushed back, and its officials have blamed U.N. aid agencies for failing to distribute aid effectively. They have also said that Hamas, which rules Gaza and has been deemed a terrorist organization, has been systematically seizing aid. David Satterfield, the U.S. special envoy for humanitarian aid, said in February that Israel had not brought forward specific evidence of theft or diversion of U.N.-delivered aid.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis has continued to grow more dire. Many Gazans have died seeking aid, including more than 100 who were killed while trying to get food from an aid convoy, according to Gazan health officials, and more than a dozen who drowned while retrieving airdropped aid that had fallen into the sea.
Helene Cooper, John Ismay, Adam Rasgon, Eric Schmitt, Adam Sella and Amy Schoenfeld Walker contributed reporting.
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3) Even With Gaza Under Siege, Some Are Imagining Its Reconstruction
International development agencies have been meeting with Middle East business interests and urban planners to map out an economic future for the territory.
By Peter S. Goodman, April 28, 2024
“The plan centers on a series of major projects, including a deepwater port, a desalination plant to provide drinking water, an online health care service and a transportation corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank. A fund for reconstruction and development would oversee future undertakings. …The deepwater port would be established on an artificial island built from the nearly 30 million tons of debris and rubble that are expected to cover the territory whenever the conflict is over, with removal anticipated to take as long as a decade. …‘Every truck that is going to remove rubble is a small business itself, supporting a family.’"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/business/gaza-economy-rebuilding.html
The plan for long-term economic development of Gaza is far removed from the dire reality confronting it today. Credit...Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
On a December morning in central London, more than two dozen people drawn from influential institutions across the Middle East, Europe and the United States gathered in a conference room to pursue an aspiration that, at that moment, verged on preposterous. They were there to plan for the reconstruction and long-term economic development of Gaza.
Gaza was under relentless bombardment by Israeli military forces in response to terrorist attacks launched by Hamas in October. Communities throughout the territory were being reduced to rubble, and tens of thousands of people had been killed. Families confronted the immediacy of hunger, fear and grief.
Yet at the meeting in London, members of the international establishment discussed how to eventually transform Gaza from a place defined by isolation and poverty into a Mediterranean commercial hub centered on trade, tourism and innovation, yielding a middle class.
The group included senior officials from American and European economic development agencies, executives from Middle Eastern finance and construction companies and two partners from the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Officially, they were attending only as individuals, not as representatives of their institutions.
The plan they produced is far removed from the dire reality confronting Gaza today. Turning it into reality would require the end of a war that has left the territory devastated, to say nothing of tens of billions of dollars in investment. It would also demand resolution to the monumental and entirely uncertain political question of who eventually controls Gaza, and then the cooperation of that authority. All of that makes the plan well short of a blueprint for action.
Yet participants maintain that the mere exercise of mapping out a more prosperous future holds value because it can prepare the way for projects once conditions are suitable — a notion that has propelled such planning in conflict zones like Kuwait after it was invaded by Iraq and Ukraine.
“We are proposing to connect Gaza to the world over the long term,” said Chris Choa, founder and director of Outcomist, a London firm that designs large-scale urban development projects, and one of the initial conveners of the group, known as Palestine Emerging.
Among those involved are Hashim Shawa, chairman of the Bank of Palestine, a commercial bank; Samer Khoury, chief executive of Consolidated Contractors International, a construction company engaged in major projects across the Middle East; and Mohammed Abukhaizaran, a board member of the Arab Hospitals Group, a medical provider in the West Bank. All would potentially have a stake in the eventual work of rebuilding.
“As soon as the war started, my team and I started developing a plan to build a facility in Gaza as soon as the war ends,” Mr. Abukhaizaran said in an interview.
The group is clear that the most pressing work is the delivery of food, water, health care and emergency shelter to the residents of Gaza, who are now contending with catastrophe. But the primary focus of their plan is on the rebuilding that would unfold over the following decades.
“The Gaza war needs to end immediately, and there will be an incredible and immediate humanitarian effort,” said Mr. Abukhaizaran. “But we also need to think long term about building a better future for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The initiative, one of several under discussion, has gained the interest and advice of major international funding organizations including the World Bank, said a senior agency official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The bank views the plan as a useful contribution toward a strategy that could generate jobs in Gaza by integrating the territory into the global economy.
Representatives for United States government agencies have attended Palestine Emerging workshops and offered counsel on the details of the plan, a senior American official said, also speaking on condition that they not be named. American engagement with the initiative has been driven by the assumption that greater economic opportunity in Gaza is necessary to undercut popular support for Hamas, the official added.
The plan centers on a series of major projects, including a deepwater port, a desalination plant to provide drinking water, an online health care service and a transportation corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank. A fund for reconstruction and development would oversee future undertakings.
The most forward-looking components, such as reducing customs barriers to trade and introducing a new currency in place of the Israeli shekel, assume the eventual establishment of Palestinian autonomy, a step that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to resist. He has also brushed aside the prospect that the future governance of Gaza could include a role for the Palestinian Authority, the most obvious potential partner for the reconstruction initiative.
