Photograph by Benjamin Ibarra. Columbia University campus two days after the mass arrest.
By Benjamin Ibarra
The CUNY Board of Trustees has announced they will be voting on May 20 to authorize an Emergency Procurement Protocol. This will give the board authority to allocate $4 million to supplement CUNY’s City College of New York with 100 security officers after the NYPD arrested 170 pro-Palestinian protesters and broke up their encampments on Oct 7.
The NYPD deployed an operation of hundreds of officers at the requests of officials at City College and Columbia University to remove pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had barricaded themselves in their campus buildings. Police officials claimed the protesters were vandalizing property and dismantling security cameras.
Remy Chwae, a political science graduate of Columbia University who lives across from the campus, said, “I walked through Colombia with my dog on the second day since the protest started. The students have been 100 percent peaceful. I’m sorry, but it is just amazing. Many Jewish students were part of the encampment and the protest. It’s crazy to me how much the media has spun everything. I thought it was really unnecessary how many police there were. It was scary.”
Timeline
In an NYPD press briefing, Mayor Adams said drones were used to survey the ground to develop deployment tactics. Their radio signals were encrypted to ensure the protestors could not hear their deployment tactics. Fox 5 News reported the “Bear,” the largest armored vehicle the NYPD has, was deployed on Columbia’s campus to remove self-barricaded protesters.
Photograph by Benjamin Ibarra. Columbia University gates closed off with NYPD officers and campus security.
Journalism Professor Barbara Nevins Taylor of City College said that after the NYPD entered Hamilton Hall at Columbia at 9:30 p.m., protestors outside Columbia’s gates marched up to City College, and the NYPD intervention ensued.
At City College, a protest site named the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment had formed a week prior and contained about 70 tents. Throughout the month of May pro-Palestinian protests exploded at colleges across the nation. They are protesting the actions of the Israeli government against Palestinians in Gaza and are demanding their institutions condemn Israel’s actions and divest from Israeli-linked companies. City College’s school paper, HarlemView, reported that students on campus were making videos with graphics reading, “Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest. We are louder.”
“At about 11:30 p.m., about 33 activists took over the Wille Administration Building. CCTV video shows them marching in military formation, barricading doors, smashing alarms, and ultimately covering the security camera,” said Taylor. Campus security went into the building and arrested 15 individuals. At this time, President Vincent Boudreau and Chancellor Felix V. Rodriguez decided to call in the NYPD.
“I felt worried for the students when I saw all the police officers enter the campus,” said Amalfi Torres Garcod, a junior majoring in education at City College.
In the NYPD press briefing, Adams said the NYPD agreed to enter the institution’s campuses after they provided video evidence that outside agitators were training and co-opting the movement. Close to 300 hundred people were arrested on that day. According to the NYPD, over half of the 170 protesters arrested at the City College campus were not affiliated with the school.
Mathew Renny, a junior majoring in Political Science here at York College, said, “The protest got out of control. As we are protesting, I think it’s important for us to do it in a manner of civil disobedience instead of taking up violent or aggressive action as protesters. It’s good their students got together to protest for this topic.”
Israel and Hamas
Israel declared itself in a state of war after Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, launched a surprise land and air attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 people as hostages on October 7.
Hamas was founded in 1987 during the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and USA Today reports that in 2006, Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2007 and violently seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority. Their political wing has controlled the Gaza Strip for decades, and they are best known for their suicide bombings on Israel. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the United States and other nations.
Since the attack and kidnapping, the United States has been sending thousands of weapons to Israel. America is the biggest weapons supplier to Israel, according to the New York Times. Multiple news outlets have recently reported President Joe Biden has told Congress that his administration intends to move forward with a plan to sell more than $1 billion in new weapons to Israel.
OCHA
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports 34,844 fatalities since October 7. Of those deaths, 7,797 children, 4,959 women, and 1,924 elderly were identified. This does not include more than 10,000 people reported missing or under rubble. Over 1.7 million people, 75% of Gaza, have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are projected to face catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
