With U.S. college campuses open for fall, students are again demonstrating against genocide in Gaza.
On August 26, on the first day of classes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, some 150 students marched into the campus dining hall with a large banner to announce that a “teach-in” would soon start on campus. The banner also included, in Hebrew, the phrase, “If not now, when?” The student protesters were joined by university custodians, cooks, and food service workers who are on strike for better working conditions and a living wage. There are 1,200 university employees at Cornell represented by UAW local 2300, according to the Ithaca Voice.
UAW Region 9 President Daniel Vicente spoke at the rally. No arrests were made, but campus security demanded that the student protesters hand over their student IDs, in order that they could be disciplined by the administration. The students locked arms, refused to surrender their IDs, and marched out after about 40 minutes. Earlier in the day there were reports of anti-genocide graffiti on campus.
To mock a California judge who made a ruling last spring that Gaza protesters cannot restrict the movement on campus of Jewish students, on Aug. 26 student protesters at Sonoma State University established a mock Israeli military “checkpoint” to decide who should be restricted, according to the Jewish Chronicle. “We don’t want to make people uncomfortable, but we want people to be uncomfortable with the idea of what we’re paying for overseas with our tax dollars,” said Albert Levine, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. Sonoma State, and many other universities, has implemented a long list of restrictions on free speech, such as requiring pre-approval of “time, place, and intent” of activities, any signs or banners must be approved in writing by the administration, all masks have been banned, and many other policies have been “updated.”