The enormous price tag of any rebuilding is another impediment. The toll of the damage to Gaza’s crucial infrastructure has reached $18.5 billion, according to a recent estimate by the World Bank and the United Nations. Half the population is on the verge of famine, and more than a million people lack homes.
Who might deliver such funding is among the largest variables. A previous development plan for the Palestinian territories advanced by the Trump administration in 2019 envisioned substantial investment from Persian Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The new initiative has yet to engage with the Gulf countries, Mr. Choa said.
The imperative for development in Gaza predates the current war. The unemployment rate in the territory was more than 45 percent in 2022, according to the World Bank. More than half the population was living in poverty, according to the International Monetary Fund.
While visions of modern transportation systems may now seem tangential to Gaza’s essential needs, the plan is governed by the assumption that even temporary structures like emergency housing and health care facilities must be thoughtfully placed to avoid squandering future possibilities.
“Temporary tends to become permanent very quickly,” Mr. Choa said. “Someone says, ‘We’re going to put this big refugee camp right here,’ but that could be exactly where you want to put a wastewater treatment plant or a transit line in the future. You then create an obstacle.”
Mr. Choa, 64, has spent much of his international architectural career wrestling with such details. After the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, he took part in a commission tasked with sketching out the future of Lower Manhattan. He later lived and worked in China, where he oversaw master plans in major urban areas. After moving to London in 2006, he continued such work in Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.
He first grappled with a detailed plan for Gaza in 2015 through work commissioned by Palestinian business interests. He led several missions to Gaza, meeting with the Palestinian Authority and the arm of the Israeli Defense Forces that administered the territory. But the pandemic and Israeli concerns about security halted the effort.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel in October, he sought to revive the project, joining forces with Baron Frankal, chief executive of the Portland Trust, a London-based organization that pursues economic opportunities for Palestinians.
Following the December meeting in London, an expanded group of 58 gathered in Washington in early March. A meeting was held recently in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank. Another meeting is planned for Tel Aviv in early June.
The group has briefed the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mr. Frankal said. One member of the initiative, Wael Zakout, a former World Bank official, recently joined the cabinet of the incoming Palestinian government.
The group has not engaged Hamas, which had overseen Gaza since 2007 and is widely condemned as a terrorist organization.
“If Hamas are still players, people are not going to invest tens of billions of dollars,” said Stephen Byers, a former British cabinet secretary in the government led by Tony Blair, who attended the London meeting.
The ideas that have emerged from the workshops extend into the next quarter-century. These include the erection of a cutting edge soccer stadium and the elevation of the existing soccer team to a more internationally competitive level, and the creation of a strategy to encourage a Palestinian film industry.
The deepwater port would be established on an artificial island built from the nearly 30 million tons of debris and rubble that are expected to cover the territory whenever the conflict is over, with removal anticipated to take as long as a decade.
The plan proposes the establishment of a degree-granting Technical University of Reconstruction in northern Gaza that would draw students from around the world. They would study strategies to dig out from disaster and spur development, using postwar Gaza as a living laboratory.
The destruction is so extensive that the usual means of administering aid and overseeing rebuilding will be inadequate, said the World Bank official.
American government agencies face legal restrictions on working directly with the Palestinian Authority. Other institutions are reluctant to transact with the Palestinian Authority given its reputation for corruption. All of this makes private companies critical elements of the plan, even as they too will grapple with the risks of investing in a highly uncertain climate.
While the largest projects require clarity over the future political administration of Gaza, other initiatives, such as those aimed at encouraging small businesses, could begin as soon as military activities cease.
“I want to focus on how we open the bread store, how we get factories up and running,” said Jim Pickup, chief executive of the Middle East Investment Initiative, a nonprofit that finances development projects. “Every truck that is going to remove rubble is a small business itself, supporting a family.”
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4) Israel faces a stark dilemma as it weighs whether to invade Rafah.
By Isabel Kershner Reporting from Jerusalem, April 28, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/28/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas
Palestinians holding Eid al-Fitr prayers by the ruins of a mosque in Rafah, earlier this month. Credit...Shadi Tabatibi/Reuters
Israel faces a stark dilemma as it weighs a ground invasion of Rafah, Hamas’s last bastion in southern Gaza, according to Israeli officials and analysts.
Should it go ahead with a full-scale attack? Or should it suspend the operation in favor of a possible cease-fire deal with Hamas for the release of hostages still held in the enclave?
The prospect of an either-or decision to hold off on temporarily or even permanently invading Rafah comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government faces intense pressure both abroad and at home. International diplomats are pushing to break a deadlock in cease-fire negotiations and hard-liners within Mr. Netanyahu’s government are insistent that the Rafah operation goes ahead soon.
Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, made the equation clear this weekend.
“If there will be a deal, we will suspend the operation” in Rafah, he told Israel’s Channel 12, echoing what officials have been saying privately about the planned ground invasion of the city that has alarmed Israel’s allies. Mr. Katz is a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s security cabinet, but not the smaller war cabinet overseeing the campaign in Gaza. Both groups have met in recent days to discuss the issues.
