The announcement was greeted with joyful jumping, hugs and singing. For the first time since the American student world mobilized over the war in the Gaza Strip, an agreement was reached between a university and students who had camped on the grounds of their establishment in support of the Palestinians .
Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island), a prestigious group of campuses in the northeast of the United States, rejoiced, Tuesday, April 30, in a press release at the dismantling of a “camp” of students and pro-Palestinian activists at 5 p.m. local time (11 p.m. in Paris) in exchange for the promise that the university’s board of directors will decide on possible “divestments from companies that enable and profit from the genocide in Gaza”.
Cutting ties between large private American universities and patrons and companies linked to Israel is part of the demands of the student and activist movement which defends the Palestinian cause and is up against the war waged by the Jewish state against Hamas in the Strip. from Gaza.
The agreement at Brown is the first concession granted by an elite university to the national movement which has spread over the past two weeks throughout the United States, from California to the West (UCLA, USC Universities, etc.) to Northeastern states (Yale, Harvard, UPenn) through the Central and Southern states such as Texas and Arizona. The management of Columbia University in New York, the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian movement on American campuses, threatened Tuesday to dismiss those who occupy and “vandalize” since last night a building of the establishment.
“Call for significant changes”
The demonstrations on American campuses have revived in the United States the tense debate since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip between freedom of expression, constitutional rights, and accusations of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Brown’s president acknowledged that “the destruction and loss of human life in the Middle East have pushed many [d’étudiants] to a call for significant change”. Students and university management must still discuss the outlines of the agreement from May to October.
Student Leo Corzo-Clark greeted “a huge victory for this international movement and for the people of Palestine”. “The university sat down to listen to our demands, the students and consider divestment from war, death, occupation”added Sam Theoharis, also a student.
Mme Paxson, whose two counterparts at Harvard and UPenn had to resign this winter for comments deemed ambiguous before the United States Congress on the fight against anti-Semitism, also denounced “the escalation of incendiary rhetoric (…) and the increase in tensions on campuses across the country”.