The first faculty-led Gaza solidarity encampment protest in the US was established on Wednesday night at New York’s New School campus.
Nearly two dozen professors and lecturers at the New York City college pitched tents and unrolled sleeping bags in the lobby of an academic building located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in support of their students, and against Israel’s attack on Gaza and their university’s financial ties to Israel.
The move comes after New York police raided the student encampment protest at the college on 3 May, which led to the arrests of more than 40 students. Arrested students were also subsequently suspended from school.
Despite the incident, dissent continues to grow on the urban campus.
Sunil, a New School faculty member in protest who only gave his first name, told the local news station Spectrum News NY1: “Faculty knew that we had to step up – not just to make sure that this could not happen again, but the students’ demands that they fought so hard for, risked their lives and their careers and futures, that was not in vain.
“I’m seeing dead children on my screen every day. I’m seeing bodies pile up in the streets. I’m seeing mass starvation. So what are you seeing and how is that acceptable?” Sunil said.
Among the demands from student and faculty protesters is for the New School to disclose interests in Israel and to divest from these interests as the country continues its military assault on the Gaza Strip, a small but densely populated Palestinian territory.
In a statement on Thursday, the New School said it would not pursue criminal charges against the student protesters who were arrested on 3 May. “We have contacted and written a letter to the District Attorney requesting that all charges be dropped,” the statement said.
It added that it would also be looking at its investments and reactivating a college committee to examine the issue of divestment. “[We] will soon be announcing a significant educational effort about investment principles and the history of divestment at The New School.”
Since the attack on Israel by Hamas fighters on 7 October, which killed nearly 1,200 people and took hundreds of hostages, Israel has launched bombing and ground campaigns on the territory, killing more than 30,000 Palestinians, most of whom are women and children and other civilians.
Though staunchly backed by the US, the military assault has angered many other countries across the world and horrified NGO groups and United Nations bodies. The head of the United Nations World Food Program has said northern Gaza has entered a “full-blown famine” as a result of the Israeli attack and its restrictions on humanitarian aid.
This latest Gaza solidarity encampment protest is one of many across the world, the first of which began at nearby Columbia University in April. Since then, university administrations at Columbia, NYU, UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory, George Washington University and others have asked for local police forces to break up the largely peaceful protests, igniting a fierce nationwide debate on the limits of free speech and questions over police brutality.
More than 2,000 arrests have been made on US campuses in recent weeks.
Encampment protests have now also spread beyond the US to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico and others.
As the semester draws to a close, some faculty protesters at the New School have refused to submit grades until their demands are met.