The Israeli military has already started calling up reserve soldiers for a potential Rafah operation. An Israeli official said that Israel — under intense American pressure to avoid harm to the more than one million Gazans sheltering there — could start evacuating civilians by the end of the month.
But the official said Israel was also using the threat of an imminent military maneuver to press Hamas into a hostage deal, conveying the message that Israel won’t wait much longer. Another Israeli official said the same. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters.
Negotiations for a hostage deal, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, have long been at an impasse. Hamas has consistently demanded an Israeli commitment to end the war in Gaza, with international guarantees, as a condition for a deal, a demand that Israel has been unwilling to consider.
For Israel, analysts say, the Rafah calculus is complicated.
“Without going into Rafah, it seems like nothing has been accomplished,” said Nachman Shai, a former Israeli government minister and military spokesman.
After six months of war, Hamas’s leadership is still mostly intact, he noted, even if the majority of its battalions have been dismantled or degraded.
“But if Israel goes into Rafah, it can work either way,” Mr. Shai said. A military operation could pressure the Hamas leaders believed to be hiding there into releasing hostages still held in the enclave. Alternatively, it could cause them to call off any prospective deal, he said.
Hamas and the Qatari mediators, for their part, appear to be increasingly trying to engage the Israeli public directly, to increase popular pressure on the government for a hostage deal.
In recent days, Hamas released two propaganda videos featuring three of the hostages.
In rare interviews this weekend with two Israeli news media outlets, Haaretz and Kan, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry blamed both Israel and Hamas for the months of deadlock in hostage talks.
“We were hoping to see much more flexibility,” the spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, told Haaretz, “much more seriousness, much more commitment on both sides, all through the process, from day one.”
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5) Crackdowns at 4 College Protests Lead to More Than 200 Arrests
The police made arrests at Washington University in St. Louis, Northeastern, Arizona State and Indiana, as more schools move in on encampments.
By Anna Betts, Matthew Eadie and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Published April 27, 2024, Updated April 28, 2024
More than 200 protesters were arrested on Saturday at Northeastern University, Arizona State University, Indiana University and Washington University in St. Louis, according to officials, as colleges across the country struggle to quell growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on campus.
More than 700 protesters have been arrested on U.S. campuses since April 18, when Columbia University had the New York Police Department clear a protest encampment there. In several cases, most of those who were arrested have been released.
At Washington University in St. Louis, more than 80 arrests were made and the campus was locked down on Saturday evening, university officials said in a statement, adding that the campus police were still processing arrests. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for the 2024 presidential election, was among those arrested, along with her campaign manager and another staff member, a spokesman for the campaign said.
Earlier in the day, at Northeastern in Boston, protesters had set up an encampment on the campus’s Centennial Common this week that drew more than 100 supporters. The administration had asked the protesters to leave, but many students did not.
Around dawn on Saturday, Massachusetts State Police officers arrived at the encampment and began to arrest protesters, putting them in zip-tie handcuffs and taking several tents down. They said they had arrested 102 protesters. It was unclear how many of those arrested were students, but the university said students who showed their university IDs were being released.
A Northeastern spokeswoman, Renata Nyul, said the demonstration had been “infiltrated by professional organizers” and that the “use of virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews,’ crossed the line.”
Protesters denied both claims, and a video appeared to show that it was a pro-Israel counterprotester who used the phrase, as part of his criticism of the pro-Palestinian protesters’ chants. In response to that video, Ms. Nyul stood by her initial comments, adding that “any suggestion that repulsive, antisemitic comments are sometimes acceptable depending on the context is reprehensible.”
After protesters had been removed from the encampment by the police and then handcuffed and brought into a nearby building, they moved to block a nearby alley where police vehicles were parked. They cheered in support when one of the arrested protesters — wearing a Northeastern sweatshirt — waved through the building’s windows with zip-tied hands.
Alina Caudle, a sophomore at Northeastern University, reiterated the protesters’ demands that the university disclose its investments and divest from companies that protesters view as supporting Israel's war in Gaza.
“We want them to divest our money that we’re paying for our tuition,” Ms. Caudle said. “Our administration is not listening to us.”
Ms. Caudle said she believed the vast majority of students in the encampment were Northeastern students, along with a large amount of Jewish students and faculty supporting the protest.
By 11 a.m. on Saturday, the majority of the encampment was cleared. A moving company had been brought in to load up the tents, snacks and other items that had been scattered throughout the grounds.
The mass arrest at Northeastern was the second early-morning crackdown on protesters at a Boston campus in less than a week. Early on Thursday morning, Boston Police officers arrested 118 people at Emerson College after protesters refused to move and formed a barricade.
More than 2,500 miles away, at Arizona State University, the school police arrested 69 people early Saturday morning after they set up an unauthorized encampment, which was in violation of university policy, school officials said.
The school said that the protesters had created an encampment and that the group was instructed multiple times to disperse.
