STUDENT INTIFADA PANEL on Nakba Day
Speakers included veterans from the 1968 and 1985 occupations at Columbia, Mark Rudd and Omar Barghouti, as well Maryam Alwan and Soph Askanase from the current insurgency. Yvonne Yen Liu from Solidarity Research Center will facilitate.
We are at a turning point in the fight for Palestinian liberation. Apartheid in South Africa was ended because of internal and external agitation. In the US, students and faculty protested, demonstrated, and liberated buildings on campus to pressure universities to divest of their South Africa-related investments throughout the 1970s and 80s. Students at Columbia University blockaded Hamilton Hall (renamed Mandela Hall) for three weeks in April 1985, demanding divestment.
What we are seeing with the emergence of 174 camps in solidarity with Gaza in campuses across the world is a new phase in the movement to free Palestine from Israeli occupation and genocide. Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS Movement for Palestinian rights, said:
“The campus uprising reflects that we’re nearing Palestine’s South Africa moment, where by a rising majority supports not only the Palestinian struggle to end Israel’s genocide, but also ending the horrific complicity of the US government, corporations, and institutions in Israel’s regime of settler-colonial apartheid.”
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