The last few weeks have seen protests against Israel’s war in Gaza occur at many dozens of college and university campuses across the United States. Student protests and other acts of solidarity are also taking place internationally. It is far too premature to describe these protests as a mass movement. However, public opinion polls clearly show that there are great levels of discontent among America’s young people about not just Israel’s war in Gaza but about a range of other public policy concerns such as America’s role in the world, the global climate emergency, the neoliberal regime and the type of financial precarity it has caused for huge swaths of the public.
University and college administrators have responded to the student protests by authorizing the police to use a range of means including rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas, and in at least one instance deploying an armored vehicle as part of an operation to clear a building at Columbia University in New York. Given that the student protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, the use of such force by the police can reasonably be described as excessive and extremely dangerous. At least 2,400 people, including at least 50 professors, have been arrested in protests on at least 50 campuses. Several people have been injured by the police.
