NEW YORK
\nProtests against Israel filled streets in Brooklyn and escalated at universities across the United States, some of which included Jewish Passover Seders, as demonstrators demanded an end to civilian casualties in Gaza.
\nThe growing protests follow mass arrests of demonstrators at some East Coast universities in recent days and show a deepening dissatisfaction in the United States, historically Israel\u2019s most important ally, with the course of the war with Hamas.
\nPro-Palestinian protests have followed President Joe Biden, a self-declared \u201cZionist,\u201d for months. At universities, protests have recently grown to encampments that draw students and faculty of various backgrounds, including of Jewish and Muslim faiths, that host teach-ins, interfaith prayers, and musical performances.
\nA large Brooklyn street protest reached a standoff on Tuesday when New York police began to arrest people over disorderly conduct, restraining those who refused to move with zip ties.
\nThe Council on American-Islamic Relations criticized the use of police force to stifle dissent, saying it undermined academic freedom.
\n\u201cSo does defaming and endangering Jewish, Muslim and Palestinian \u2026 students based on suspiciously inflammatory remarks that a few unidentified, masked individuals have made outside of campus,\u201d Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR in New York, said in a statement.
\nCritics of the protests, including prominent Republican members of the U.S. Congress, have stepped up accusations of antisemitism and harassment by at least some protesters. Civil rights advocates, including the ACLU, have raised free speech concerns over the arrests.
\nThere have been heated exchanges of words and insults between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators, particularly in the public streets around Columbia, leading congressional Republicans on Tuesday to demand that Biden do more to protect Jewish students.
\nSeveral campus protesters Reuters spoke to attributed the off-campus incidents to rogue provocateurs who are trying to hijack the protests\u2019 message.
\n\u201cThere are no universities left in Gaza. So we chose to reclaim our university for the people of Palestine,\u201d said Soph Askanase, a Jewish Columbia student who was arrested and suspended for protesting. \u201cAntisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians, are all cut from the same cloth.\u201d
\nOther students blamed universities for failing to protect their right to protest or stand up for human rights.
\n\u201cAs a Palestinian student, I too did not feel safe for the past six months, and that was as a direct result of Columbia\u2019s one-sided statements and inaction,\u201d said Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia.
\nStudents at the University of California, Berkeley\u2013a school well known for its student activism during the 1960s\u2013set up tents in solidarity with protesters at other schools.
\nMilton Zerman, 25, a second-year student at Berkeley\u2019s law school, who is from Los Angeles, said Jewish and Israeli students have suffered from hateful harassment.
\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re an Israeli student on this campus, you feel like you have a target on your back, you feel unsafe and it\u2019s no wonder students from Israel are so hesitant to come here,\u201d Zerman said.
\nNew York police arrested more than 120 protesters at New York University on Monday and more than 100 at Columbia University last week. Columbia cancelled in-person classes at its Upper Manhattan campus on Monday in a bid to defuse tensions.
\nOn Tuesday, Columbia said classes for the rest of the year would be hybrid, with students able to attend online or in person.
\nLater, the university\u2019s president said it was time \u201cto move forward with a plan to dismantle\u201d the pro-Palestine encampment, and gave organizers a midnight deadline to do so.
\nCalifornia\u2019s Cal Poly Humboldt, a public university in Arcata, was shut down after pro-Palestinian protesters occupied a campus building.
\nAt the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul, police cleared an encampment after the school asked them to take action, citing violations of university policy and trespassing law.
\nPassover protests
\nSome Jewish demonstrators said they were taking the second night of the weeklong feast of Passover, a holiday feast when families gather and celebrate the biblical account of the Israelites\u2019 freedom from Egyptian slavery, to reaffirm their faith and distance themselves from the Israeli government\u2019s war strategy.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t see what Israel is doing as self-defence. I see incredible, absolutely unbelievable human rights violations,\u201d said Katherine Stern, 62, of Woodstock, New York, who gave up her family Seder 120 miles (190 km) away to attend the Brooklyn protest.
\nProtesters want university endowments to divest from Israeli interests and the United States to end or at least condition Israeli military aid on improving the plight of Palestinians.
\nHamas resistance group attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 and taking scores of hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel\u2019s counterattack has killed over 34,000 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry, displacing nearly all of Gaza\u2019s 2.3 million people and causing a humanitarian crisis.
\nIn Brooklyn, about 2,000 people occupied a plaza near the Brooklyn home of US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a staunch Israel supporter and the highest-ranking Jew in the US government, chanting, \u201cStop arming Israel,\u201d \u201cStop funding genocide\u201d and \u201cLet Gaza live.\u201d
\nOrganizers staged music and songs from Jewish and other cultures, giving prominence to Canadian author Naomi Klein, a peace activist who drew on her Jewish roots to argue against Zionism, which she called a \u201cfalse idol.\u201d
\n\u201cWe want freedom from the project that connects genocide in our name,\u201d Klein said to cheers. \u201cWe seek to migrate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid \u2026 or that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending them the weapons and the donations.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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