Student activists are planning a fresh wave of pro-Palestine protests at US colleges this fall, boosted by a “summer school” led by organizers over the break, ramping up coordination and strategy in the wake of police crackdowns on campuses this past spring.
Despite academic suspensions, doxing attempts and the arrests of more than 3,000 students nationwide, the students who occupied their campuses’ lawns with tents last semester are gearing up for another – possibly bigger – round of demonstrations “on all fronts, by all means”, calling once again for a ceasefire in Gaza and for their colleges to divest from financial ties to Israel.
The National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization held online education and training sessions this summer, offering unofficial courses to students who belong to specific student organizations – such as Jewish Voices for Peace, the Muslim Students Association and local SJP university chapters around the country – on the history of Palestine but also on how to organize, with the aim of creating a more unified and better prepared mass protest movement.
“The purpose of it was kind of to have all these people that are involved in SJP itself to build different workshops to be more educated on organizing and to be prepared for certain situations,” said Sereen Haddad, a Palestinian American undergraduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, a public institution in that state’s capital, Richmond.
NSJP and local SJP chapters have been accused by their opponents of sympathizing with Hamas – a claim the organization vehemently rejects – and have been suspended on some college campuses including Columbia University in New York, Brandeis University in Massachusetts and George Washington University in Washington DC, for allegedly breaking campus rules.
“Obviously, it’s a lot [logistically], but at the end of the day, these are still students and they have a lot to learn. Whenever you’re organizing, it’s very complicated. It’s not just like A plus B equals C – there’s all these different factors that go into it,” Haddad, 19, said.
Student protesters at Columbia University, where the first pro-Palestinian encampment was set up, pitched tents and rolled out sleeping bags in front of the iconic Butler Library early on 17 April. It was an escalation of demonstrations that had occurred on campus and across the US, often with dueling stances, since Hamas’s 7 October attack last year and Israel’s massive and continuing retaliatory bombing and ground campaigns on the Gaza Strip. Israel’s war has so far killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.
Student protesters at Columbia said this week it had taken months to plan the encampment.
Inspired by their peers at Columbia, students at roughly 80 other US universities scrambled to replicate the tent protests in New York City, but with much less time to prepare. Legal observers and faculty members have said the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, but shocking videos showed many protests – at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Emory University in Atlanta, and many more – were met with violent clashes with police, called onto campus by university administrators, who eventually cleared the protest camps.
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned on Wednesday after months of intense backlash from different sides for her handling of the protests, amid accusations of both tolerating antisemitism and effectively supporting of genocide.
Despite police crackdowns across the country and academic punishments, student organizers expect to come back this fall just as determined to protest, and much more coordinated. Many have been boosted by sessions with the NSJP and a coalition of other groups that advocate for a free Palestine and argue, as does the United Nation’s international court of justice (ICJ), that Israel imposes a form of apartheid on Palestinians..
NSJP announced the creation of a student-led summer school on social media in June; subjects related to political history and mass organizing were taught. The organization said more than 1,000 people registered. Parts of the syllabus, shared exclusively with the Guardian, showed 15 classes held remotely in the evenings over the course of six weeks, taught in part by graduate and doctoral students, as well as guest speakers whose names the organizers declined to share.
🚨CALLING ALL STUDENTS: SIGN UP FOR THE NSJP SUMMER SCHOOL 2024 🇵🇸
— National Students for Justice in Palestine (@NationalSJP) June 12, 2024
In the aftermath of the most impactful years of Palestine student organizing in decades, National Students for Justice in Palestine invites student organizers and movement partners to deepen our understanding of… pic.twitter.com/WMwcEHx4OU
Leaders at SJP chapters who wished to remain anonymous did not disclose details about what students learned in these two-hour classes, but said some of the subjects covered included safety during a protest, the rights of protesters, lessons in appropriate protest vocabulary, explanations of concepts such as a bail fund in the event of arrests, and the geopolitics of Israel and Palestine.
One eye-catching session title was: The student intifada, the uprising continues.
One student detailed the teaching of protest safety tactics in case police were called, such as using color coding to designate certain volunteers. For example, those marked with red will lock their arms with each other to form a human barricade between police and students, prepared to be arrested and face repercussions. “Green” volunteers may leave as soon as things escalate and police arrive, while “yellow” volunteers remain at the protest after police leave.
A spokesperson for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition said the group “remain[s] steadfast in our commitment to the Palestinian people and refuse to flinch in the face of threats, retaliation, and attempts to discredit the unified power of students on a now-global stage. As long as bombs continue to drop and Columbia refuses to heed the call of divestment, our work is not done and we will continue to resist: we’ve said it before and will say it again, we’ll be back.”
The Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest coalition said it will “continue to apply pressure on all fronts, by all means. We will also focus our energies on building and organizing a larger base, especially after the encampment mobilized many new people into the struggle for a free Palestine.”
“If anything, I think that has strengthened our resolve,” said Craig Birckhead-Morton, a recent Yale graduate and incoming Columbia graduate student who, like many, is simultaneously navigating disciplinary hearings and court systems after his participation in last semester’s protests.
“We don’t have to be as afraid of these institutions as we previously thought we had to be. I think people will come out more, people who weren’t even necessarily moved by the agenda who saw their fellow students being arrested and brutalized started to get them to move.”
Student organizers did not rule out more encampments as well as occupations, mass demonstrations on campusand pop-up protests at the homes of administrators or university board members.
In a statement sent to the Guardian on Thursday, National Students for Justice in Palestine wrote regarding the war and rebellion on campus.
It said: “As we enter an eleventh month of the relentless genocide in Gaza, it is crucial to note that students are using their summer to prepare for yet another semester of the Student Intifada. No level of academic repression or police violence will stop us. We will only use down time to build and come back stronger than ever before.”