“While the university will continue to be an environment that embraces freedom of speech, ASU’s first priority is to create a safe and secure environment that supports teaching and learning,” school officials said in a statement.
Three people were also arrested at the school in relation to a protest on Friday, officials said.
At Indiana University Bloomington, where the university police had arrested 33 people at an encampment earlier this week, campus and state police arrested 23 more protesters on Saturday. Officials said that a group had “erected numerous tents and canopies on Friday night with the stated intention to occupy the university space indefinitely.”
Schools across the country have used differing strategies over the past week to tamp down protests. Some have backed off and sought to de-escalate tensions, while at other colleges, like the University of Southern California and Emory University, the police have rushed in to break up encampments and arrest students and faculty members, among others.
At some demonstrations, there were some reports of injuries, but in many cases, the arrests have been peaceful, and protesters have often willingly given themselves up when officers moved in.
On Saturday, there appeared to be increased police presence in several campuses, though not all of them have made arrests. At the University of Pennsylvania, more than a dozen campus police officers were stationed along barricades, with over 100 protesters in an encampment and about a dozen pro-Israel counterprotesters across the campus walk.
Across the country at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, officers were stationed all over the now-closed campus after protesters occupied two buildings earlier this week. About three dozen protesters were inside an encampment.
Beyond arrests, schools are using other measures to apply pressure. At Harvard, access to its historic Harvard Yard was restricted, allowing in only those who showed a university ID. The university also suspended a pro-Palestinian group, but the group and its supporters set up an encampment in the yard nonetheless.
On Saturday, Harvard’s dean of students sent an email to the student body warning that anyone participating in the encampment faced discipline. But there was no sign of any impending police operation.
At Cornell University, the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, reported on Friday that four students connected with the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus had been suspended from the school. Cornell officials confirmed the suspensions were issued but declined to provide a number.
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, the university’s vice president for university relations, Joel M. Malina, said that the school had asked the protesters to move to an area “where noise would not disturb classes” and where people could easily avoid the encampment, but he said that offer was rejected.
Mr. Malina also said the university was prepared to issue additional suspensions, “as well as referrals to HR for employee participants.”
Nick Wilson, a student who said he was among those suspended, said in an opinion article for The Cornell Daily Sun that he and others had been withdrawn from their current courses and that they were not allowed on campus. Still, he wrote, the suspension “in an odd way” gave him hope. By his reasoning, institutions like Cornell would not have suspended him and others “unless they truly fear our movement may succeed.”
Halina Bennet, Andrew Spielmann, Jonathan Wolfe and Joel Wolfram contributed reporting.
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6) Blinken meets with Arab officials to discuss Gaza and postwar plans.
By Edward Wong traveling with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, April 29, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/29/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, right, attended a joint ministerial meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Monday. Credit...Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Arab officials on Monday in Saudi Arabia about the war between Israel and Hamas and the difficult issues it has created, from humanitarian aid to hostages. Mr. Blinken plans to travel to Jordan and Israel on Tuesday.
After landing in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, shortly after dawn, Mr. Blinken met with Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, and then with foreign ministers and a top foreign policy adviser from five other Arab nations in the Persian Gulf that, along with Saudi Arabia, form the Gulf Cooperation Council. Prince Faisal was also part of that second meeting.
The State Department listed the cease-fire and hostage issues first in the summary it released of Mr. Blinken’s one-on-one meeting with the prince. The two “discussed ongoing efforts to reach an immediate cease-fire in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages held by Hamas,” the department said.
The two diplomats also talked about greater regional integration and “a pathway to a Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel,” the summary said. That was a reference to negotiations over a broad deal that would involve the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestinian representatives agreeing to terms that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state and greater diplomatic recognition for Israel in the region.
Mr. Blinken planned to meet with Arab and European officials in a group later on Monday to talk about plans for rebuilding Gaza, even though Israel is still carrying out its war there and has not stepped back from its difficult — and perhaps impossible — goal of fully eradicating Hamas.
Saudi Arabia is hosting a three-day meeting of the World Economic Forum, and top Arab officials, including Mr. Blinken’s diplomatic counterparts, are attending the event in Riyadh. The gathering includes senior ministers from Qatar and Egypt, the two Arab mediators in multiple rounds of talks over a potential cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
“The quickest way to bring this to an end is to get to a cease-fire and the release of hostages,” Mr. Blinken said in an onstage talk with Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. “Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel. And at the moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas.”
“I’m hopeful they will make the right decision and we can have a fundamental change in the dynamic,” he added.
Mr. Blinken and other top aides of President Biden have also been trying to push for a long-term political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is where the broader deal comes in. In a call meant to pave the way for Mr. Blinken’s trip, Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by phone on Sunday afternoon for nearly an hour.
The two leaders discussed “increases in the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” according to a White House statement released after the call, and Mr. Biden repeated his warning against an Israeli ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. He also reviewed with Mr. Netanyahu the negotiations over a hostage release.
