Last academic year saw university students across North American campuses form Gaza solidarity encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins received widespread media coverage and helped carry Israel’s crimes against Palestinians to the top of the Western news agenda.
Although these campus protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and included many anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty, Israel’s supporters in media, politics and academia itself responded to the demonstrations by accusing protesters of peddling anti-Semitism and intimidating Jewish students. Towards the end of the academic year, police dismantled most of these campus protests, arresting hundreds of students in the process and charging them with crimes ranging from third-degree trespass to felony burglary. ….more