New pressure from New York’s Columbia University against the student movement in favor of the Palestinian cause: the president on Monday urged demonstrators to leave their camp “voluntarily”, after the failure of negotiations.
After more than a week of demonstrations across the United States – a vague part of this prestigious university – the White House on Sunday called on this movement in support of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to remain “peaceful”.
Hundreds of people, students and activists, were briefly questioned, sometimes arrested and prosecuted.
“We urge those in the camp to disperse voluntarily. We are studying alternatives internally to end this crisis as soon as possible,” wrote the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, in a long press release.
The university leader deplored that negotiations between Columbia and a group of students, underway since last Wednesday, had not resulted in an agreement to dismantle a “village” of tents of some 200 people set up on a lawn on the tree-lined campus. , in northern Manhattan.
The presidency, however, assured this weekend that it had given up calling on the New York police to evacuate the camp and arrest students or activists, as was the case in a number of universities in the country.
This new wave of protests on American campuses against the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip against the Islamist movement Hamas has taken a very political turn in the United States, six months before the presidential election, between allegations of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
“Many of our Jewish students, and others, have felt an intolerable atmosphere in recent weeks. Many have left the campus and it is a tragedy,” underlined Mr.me Shafik.
The presidents of Harvard University and UPenn resigned this winter after statements deemed ambiguous before Congress in Washington on the fight against anti-Semitism.
The United States, and primarily the megacity New York, has the largest number of Jewish Americans in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.