In their best-case scenario, the Biden administration envisions Saudi Arabia and perhaps a few other Arab nations agreeing to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would receive advanced weapons and security guarantees, including a mutual defense treaty, from the United States and a commitment for U.S. cooperation on a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom.
For its part, Israel would have to commit to a concrete pathway to the founding of a Palestinian nation, with specific deadlines, U.S. and Saudi officials say.
“I think it’s clear that in the absence of a real political horizon for the Palestinians, it’s going to be much harder, if not impossible, to really have a coherent plan for Gaza itself,” Mr. Blinken said at the public talk on Monday.
Prince Faisal said Sunday that Saudi officials hoped to discuss concrete steps toward creating a Palestinian state during Mr. Blinken’s visit to Riyadh. Calling the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza “a complete failing of the existing political system,” he told a news conference that the kingdom’s government believes that the only solution is “a credible, irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state.”
Before the war started last October, U.S. and Saudi officials were in intense discussions to reach an agreement on the terms of such a proposal. For those negotiators, a big question at the time was what Israel would agree to. Since the war began, the Americans and the Saudis have publicly insisted that Israel must agree to the existence of a Palestinian state.
But Israeli leaders and ordinary citizens have become even more resistant to that idea since the Oct. 7 attacks, in which the Israeli authorities say that Hamas and allied gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 people as hostages. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including thousands of children, say officials from the Gaza health ministry.
Vivian Nereim and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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7) World Central Kitchen plans to resume working in Gaza.
By Anushka Patil, April 29, 2024
Employees from the World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli airstrike early this month. Credit...Ahmed Zakot/Reuters
World Central Kitchen said on Sunday that it would resume operations in Gaza with a local team of Palestinian aid workers, nearly a month after the Israeli military killed seven of the organization’s workers in targeted drone strikes on their convoy.
Israeli military officials have said the attack was a “grave mistake” and cited a series of failures, including a breakdown in communication and violations of the military’s operating procedures.
The Washington-based aid group said that it was still calling for an independent, international investigation into the April 1 attack and that it had received “no concrete assurances” that the Israeli military’s operational procedures had changed. But the “humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire,” the aid group’s chief operating officer, Erin Gore, said in a statement.
“We are restarting our operation with the same energy, dignity, and focus on feeding as many people as possible,” she said.
The aid group said it had distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza so far and that it had trucks carrying the equivalent of nearly eight million meals waiting to enter the enclave through the Rafah crossing in the south. World Central Kitchen said it was also planning to send trucks to Gaza through Jordan and that it would open a kitchen in Al-Mawasi, a small seaside village that the Israeli military has designated as a “humanitarian zone” safe for civilians, though attacks there have continued.
Six of the seven workers killed on April 1 were from Western nations — three from Britain, one from Australia, one from Poland and one with dual citizenship of the United States and Canada. The seventh was Palestinian. They were killed in back-to-back Israeli drone strikes on their vehicles as they traveled toward Rafah after unloading food aid that had arrived by sea.
The attack prompted World Central Kitchen to immediately suspend its operations in Gaza and elicited outrage from some of Israel’s closest allies.
The World Central Kitchen convoy’s movements had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli military, but some officers had not reviewed the coordination documentation detailing which cars were part of the convoy, the military said.
Some 200 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, were killed in Gaza between Oct. 7 and the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy, according to the United Nations. A visual investigation by The New York Times showed that, well before the World Central Kitchen attack, six aid groups in Gaza had come under Israeli fire despite sharing their locations with the Israeli military.
The episode forced World Central Kitchen to decide between ending its efforts in Gaza or continuing, “knowing that aid, aid workers and civilians are being intimidated and killed,” Ms. Gore said in the statement.
“Ultimately, we decided that we must keep feeding, continuing our mission of showing up to provide food to people during the toughest of times,” she said.
At a memorial in Washington for the World Central Kitchen workers on Thursday, the group’s founder, the celebrity chef José Andrés, said that there were “many unanswered questions about what happened and why,” and that the aid group was still demanding an independent investigation into the Israeli military’s actions.
The seven aid workers had “risked everything to feed people they did not know and will never meet,” Mr. Andrés said. “They were the best of humanity.”
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8) Israeli officials believe the International Criminal Court is preparing arrest warrants over the war.
By Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley The reporters spoke to Israeli and foreign officials, April 29, 2024
Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, last week. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli officials increasingly believe that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for senior government officials on charges related to the conflict with Hamas, according to five Israeli and foreign officials.
The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.
If the court proceeds, the Israeli officials could potentially be accused of preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and pursuing an excessively harsh response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to two of the five officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
The Israeli officials, who are worried about the potential fallout from such a case, said they believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is among those who might be named in a warrant. It is not clear who might be charged from Hamas or what crimes would be cited.
The Israeli officials did not disclose the nature of the information that led them to be concerned about potential I.C.C. action, and the court did not comment on the matter.
Arrest warrants from the court would probably be seen in much of the world as a humbling moral rebuke, particularly to Israel, which for months has faced international backlash over its conduct in Gaza, including from President Biden, who called it “over the top.”
