Topline
Texas authorities arrested at least 10 University of Texas at Austin students Wednesday afternoon in the midst of a student-led protest critical of Israel, multiple outlets reported, as campus tensions boil over at universities across the country over student protests in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Key Facts
The protests Wednesday in Texas’ state capital come as students at colleges and universities stage sit-ins and walkouts, most notably at Columbia University in New York City, where an encampment on campus has prompted widespread pushback and calls from lawmakers for the Ivy League school’s president to resign.
More than 200 students at the University of Texas participated in the protest, demanding the school divest its endowment from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, the Texas Tribune reported.
That protest follows a similar demonstration at the University of Texas at Dallas on Tuesday, when students demanded school officials reject a controversial executive order from Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordering colleges to discipline a “sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.”
Videos posted online appeared to show state police in riot gear marching through the demonstration on the school’s campus, with officers taking some students into police cars, while other officers patrolled the campus on motorcycles and on horseback.
Amelia Kimball, associate managing editor of The Daily Texan, the university’s student newspaper, told CNN the police presence included state police officers, Austin police and campus police, who told students involved in the protest to disperse, warning that students who did not disperse would be arrested.
Tangent
Meanwhile, at the University of Southern California, law enforcement officers clashed with student protesters at a Gaza Solidarity Occupation on Wednesday, local outlets reported, while school officials warned students of “significant activity” on campus “due to a demonstration.” The protests at USC and UT join a host of student demonstrations against Israel’s war against Hamas. Nearly 50 students were arrested at Yale during a protest this week, while students at Emerson College in Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized protests condemning the war in Gaza. Other student-led protests have taken place at NYU, the University of California, Berkeley, California State Polytechnic, Brown University, the University of Michigan and Harvard, where students staged an encampment in Harvard Yard on Wednesday.
Key Background
Columbia has become a hotbed of student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, where the death toll since the war began in October has surpassed 34,000, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry (an estimated 1,200 people died in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel). While the protests have inspired a wave of demonstrations across the country, they have also been heavily criticized by lawmakers and university donors, including billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who pulled his funding to Columbia this week in the wake of the protests. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have also called on Columbia president Nemat Shafit to step down, putting Shafit in a similar position as former Harvard president Claudine Gay and former Penn president Liz Magill, who resigned over the winter amid allegations they allowed antisemitic rhetoric to flourish on campus—their resignations also came after they stumbled in response to lawmakers at a December congressional hearing, when they said calls for the genocide of Jewish people would violate school policy depending on the context. At Columbia, student protests also prompted school officials to make all classes remote for the remainder of the semester, a decision that has also been criticized, including by former President Donald Trump, who bemoaned the call as a “grave mistake.”
Chief Critic
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also denounced the protests in a speech on Wednesday, referring to the encampments as “antisemitic mobs” and calling the student activity “horrific.” Netanyahu went on to compare the protests to “what happened in German universities in the 1930s,” calling it “unconscionable” and saying the protests “has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.”
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