Anti-Israel activist groups called on students, staff, and faculty to engage in a walk out and a take over of central campus spaces on Tuesday, according to a call to action published Monday by the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).
“We call on the widest swath of organizations, formations, and individuals to walk out of class, take over central spaces on campus, and assert our mass power,” the NSJP said on social media. “In the face of the state’s existential attacks on the student movement and popular education, we declare that we, the united students, faculty, staff, and workers, are the university.”
Published across social media platforms and endorsed by eight activist groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, City University of New York for Palestine, and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, the call to action came in response to a crackdown on campus protests by the US government.
The anti-Israel groups said that the US President Donald Trump administration’s Friday decision to cancel grants and contracts to Columbia University worth $400 million was only the beginning of what they characterized as the president’s desire to control academia. Other universities would be leveraged in such a fashion, they said.
“Campus and community unity in the face of fascist attacks is critical in this moment,” read the joint statement.
The NSJP said that Columbia University was being punished for failing to “eradicate” the post-October 7 massacre protest movement, but regardless of their actions, universities would be controlled by the federal government because “the state views intellectual and academic freedom as an existential threat to the ruling class.”
'Capitulation to Zionists'
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has led recent protest actions such as occupying campus buildings, said on Instagram on Sunday that Columbia had been punished even though it “bent over backward to satiate the Zionist death machine.”
“It is more clear than ever that no level of capitulation to Zionists will be enough. Now that we’ve seen that submission won’t help us, perhaps we can try a new tactic, one that has been preached in our seminars for decades: Organized resistance to obvious injustice.”
The Monday joint statement did not mention the alleged Saturday arrest and Green Card revocation of Columbia School of International and Public Affairs student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, but the NSJP supported a Sunday petition calling for the activist’s release and for Columbia not to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement on campus.
The petition, which had also been shared by walk out endorsers such as Within Out Lifetime, had garnered over 750,000 signatures by Monday morning.