It could also affect Israel’s policies as the country presses its military campaign against Hamas. One of the Israeli officials said that the possibility of the court issuing arrest warrants had informed Israeli decision-making in recent weeks.
The Israeli and foreign officials said they didn’t know what stage the process was in. Any warrants would require approval from a panel of judges and would not necessarily result in a trial or even the targets’ immediate arrest.
Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, has previously confirmed that his team is investigating incidents during the war, but his office declined to comment for this article, saying that it does not “respond to speculation in media reports.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s office also would not comment, but on Friday the prime minister said on social media that any intervention by the I.C.C. “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not explain what prompted his statement, though he may have been responding to speculation about the arrest warrants in the Israeli press.
He also said: “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.”
Based in The Hague, the I.C.C. is the world’s only permanent international court with the power to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The court has no police force of its own. Instead, it relies on its 124 members, which include most European countries but not Israel or the United States, to arrest those named in warrants. It cannot try defendants in absentia.
But warrants from the court can pose obstacles to travel for officials named in them.
The Hamas-led raid last October led to the killing of roughly 1,200 people in Israel and the abductions of some 250 others, according to Israeli officials. The subsequent war in Gaza, including heavy Israeli bombardment, has killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gazan officials, caused widespread damage to housing and infrastructure, and brought the territory to the brink of famine.
The Israeli assault in Gaza has led the International Court of Justice, a separate court in The Hague, to hear accusations of genocide against the Israeli state and has spurred a wave of protests on college campuses in the United States.
If the I.C.C. does issue arrest warrants, they would come with deep stigmatization, placing those named in them in the same category as foreign leaders like Omar al-Bashir, the deposed president of Sudan, and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who was the subject of a warrant last year tied to his war against Ukraine.
The I.C.C.’s focus on individuals rather than states differentiates it from the International Court of Justice, which settles disputes between states.
The I.C.C. judges have ruled that the court has jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank because the Palestinians have joined the court as the State of Palestine.
Mr. Khan has said that his team will be investigating incidents that have occurred since Oct. 7 and that he will be “impartially looking at the evidence and vindicating the rights of victims whether they are in Israel or Palestine.”
Mr. Khan’s office has also been investigating allegations of war crimes committed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas; one of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity believes the new arrest warrants would be an extension of that investigation.
Hamas and the Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment. The office of Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, declined to comment.
In general, Israeli officials say that they fight according to the laws of war and that they take significant steps to protect civilians, accusing Hamas of hiding inside civilian areas and forcing Israel to pursue them there. Hamas has denied committing atrocities on Oct. 7, saying — despite video evidence to the contrary — that its fighters tried to avoid harming civilians.
Marlise Simons, Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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9) As Anger Grows Over Gaza, Arab Leaders Crack Down on Protests
Grief and rage over the war and Israel have led to demonstrations across the Arab world. Arrests suggest governments fear the outrage could boomerang.
By Vivian Yee, Vivian Nereim and Emad Mekay, April 29, 2024
Vivian Yee and Emad Mekay reported from Cairo, and Vivian Nereim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
A pro-Palestinian demonstration in Cairo in October, when the Egyptian government was organizing rallies of its own. But even then, some protesters were arrested. Credit...Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock
Like other governments across the Middle East, Egypt has not been shy about its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its denunciations of Israel over the war in Gaza are loud and constant. State media outlets broadcast images of long lines of aid trucks waiting to cross from Egypt into Gaza, spotlighting Egypt’s role as the sole conduit for most of the limited aid entering the besieged territory.
Earlier this month, however, when hundreds of people gathered in downtown Cairo to demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza, Egyptian security officers swooped in, arresting 14 protesters, according to their lawyer. Back in October, the government had organized pro-Palestinian rallies of its own. Yet at those, too, it detained dozens of people after protesters chanted slogans critical of the government. More than 50 of them remain behind bars, their lawyers say.
It was a pattern that has repeated itself around the region since Israel, responding to an attack by Hamas, began a six-month war in Gaza: Arab citizens’ grief and fury over Gaza’s plight running headlong into official repression when that outrage takes aim at their own leaders. In some countries, even public display of pro-Palestinian sentiment is enough to risk arrest.
Out of step with their people on matters of economic opportunity and political freedoms, some governments in the Arab world have long faced added discontent over their ties with Israel and its chief backer, the United States. Now the Gaza war — and what many Arabs see as their own governments’ complicity — has driven an old wedge between rulers and the ruled with new force.
Morocco is prosecuting dozens of people arrested at pro-Palestinian protests or detained for social media posts criticizing the kingdom’s rapprochement with Israel. In Saudi Arabia, which is pursuing a normalization deal with Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, which has already struck one, the authorities have displayed such hypersensitivity to any hint of opposition that many people are too frightened to speak on the issue.
And Jordan’s government, caught between its majority-Palestinian population and its close cooperation with Israel and the United States, has arrested at least 1,500 people since early October, according to Amnesty International. That includes about 500 in March, when huge protests were held outside the Israeli Embassy in Amman.
