New Orleans, Louisiana, US – Student protests against the Israeli war on Gaza have rocked the United States over the past few weeks, prompting a police crackdown on many campuses and more than 2,000 arrests. Students who have set up protest encampments at universities across the country are calling for their institutions to withdraw all investments from firms complicit in Israeli abuses against Palestinians.
While the focus has been on Columbia University in New York and other elite Ivy League institutions, students are also organising for Palestine in the US South. Smaller Southern cities were at the heart of the 1960s civil rights movement, but today, like then, protesters operate in a particularly hostile, even violent environment.
