Columbia students set up new anti-Israel encampment on campus during alumni weekend
Students at Columbia University set up a new anti-Israel encampment on campus Friday night as the school hosts alumni weekend.
The defiant demonstrators — members of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine — set up camp on the Manhattan campus’ south lawns alongside a giant white party tent already in place for the alumni event festivities that end Saturday.
“We’re back bitches,” declared one sign the protesters put up, video from the New York Times shows.
Another banner redesignated the area — for the third time — a “Liberated Zone.”
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine confirmed the latest encampment at the Ivy League school in a Friday night social media post.
They are once again demanding that the school divest from Israel-associated companies, amid the Jewish state’s ongoing retaliatory military offensive in Gaza.
Shortly after the encampment was erected, Columbia security guards moved in and began removing some of the tents, according to the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator.
The protesters, about two dozen or so, then began sitting in other tents so they could not be removed and chanted “shame” at the security personnel, the paper reported.
“We are aware of the encampment erected this evening and are monitoring the situation. We remain committed to hosting a successful weekend for our alumni,” a university spokesperson said in a statement.
Columbia’s alumni weekend kicked off on Thursday. Campus events conclude Saturday night and the weekend comes to a close with a Sunday morning mass at the Church of Notre Dame.
The spring semester for Columbia College, the university’s liberal arts undergraduate school, concluded on May 10. The activists seem undeterred by their low numbers.
“Columbia University thinks that just because it’s the summer, they don’t have as many classes, they don’t have as many students, … that we’re tired, that we’re scared, that we’re not going to be on their campus because they have a few ID checks. They’re wrong,” an organizer said, according to the Columbia Spectator.
The Morningside Heights campus remains open only to Columbia University ID holders, according to the paper.
On April 30, NYPD officers swarmed Columbia’s campus and cleared out the encampment as well as the university’s Hamilton Hall, which had been taken over by rogue rioters. More than 100 people were arrested — many of them not affiliated with the university.
A little over a week earlier, another 100 protesters were hauled away by police as they dismantled the first campus encampment — but demonstrators returned the following day.
Elsewhere in the Big Apple on Friday, hundreds of anti-Israel protesters stormed the Brooklyn Museum, flying a banner from the top of the building and damaging artwork in the process. Several people were seen being taken into custody.
Earlier in the day hundreds of New York City high school students walked out of school and staged a pro-Palestinian protest outside of the Department of Education headquarters t the Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