Afterward, the president of the Jordanian Senate, Faisal al-Fayez, said that his country “will not accept that demonstrations and protests turn into platforms for discord.”
Arab autocracies rarely tolerate dissent. But activism around the Palestinian cause is particularly thorny.
For decades, Arab activists have linked the struggle for justice for the Palestinians — a cause that unites Arabs of different political persuasions from Marrakesh to Baghdad — to the struggle for greater rights and freedoms at home. For them, Israel was an avatar of the authoritarian and colonialist forces that had thwarted their own societies’ growth.
“What’s happening to the Palestinian people clarifies the foundation of the problem for Arabs everywhere, that the problem is tyranny,” said Abdurrahman Sultan, a 36-year-old Kuwaiti who has participated in sit-ins in support of the Palestinian cause since the war began.
Kuwait initially tolerated some of the sit-ins. But for some Arab governments, the connection evokes peril. Palestinian flags were a common sight at the Arab Spring protests that swept the region in 2011. In Egypt, where since taking power in 2013 President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has quelled protest and muffled most criticism, the authorities are ever mindful that activism can quickly boomerang against them.
“Today they’re out to protest for Palestine; tomorrow they might protest against him himself — the president,” said Nabeh Ganady, 30, a human rights lawyer who represents the 14 activists arrested at the April 3 protest in Cairo.
The message, said Mahienor El-Massry, a human rights lawyer who joined the demonstration, “is that people shouldn’t even dream that there exists any margin for freedoms or for democracy, and that you should never gain confidence and then move toward bigger demands.”
Ms. El-Massry was arrested along with 10 other protesters during a smaller solidarity protest outside United Nations offices in Cairo last Tuesday, according to Ahmed Douma, a well-known Egyptian activist. They were later released.
In interviews conducted around Egypt, Morocco and Persian Gulf countries — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait — many citizens described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in stark terms, viewing the Palestinian cause as a struggle for justice, Israel as a symbol of oppression and, in some cases, their rulers’ dealings with Israel as morally bankrupt.
Coming after agreements by Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to normalize ties with Israel, along with Saudi steps toward following suit, the war has galvanized outrage in those countries toward not only Israel but also Arab leaders willing to work with it.
“If you’re willing to sell that, and sell those people out — sell yourself out — what’s next? What else is for sale?” said Salem, an Emirati in his 20s who asked to be identified by a middle name, given the Emirati authorities’ record of punishing dissent.
Governments that signed agreements with Israel have often described the decision as a step toward greater regional dialogue and interfaith tolerance. In February, the Emirati government said in a statement to The New York Times that keeping its diplomatic ties with Israel open was “important in difficult times.”
But because of hostility or, at best, indifference toward Israel in the broader Arab public, there is a “direct, necessary connection” between authoritarianism and the signing of such agreements, said Marc Lynch, a political science professor focused on the Middle East at George Washington University.
The fact that some gulf Arab states have used Israeli surveillance tools to monitor critics only cements that impression.
“If people had any space to democratically elect or express, they wouldn’t choose to normalize with Israel,” said Maryam AlHajri, a Qatari sociologist and anti-normalization activist.
Many Arab governments have tried to tame or harness popular anger with heated rhetoric condemning Israel over the war. Yet they see too many practical benefits to ties with Israel to renege on peace deals, analysts said.
Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, has developed a close security partnership with its neighbor over years of jointly combating militancy in northern Sinai. Egypt and Israel have also worked together to blockade Gaza to contain Hamas, whose brand of militant political Islamism Egypt considers a threat. And Egypt needs Israel’s cooperation to prevent a huge influx of Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
Gulf monarchies, including Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, which have for years faced attacks by Iran-backed groups, have long maintained back-channel security connections with Israel, which sees Iran as its greatest threat. That enemy-of-my-enemy arrangement paved the way for normalization talks later on, and critiques of those initiatives are rare since many gulf monarchies effectively ban all forms of protest and political organizing.
H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said governments were “trying to thread a line between that anger, which I think is very genuinely felt, across all sectors of Arab societies, and what those states interpret as their national security considerations.”
In the past, some of the region’s leaders permitted their frustrated populations to blow off steam with pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism. But now that the suffering in Gaza implicates Arab governments in the eyes of many of their citizens, the chants tread on sensitive territory.
Some Egyptians have criticized their government for, among other things, allowing Israel any say over the delivery of desperately needed aid into Gaza through a border crossing in Egypt. And since October, Moroccans have gathered for large, near-daily solidarity demonstrations in about 40 cities that bring together leftists and Islamists, young and old, men and women.
Mostly, the authorities have left them alone. But a few protests have been repressed, according to rights groups and witnesses, and dozens of protesters have been arrested, including a group of 13 in the city of Sale and an activist named Abdul Rahman Zankad, who had criticized Morocco’s normalization agreement with Israel on Facebook.
Mr. Zankad was sentenced to five years in prison this month.
