pro-Palestinian students believe they are deprived of their freedom of expression

At the prestigious Colombia University, a year of student mobilization and occupation has had a profound impact on relations between universities and their students.

Since the spring, the prestigious American campus of Columbia University has been barricaded. In northern Manhattan, dozens of security guards now control all entrances. A political decision, according to Will, a student in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. “The university does not say that it is to prevent the movement in support of the Palestinians, but that is the effect it has, according to the student. They say that a university must remain neutral, but that is not true. Columbia has chosen its side. You just have to see where your money goes.”

Last April, the Columbia campus was occupied by dozens of students who demanded that their university cut all its ties, financial and institutional, with Israel. The administration called in the police, a first in the history of this university, rather marked by its militant past. In 1968, Columbia had been a mecca for refusing the Vietnam War, recalls a student. “Columbia has a real activist tradition and our leaders boast of it, she recalls. They say they love it when their students are engaged. But apparently, they only like our freedom of expression in the past.” The young woman describes a climate of repression and mistrust that has established itself between the university and its students.

Distrust has also set in between the students: the mobilization claims to be anti-Zionist, and many Jewish students see it as an anti-Semitic threat. Accusation rejected by Morgan, leader of Jewish Voices for Peace, an organization very active in Columbia for the past year. “Israel claims to speak on behalf of all Jews and treats as anti-Semitic all those who oppose its violence. But we do not accept being used to justify the oppression of the Palestinian people or the American war machine. “

The escalation of the conflict in Lebanon has only strengthened student mobilization, in New York as on other campuses across the country. American youth who are becoming politicized but do not find themselves in the very pro-Israeli positions defended by both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the presidential campaign.