The police entered the Sciences Po Paris higher education school before noon on Friday to evacuate the pro-Gaza activists who had occupied it since the day before: the renowned establishment and its campuses remain the epicenter in France of a student mobilization in favor of the Palestinians, which ignites the political debate.
The protest movement is inspired by the situation in the United States, where the campuses of around forty universities are experiencing a wave of mobilization, with muscular interventions by the police.
“The firmness is and will remain total,” the French government said on Friday.
“Regarding the situation in the establishments, some could be resolved through dialogue. For others, requisitions by university presidents were made and the police intervened immediately. This firmness is paying off: 23 disturbed sites were evacuated yesterday,” the same source said.
According to a Sciences Po student who spoke to the press, “around fifty students were still present in the premises on rue Saint-Guillaume”, in the center of Paris, at the time when the forces of the order entered the school on Friday, a week after a mobilization marred by tensions at Sciences Po Paris.
Since the beginning of the morning, the street has been blocked by the police. “A disproportionate and safe response,” said two students from the Palestine Committee, who also regret the absence of “medical aid” for the seven students who began a hunger strike the day before. Actions carried out by students in support of Gaza take place mainly in Sciences Po establishments across France, but few within universities.
“Dialogue table” held by Jewish students
Place de la Sorbonne, a few hundred meters from Science Po Paris, the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) was to hold a “dialogue table” for a good part of the day, with several guests, including the designer of BD Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat).
“We want to prove that it is not true that we cannot talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To do this, we must put aside those who point the finger at Jewish students as complicit in the genocide,” declared the president of the UEJF, Samuel Lejoyeux, on Radio J.
Thursday evening, the management of Sciences Po Paris – which welcomes 5,000 to 6,000 students in the capital – announced the closure of its main premises and invited students and employees to telework.
After an internal debate on the Middle East organized Thursday by the management, which the students of the Palestine Committee considered “disappointing”, the latter carried out a “peaceful sit-in” in the school hall and six of them began a hunger strike, “in solidarity with the Palestinian victims”.
At the end of this two-hour debate, in which teachers and students participated, the school’s provisional administrator, Jean Bassères, reiterated that there was no question, as some students were demanding, of ” investigate » Sciences Po’s relations with Israeli universities.