Clashes broke out during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, on the sidelines of a pro-Palestinian rally on the campus of UCLA University, in Los Angeles, according to the police and images broadcast by American television.
“At the request of UCLA, due to numerous acts of violence committed in the encampment inside the campus, the LAPD intervenes to assist the university police and restore order and security,” announced the Los Angeles City Police on X.
Demonstrators and counter-protesters clashed with sticks, threw objects at each other and fired fireworks at each other, according to television images.
The clashes pitted pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups, according to CNN.
New York police on Tuesday evening dislodged pro-Palestinian demonstrators barricaded in a building at Columbia University, intervening manu militari in the epicenter of pro-Palestinian mobilization on American campuses.
As elsewhere, students at Columbia, a private university, want the management to cut ties with patrons or companies linked to Israel.
An elite northeastern campus, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, announced a deal with students to dismantle the encampment in exchange for a university vote in October on possible “divestments from” companies that make possible and profit from the genocide in Gaza.”
Fear among Jewish students
For two weeks, many university leaders across the United States have faced protesters, sometimes just a few dozen, who have occupied their campuses to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas.
Pro-Palestinian students thus established a camp in the heart of the UCLA campus, on a lawn surrounded by barricades.
UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block had warned, before these clashes, against the presence of people from outside the university.
On Sunday, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists, supported by numerous demonstrators from outside the campus, came to blows, with shoving and insults.
“Many protesters and counter-protesters practice their activism peacefully. But others use methods that are frankly shocking and shameful,” the chancellor wrote in a message posted Tuesday on the university’s website.
“We have witnessed acts of violence. These incidents have caused, especially among our Jewish students, deep anxiety and fear,” he added.
The wave of protest against Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been spreading across American universities for ten days. The movement started from Columbia where one hundred people were arrested on April 18.
6 months before the presidential election
Since then, hundreds of others — students, teachers and activists — have been questioned, sometimes arrested and prosecuted in several universities across the country.
Images of riot police intervening on campuses, at the request of universities, have gone around the world, recalling similar events in the United States during the Vietnam War.
The protests have reignited the tense debate since the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, over freedom of expression, a constitutional right and accusations of anti-Semitism.
The country has the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
Six months before the presidential election in a polarized country, this student movement has provoked a strong reaction from the political world.
Joe Biden “must do something” against these “paid agitators,” Republican candidate Donald Trump said Tuesday evening on Fox News. “We must put an end to the anti-Semitism that plagues our country today,” he added.
“While Columbia University is plunged into chaos, Joe Biden is absent because he is afraid to tackle the subject,” Republican leader of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson wrote on X in the evening. It has long called for the departure of its president, Minouche Shafik.
“Occupying a university building by force is the wrong approach” and does not represent “an example of peaceful demonstration,” John Kirby, spokesperson for Democratic President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, thundered before the police intervention. .