Universities worldwide heed student protests for Palestine solidarity

Universities in Dublin and Barcelona have agreed to the demands of protesting students. In many places, pro-Palestinian protests are being broken up. Rapper Macklemore has released a "protest anthem".

On 8 May, five days after it was set up, the pro-Palestinian tent city on the campus of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, disappeared. Not because it was dismantled by the police, as in many other student protests against the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip. The authorities of the Irish university accepted the demands of the protestors and agreed to end cooperation with Israeli companies.

The University of Barcelona's Senate approved a motion supporting students on Wednesday. The document calls for the university to break all institutional and academic ties with Israel, including with centres, research institutes, companies, and other institutions in that country. The University Senate is a body composed of the heads of all the university’s departments. The Senate's proposal was submitted to the institution's supervisory board.

Protesting students' tent cities still operate in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, Lausanne in Switzerland, and Ghent in Belgium, among others. On 8 May, the student protest in Amsterdam was broken up by the police. Some of the academic staff of the University of Amsterdam issued an official statement in which they disagree with the way the university and city authorities treat the peaceful protesting students.

The statement was published on the X platform by anthropologist Martijn Dekker, among others. He wrote: "We, staff members of the University of Amsterdam, are horrified by the police violence unleashed on our staff and students, on the heart and soul of our academic community". Against the protesters were directed police units with dogs and pepper spray, and bulldozers destroyed encampments. On 13 May, a protest by lecturers will take place on campus.

Police also broke up protests in Berlin, which arose at three local universities: Humboldt University, Free University, and Berlin University. Student protests continue in the United States, including at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Princeton. The agreement was reached with the authorities of Rutgers, Northwestern, Brown, Middlebury, Evergreen, and Vassar universities. The police shut down the protest at Columbia University, which on 18 May began an international wave of tent cities in solidarity with the Palestinians.

American rapper Macklemore released on 7 May a track in which, in straightforward words, without mincing words describes student protests, attempts to suppress them by university authorities with the help of police, and the lack of reaction from other musicians and celebrities to the situation in Palestine. Macklemore rapped, among others: "I want a ceasefire, f*ck a response from Drake".

The title of the song refers to the renaming of the Hamilton Hall at Columbia University by protesting students to Hind's Hall in honour of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl killed in January 2024. The Israeli authorities deny she died at the hands of the Israeli army. However, recordings of conversations of the child with relatives and testimonies of Palestinian medical workers who tried to help the girl trapped in a car under tank fire confirm it. Hind's mother, thanking Columbia students, told the portal ajplus.net: "I started crying because I wanted all of these movements & support to come while Hind was still alive".