“People are arrested simply for voicing their opinions,” said Serroukh Mohammed, a lawyer in the port city of Tangier and a member of an Islamist political organization. Moroccans will continue to protest, he said, as long as their government defies popular sentiment to maintain ties with Israel.
Representatives for the governments of Egypt and Morocco did not respond to requests for comment.
For Arabs like Mr. Sultan, from Kuwait, the absence of popular support for relations with Israel means any normalization agreements are doomed to fail.
“To make peace, you need regimes and governments that represent their people, that are elected,” he said.
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10) Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education
By Serge Schmemann, April 29, 2024
Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He was a first-year graduate student at Columbia in 1968.
1968 cannot help but see a reprise of those stormy, fateful and thrilling days in what is happening on the Morningside Heights campus today.
But there is a troubling and significant difference. If the students back in ’68 were divided into rebellious, longhaired pukes and conservative, close-cropped jocks, with a lot of undecided in between, the current protests at Columbia — and at the growing number of other campuses to which they have spread — have witnessed personal and often ugly divisions between Jewish students and Arab or Muslim students or anyone perceived to be on the “wrong” side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That, in turn, has thrust the protests squarely into the polarized politics of the land, with politicians and pundits on the right portraying the encampments as dangerous manifestations of antisemitism and wokeness and demanding that they be razed — and many university administrations calling in the police to do just that.
The transformation of the protests into a national political football is perhaps inevitable — everyone up to President Richard Nixon sounded off about students in ’68 — but it is still a shame. Because student protests, even at their most disruptive, are at their core an extension of education by other means, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war.
The hallowed notion of a university as a bastion of discourse and learning does not and cannot exclude participation in contemporary debates, which is what students are being prepared to lead. From Vietnam to apartheid to the murder of George Floyd, universities have long been places for open and sometimes fiery debate and inquiry. And whenever universities themselves have been perceived by students to be complicit or wrong in their stances, they have been challenged by their communities of students and teachers. If the university cannot tolerate the heat, it cannot serve its primary mission.
The counterargument, of course, is that without decorum and calm, the educational process is disrupted, and so it is proper and necessary for administrations to impose order. But disruption is not the only byproduct; protests can also shape and enhance education: a disproportionate number of those who rose up at Columbia in 1968 went into social service of some sort, fired by the idealism and faith in change that underpinned their protests and by the broader social movement of the ’60s.
I was a first-year graduate student at Columbia in ’68, living in the suburbs and so more of a witness than a participant in events of that spring. But it was impossible not to be swept up in the passions on the campus.
The catalyst was a protest by Black students over the construction of a gym in Morningside Park, which touched on many Black grievances against the university — the way it was pushing into Black neighborhoods, the gym’s limited access and separate door for area residents, many of them Black. The slogan was “Gym Crow must go.”
The Black sit-in quickly galvanized students from all the other social and political causes of that turbulent era — a war that was killing scores of American boys and countless Vietnamese every week, racism that just weeks earlier took the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and, yes, a celebration of flower power and love. The gym issue at Columbia was quietly resolved, but by then, other students were occupying several buildings. Finally, Columbia’s president, Grayson Kirk, called in the police.
I have a snapshot embedded in my memory of groups of students milling about the grounds, which were littered with the debris of the confrontation, many of them proudly sporting bandages from the injuries inflicted by the violent sweep of the Tactical Patrol Force. Psychedelic music blared from some window, and a lone maintenance man pushed a noisy lawn mower over a surviving patch of grass.
The sit-ins had been ended, and order was being restored, but something frightening and beautiful had been unleashed, a faith that mere students could do something about what’s wrong with the world or at least were right to try.
The classic account of Columbia ’68, “The Strawberry Statement,” a wry, punchy diary by an undergraduate, James Simon Kunen, who participated in the protests, captures the confused welter of causes, ideals, frustrations and raw excitement of that spring. “Beyond defining what it wasn’t, it is very difficult to say with certainty what anything meant. But everything must have a meaning, and everyone is free to say what meanings are. At Columbia a lot of students simply did not like their school commandeering a park, and they rather disapproved of their school making war, and they told other students, who told others, and we saw that Columbia is our school and we will have something to say for what it does.”
That’s the similarity. Just as students then could no longer tolerate the horrific images of a distant war delivered, for the first time, in almost real time by television, so many of today’s students have found the images from Gaza, now transmitted instantly onto their phones, to demand action. And just as students in ’68 insisted that their school sever ties to a government institute doing research for the war, so today’s students demand that Columbia divest from companies profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza. And students then and now have found their college administrators deaf to their entreaties.
Certainly there’s a lot to debate here. Universities do have a serious obligation to protect Jewish students from antisemitism and to maintain order, but it is to their students and teachers that they must answer, not to Republicans eager to score points against woke “indoctrination” at elite colleges or to megadonors seeking to push their agendas onto institutions of higher learning.
Like Mr. Kunen, I’m not sure exactly how that spring of 1968 affected my life. I suspect it forced me to think in ways that have informed my reporting on the world. What I do know is that I’m heartened to see that college kids will still get angry over injustice and suffering and will try to do something about it.
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