Defend Pro-Palestinian Campus Protesters!

APRIL 15—A nationwide wave of campus repression against pro-Palestinian activists has dramatically escalated in recent weeks. Students and staff are being met with slander, suspensions, expulsions, even arrests. Their “crimes” all boil down to the same thing: They dared oppose the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.

The Pomona College administration provoked protests by dismantling a mock apartheid wall built to illustrate life for Palestinians in the West Bank. On April 5, students from colleges in the Los Angeles area staged a sit-in at the president’s office. The administration called the cops, who stormed the building dressed in riot gear. The demonstrators were arrested and charged with trespassing. President Gabrielle Starr immediately issued “interim” suspensions against the students, evicting them from their dorms and banning them from campus.

Another flash point is Columbia University, where the administration suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace last fall. On January 19, two pro-Zionist students who were IDF soldiers sprayed “skunk” (a dangerous chemical agent) at Columbia protesters. At least eight students required hospitalization. These thugs continue to walk the campus with impunity.

Recently, the administration launched an inquest into a March 24 teach-in on Palestine featuring Palestinian activist Khaled Barakat. Columbia even hired private investigators to intimidate students, demanding that they turn over their private texts. On April 3, the school suspended six students for organizing the event, later lifting two of the suspensions while proceeding to evict the other four from their dorms. Columbia Professor Abdul Kayum Ahmed was notified on April 9 that he would likely lose his post at the Mailman School of Public Health scarcely a month after the Wall Street Journal accused him of pro-Palestinian “political indoctrination” in his class.

Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, blocked a student vote to divest student government funds from companies that do business in Israel. For protesting in the hallway outside the chancellor’s office on March 26, some 27 students faced suspension. The school later expelled three, suspended another and the remainder face disciplinary probation.

As the PDC wrote last October, such repression is “all part of a vile campaign to brand those showing solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people as being anti-Semitic or even terrorists. These acts of repression represent a threat to anyone opposing the Israeli massacre of Palestinians, which is backed to the hilt by the U.S. and other imperialist powers” (WV No. 1180, 22 December 2023). The attacks on pro-Palestinian students are being carried out at the behest of the capitalist rulers who continue to arm the Zionists to the teeth and must be opposed.

• Lift the suspensions with full reinstatement!
• No reprisals!
• Drop all the charges!