Hunter College was surrounded. Students from around New York City had descended upon the 68th street plaza and were not moving until their voices were heard. Hand painted flags and signs showing support of tuition freezes and faculty raises were held high above the heads of students as they circled the school. “No tuition, open admission” was one of the frequent unified chants by the hundreds of students who had gathered.
The Million Student March was held on over one hundred different college campuses November 12th to protest the rising debt levels of students and the rising costs of public higher education. From New York City to Berkeley California, students held rallies to unify their message and solidify their voice.
Two unique waving flags stood out amongst the homemade signs. One red, white, green and black Palestinian flag and a blue and white Israeli flag. While Middle Eastern politics revolving around the territory currently called Israel is extremely controversial, it did not have a connection with the rest of the protest.
One of the students leading different chants and waving the Palestinian flag sported a red shirt with gold letters spelling “RSCC”. According to its own constitution, the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee is an organization that has the goal “To educate, organize and mobilize the broadest numbers of students to join the peoples’ struggles in the community against white supremacy and capitalism-imperialist.”
Their leaders started call and response chants relating to freezing tuition and making sure CUNY staff and faculty have living wages. As more people joined in, the chants turned to “There is only one solution… Intifada revolution!” and “Zionists out of CUNY!”
The First Intifada or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza lasted from 1987 through 1993. In response to a car crash in which an IDF (Israeli Defense Force) vehicle struck a civilian car killing the four Palestinian passengers inside, a mass protest was held consisting of different strikes, economic boycotts, and civil disobedience including throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli defense. During the six-year period, it is estimated that over 1000 Palestinians were killed.
In 2000, the second Intifada occurred and lasted until 2005. There are different theories on the spark that ignited this second Intifada, but it resulted in over four thousand Israeli and Palestinian and Israeli deaths. The Wall along the west bank was also constructed as a result of the second Intifada.
As one student stood with the Israeli flag draped over his back, another argued with a member of the RSCC. “Tell those Israel’s (sic)…tell the people in Israel to go back to L.A.,” the RSCC member shouted. “They don’t belong in Palestine.”
As the screaming members from both parties moved closer to one another the debate became even more heated. “Intifada, Intifada, long live the Intifada” was chanted by the mass of students surrounding the lone student wrapped in the Israeli flag. Further anti-Semitic comments were thrown around until finally the two groups were separated.
The following day the President of Hunter College Jennifer J. Raab along with Sandra Clarkson, the chair of Hunter’s Senate, and Chika Onyejiukwa, the president of the Undergraduate Student Government, released a joint statement condemning the acts that occurred on their campus. The CUNY Chancellor James B. Milliken also commented saying, “CUNY is a place of inclusion not exclusion.”
Samuel Rubinstein, a member of the Board of Directors of Baruch College backed the statements made by those at Hunter adding, “Free speech is essential in a democracy but I do not not believe Students for Justice in Palestine in its current form has a place at CUNY. In my eyes, they are not activists. They are taking a legitimate issue, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and making it an attack on Israel versus trying to find a solution on both sides.”
Members of RSCC declined to answer questions at the rally, and a member of SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) was not reached in time for this article.
On November 16th, the CUNY Board of Trustees held a Public hearing at Baruch College. A police barricade was set up on the Baruch pedestrian plaza on 25th street for students to have a space to express their points of view. Over 20 students from the RSCC as well as members from SJP squeezed into the barricaded space with their signs from the previous protest calling for the board of trustees to be abolished, no more budget cuts, and free tuition.
Calvin Rong, a Baruch Junior majoring in Psychology was crossing the plaza on his way to class as the protest started. “People came to protest tuition hikes, but the protest wasn’t just about that,” he said. Speaking of his confusion with the protestors message he added, “They talked about CUNY divestment in private prisons, demanded more money towards liberal arts, more funding for faculty members, abolishing the board of trustees…oh, and free Palestine.”
Ryan Powers, a former senator with the Baruch Student Government also passed by the protest. “I was down there at the beginning and heard them chanting about tuition being high. After I studied in the library for about an hour, I came back and heard chants about freeing Palestine. I thought it was a completely separate group but they were the same kids,” he said.
What makes their message so confusing to some is that they push many different issues across in a short amount of time. While on the plaza a member began preaching to the growing crowd: “Here in CUNY we do not have the KKK, but we do have the NYPD, we do have Andrew Cuomo and racist legislators upstate, we do have the board of trustees. They have been severely harassing us and suppressing this movement for years.” He went on to talk about poor college prep in high schools and the “racist attacks on poor black and brown families in New York City.”
Sean Liu, a senior majoring in political science at Baruch had stopped and listened to the protestors for almost an hour. “They started with rational tuition hikes and the students who are against that joined in, but then they used it to push their own agenda when it wasn’t even related,” he said.
Powers who had been working on the fight against the tuition hikes with the student government for the past two years shared Liu’s anger. “It’s frustrating when groups like these come along because they are diluting the importance of this issue,” he said. “They are using the stage we created to promote their own cause.”
As a large group of students walked by, one protestor made them a promise. “Next Monday we will be back here for the board of trustees meeting. This board of trustees invests over 300 thousand of our dollars in private prisons CUNY invests in the fences that Israel uses to support apartheid against Palestinians!”
He kept that promise. The following week, at a closed board of trustees meeting, nine different times, the Board was interrupted by screaming protestors being escorted out by the police.
During the meeting, the Board of Trustees approved a budget request to the State legislature that would ask for a rational tuition increase at the four-year colleges to be included in this years state budget.
The student representative on the Board voted no on the request, and the RSCC and SJP are planning their next protest.