Universities heed protestor demands; Macklemore voices support

On May 8th, five days after it was established, the pro-Palestinian tent city on the campus of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, was removed. Not because it was dismantled by the police, as has happened with 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 centres, research institutes, companies, and other institutions in that country. The University Senate, composed of the heads of all the university’s departments, submitted the proposal to the institution's supervisory board.

Protesting students' tent cities are still operational in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, Lausanne in Switzerland, and Ghent in Belgium, among other places. On May 8th, the police forcibly ended the student protest in Amsterdam. Some academic staff members at the University of Amsterdam issued an official statement expressing their disagreement with how peaceful protesting students were treated by the university and city authorities.

This statement was shared 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." The police used units with dogs and pepper spray against protesters, and bulldozers destroyed encampments. A protest of lecturers will occur on campus on May 13th.

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

American rapper Macklemore released on May 7th a track that frankly describes student protests attempts to suppress them by university authorities with police assistance, and the silence of other musicians and celebrities on the situation in Palestine. In the song, Macklemore raps, "I want a ceasefire, f*ck a response from Drake".

The title of the song references the renaming of 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. Although the Israeli authorities deny that she died at the hands of the Israeli army, recordings of conversations of the child with relatives and testimonies from Palestinian medical workers who attempted to aid the girl trapped in a car under tank fire verify it. Hind's mother, thanking Columbia students, told ajplus.net: "I started crying because I wanted all of these movements & support to come while Hind was still alive".