Across college campuses this week, students continued their protests against their schools’ investments in companies tied to Israel, Presdient Joe Biden’s support for the war, and the genocide in Gaza. At Columbia University, where the first encampment popped up on April 17, protesters took over Hamilton Hall, which their anti–Vietnam War and anti-gentrification predecessors occupied in 1968. The students swung a banner that reads “Hind’s Hall” over the building’s façade, symbolically renaming the building after a 6-year-old child murdered in Gaza. As our own Jack Mirkinson reported, the Columbia administration called in the NYPD to clear the encampments and Hind’s Hall, and the police brought overwhelming force. It proves, Mirkinson wrote, that the people in charge “are terrified of the power of the movement for Palestine—of its size, moral righteousness, fearlessness, diversity, and love.”

Further uptown, officers were already storming CUNY and sending kids away in police cars.

Over the past two weeks, the campus protest movement has spread to schools large and small, public and private. But the threat of the police has been particularly acute at Emory University, located not far from where the state of Georgia plans to build the police training facility known as “Cop City.” As writer and activist Hannah Riley reported this week from Atlanta, “The connection between Cop City, Israel, and Atlanta-area universities are stronger than you might guess.” At Emory, a militarized police force has fired pepper balls on students, tased them while they were already in cuffs, and hauled away professors who stood in solidarity with students.

At this point, the movement has even extended across the pond. Reporting from Paris this week, Nicholas Niarchos documented the crackdown on the student movement at Sciences Po, an elite university known for its political science and economics faculties. “It had been the first use of police force to break a student protest in Sciences Po history,” he wrote.

As anti-protest hysteria stretches across Twitter and all levels of governments, it’s unclear what comes next for these students and how their actions might effect change. Universities wondering what to do next might look to Brown, where administrators have committed to voting on divestment from Israeli companies. As one energized student on Brown’s campus told Owen Dahlkamp: “If our encampment shows anything, it’s that this is effective in getting people in positions of power to listen to student demands.”

-Alana Pockros

Engagement Editor, The Nation