National SDS Stands with Columbia Student Movement

In the last 48 hours, students at Columbia have taken bold action, setting up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment in the middle of campus, promising not to leave until their demands are met; they are as follows:

1. Columbia Divest from companies complicit in genocide
2. Transparency of Columbia’s investments
3. FULL amnesty for students and faculty facing political repression

For months, students have watched in horror the genocide in Gaza being broadcast live, while our University administrators have refused to divest from Israel’s genocide; we have also witnessed in awe the unrelenting resistance of the Palestinian people against their occupiers. As young people in the United States, our role in solidarity with Palestine is to make demands, take action, and divest our governments and institutions from critical military and financial aid that keeps the “israeli” regime afloat.

Their escalatory action is necessary, as their demands have been summarily ignored by administrators. If they, the administrators and officials that command our institutions, ignore the voices of their students, the students have an obligation to MAKE them listen. There is no action that students could take to be heard, regardless of how “disruptive” it may be, that goes too far in the face of this genocide and the occupation of Palestine.

National SDS condemns, in the strongest possible terms, the vile and cruel treatment and mass arrest of students from Columbia and Barnard Universities. The shameful Columbia administration, headed by University President Shafik, has let loose the criminal gang that is the NYPD to brutalize and detain their own students, solely for using their constitutional right to protest to demand the University that they pay for divest from the genocidal “state of Israel”.

We stand in unconditional solidarity with the students and organizers at Columbia and Barnard as they face the political repression being used to silence them and their righteous actions. Students have an unalienable right to make demands of their administrators, and have those demands met.

HANDS OFF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT!
UNIVERSITIES DIVEST NOW!
END U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
VICTORY TO PALESTINE!