Students at Columbia University staged anti-Israel demonstrations — which included vandalism of a statue on campus and slogans calling for continued violence against the Jewish state — on Tuesday, the first day of the academic year. At least two protesters have been arrested after pushing through barricades around the entrance.
Blocking the main gate to Columbia’s campus, the protesters held signs with “intifada,” “resist until victory,” and “to rebel is justified” written across them. The group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which organized the protest on Tuesday and the encampment on the school’s main lawn in the spring, published a flyer calling on students to join.
“Columbia University’s first day of class is funded by Israel’s bombing of every university in Gaza,” the note read. “Shut it down.”
When asked whether similar protests will be a fixture on the university’s campus over the course of the semester, one student told Fox News that the rallies “will not stop until Columbia has divested from its complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.”
By noon, the Alma Mater, a bronze statue on the steps of the campus’s Low Memorial Library, had been vandalized and covered in red paint.
The Unity of Fields, an “anti-imperialist propaganda front bringing the war home,” published a list of demands on X.
“This action is the first of many,” the group wrote. “We will not stop until the university fully divests from all forms of settler-colonial violence. Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself. It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of all populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The organization wrote that it refuses “to allow Columbia to return to a state of ‘normalcy'” and acts “in full support of the Palestinian resistance.”
“This action is first and foremost an effort to extend the successes of the Palestinian resistance to the heart of the empire itself, to translate their resilience in Gaza to unrest and violence in America,” the Unity of Fields continued.
The protests come just over a week after a convocation ceremony at which Columbia University Apartheid Divest handed out pamphlets supporting Hamas and quoting Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri, a leader in the terrorist organization, and his remarks on October 7. An upperclassman involved in the new-student orientation process told National Review that student activists wearing masks and keffiyehs had attempted to use the convocation as a forum for spreading their pro-terror flyers.