Anti-Israel students in US plan to ring in academic year with ‘strike for Palestine’
Student activists hope to pressure schools to divest from Israel by absenting themselves from campus, after tent encampments last semester failed to make schools heed their demands
Pro-Palestinian college students may choose to stay home from class at the start of the upcoming fall semester as part of a national student strike organized by the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), which hopes to revive the anti-Israel protest movement that gained traction at schools around the United States during the last academic year.
A report published Monday by The Free Press found that the YDSA — the youth and student wing of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America — published a new resolution last month in which it encouraged members of its more than 100 university chapters across the country to take part in a “Student Strike for Palestine” at the start of the 2024-2025 academic year.
The movement’s chapters were encouraged to “organize democratically-run campaigns demanding their school’s divestment from Israel, a ceasefire in Gaza, and free speech on campus,” the report stated, adding that it was not clear how long the strike could last.
The planned strike is the latest in a series of actions taken by left-wing groups on American college campuses as they protest Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which began following the terror group’s shock October 7 onslaught in southern Israel.
During the previous academic year, anti-Israel groups at universities set up tent encampments to protest the war in Gaza and demand that colleges divest from companies that do business in Israel or with Israelis.
The protests were rife with accusations of antisemitism from Jewish students who reported feeling unsafe on campus, and in several instances, the demonstrations led to clashes, including at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and other incidents of violence such as takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.
The anti-Israel action was pervasive and continued throughout the summer months, including at Columbia’s Barnard College, where inverted red triangles — the symbol that the Hamas terror organization uses to identify targets — were spray-painted on buildings.
The YDSA has since acknowledged that the campus protests were largely unsuccessful when it came to having their demands met, The Free Press reported, citing an article published by the YDSA, in which a member claimed that the encampments “did not win” despite being the “largest national student movement of our lifetime.”
The YDSA publication asserted that unlike the tent encampments, a student strike would pressure the university into meeting the protesters’ demands as “no one can just turn around and plug their ears when the university can no longer call itself a university.”
As part of its preparations, the YDSA pledged in its resolution that it would form a “Palestine Committee” to guide and oversee the management of the planned strike.
The committee would be required to provide training to “define the nature of a student strike, explain why a student strike is strategic in terms of YDSA winning our demands, and help plan an escalatory campaign timeline for chapters,” according to the Free Press report.
Among the schools that host chapters of the YDSA are Columbia University, UCLA and New York University, all of which found themselves at the center of scandals relating to the anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests last year.
In July, NYU settled a lawsuit by Jewish students who accused the school of failing to stop antisemitism on campus, and said it had violated federal civil rights law by enforcing its anti-discrimination policies unevenly, including by allowing chants such as “Gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right” while ignoring other bigotry.
The students also alleged that the NYU administrators including President Linda Mills had “ignored, slow-walked, or met with gaslighting” Jewish students’ complaints.
Meanwhile at UCLA, a federal judge ordered the university to craft a plan to protect Jewish students following a lawsuit alleging that they experienced discrimination on campus.
The scenes that played out at the California university became some of the most prominent of the tent protest movement, after counter-demonstrators attacked the encampment, injuring at least 15 protesters and causing the police to order the demonstration be disbanded. Dozens were then arrested after they tried to set up a new encampment.
At Columbia, unrest has threatened to break out before the school year has even started. In June, the Manhattan District Attorney dropped charges against a majority of anti-Israel protesters who broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall in April, claiming insufficient evidence as the protesters had concealed their faces with masks and covered security cameras.
Earlier in August, Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) announced that it would be back at the start of the academic year.
“We recommit to continue strategic, targeted attacks on all aspects of university life. There will be no business as usual during genocide,” the group wrote on Instagram.
Along with the university’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, Columbia said it was suspending SJP last November for failing to adhere to the school’s policies.
In their stead, a coalition of student organizations operating under the name “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” took over responsibility for organizing the campus’s anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian events.
CUARD has vowed to escalate its activities going forward, and in a recent social media post hailed the October 7 Hamas onslaught and the recent unrest in Bangladesh as a model of “escalating the global battle for liberation.”
Declaring itself to be “on the frontlines of the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order,” CUARD wrote in the same post that its members were “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
Cathryn J. Prince and Reuters contributed to this report.
