Using a tactical vehicle, New York City police enter an upper floor of Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus in New York. Photo / AP
The pro-Palestinian demonstration that has paralysed Columbia University ended in a dramatic fashion late Tuesday (today NZ time), with police carrying riot shields swarming the Ivy League campus, bursting into an administration building protesters took over the previous night and making dozens of arrests.
A statement released by a Columbia spokesperson said New York City officers entered the campus after the university requested help. A tent encampment on the school’s grounds to protest the Israel-Hamas war was cleared, along with Hamilton Hall where a stream of officers used a ladder to climb through a second-floor window. Protesters seized the hall about 20 hours earlier.
“After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalised, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” the school said. “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing. We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”
NYPD spokesman Carlos Nieves said he had no immediate reports of any injuries. The arrests occurred after protesters had shrugged off an earlier ultimatum to abandon the encampment or be suspended and unfolded as other universities stepped up efforts to end demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war that were inspired by Columbia.
Just blocks away at The City College of New York, demonstrators were in a standoff with police outside the public college’s main gate. Video posted on social media by news reporters on the scene late on Tuesday local time showed officers putting some people to the ground and shoving others as they cleared people from the street and sidewalks. Many detained protesters were driven away on city buses.
An encampment at the college, part of the City University of New York system, has been up since Thursday. After police arrived on campus on Tuesday, NYPD officers lowered a Palestinian flag atop the City College flagpole, balled it up and tossed it to the ground before raising an American flag.
Police have swept through other campuses across the US over the past two weeks, leading to confrontations and more than 1000 arrests. In rarer instances, university officials and protest leaders struck agreements to restrict the disruption to campus life and upcoming commencement ceremonies.
Brown University, another member of the Ivy League, reached an agreement on Tuesday with protesters on its Rhode Island campus. Demonstrators said they would close their encampment in exchange for administrators taking a vote to consider divestment in October. The compromise appeared to mark the first time a US college has agreed to vote on divestment in the wake of the protests.
Columbia’s police action happened on the 56th anniversary of a similar move to quash an occupation of Hamilton Hall by students protesting racism and the Vietnam War.
The police department earlier on Tuesday said officers wouldn’t enter the grounds without the college administration’s request or an imminent emergency. Now, law enforcement will be there through May 17, the end of the university’s commencement events.
Fabien Lugo, a first-year accounting student who said he was not involved in the protests, said he opposed the university’s decision to call in police.
“This is too intense,” he said. “It feels like more of an escalation than a de-escalation.”
In a letter to senior NYPD officials, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said the administration was making the request that police remove protesters from the occupied building and a nearby tent encampment “with the utmost regret”.
Shafik also leaned into the idea, first put forward by New York City mayor Eric Adams earlier in the day, that the group that occupied Hamilton was “led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university”.
Neither provided specific evidence to back up that contention, which was disputed by protest organisers and participants.
NYPD officials made similar claims about “outside agitators” during the huge, grassroots demonstrations against racial injustice that erupted across the city after the death of George Floyd in 2020. In some instances, top police officials falsely labelled peaceful marches organised by well-known neighbourhood activists as the work of violent extremists.
Before officers arrived at Columbia, the White House condemned the standoffs there and at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where protesters had occupied two buildings for more than a week until officers with batons intervened early on Tuesday and arrested 25 people.
President Joe Biden believes students occupying an academic building is “absolutely the wrong approach” and “not an example of peaceful protest”, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said.
Later, former President Donald Trump called into Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News Channel to comment on Columbia’s turmoil as live footage of police clearing Hamilton Hall aired. Trump praised the officers.
“But it should never have gotten to this,” he told Hannity. “And they should have done it a lot sooner than before they took over the building because it would have been a lot easier if they were in tents rather than a building. And tremendous damage done, too.”
The nationwide campus protests began at Columbia in response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7. Militants killed about 1200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to stamp out Hamas, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.
As ceasefire negotiations appeared to gain steam, it wasn’t clear whether those talks would inspire an easing of protests.
Israel and its supporters have branded the university protests as antisemitic, while Israel’s critics say it uses those allegations to silence opposition. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organisers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.
On Columbia’s campus, protesters first set up a tent encampment almost two weeks ago. The school sent in police to clear the tents the following day, arresting more than 100 people, only for the students to return – and inspire a wave of similar encampments at campuses across the country.
Negotiations between the protesters and the college came to a standstill in recent days, and the school set a deadline for the activists to abandon the tent encampment Monday afternoon or be suspended.
Instead, protesters defied the ultimatum and took over Hamilton Hall early on Tuesday, carrying in furniture and metal barricades. The demonstrators dubbed the building Hind’s Hall, honouring a young girl who was killed in Gaza under Israeli fire, and issued demands for divestment, financial transparency and amnesty.
Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the faculty’s efforts to help defuse the situation had been repeatedly ignored by the university’s administration despite school statutes that require consultation.
Ilana Lewkovitch, a self-described “leftist Zionist” student at Columbia, said it had been hard to concentrate on school for weeks. Her exams have been disrupted with chants of “say it loud, say it clear, we want Zionists out of here”.
Lewkovitch, who identifies as Jewish, said she wished the current pro-Palestinian protests were more open to people like her who criticise Israel’s war policies but believe there should be an Israeli state.
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