Pro-Palestinian students at one of France’s most elite universities, Sciences Po, occupied a campus building overnight. Like-minded demonstrators at University College London set up an encampment. And tents with Palestinian flags stretched out this week across university campuses in Australia.
The tensions gripping universities in the United States appear to be spreading to other countries, where student activists have challenged their own schools’ stances on the war in Gaza and ties to Israel.
Demonstrators at several universities in France have put pressure on administrators to more forcefully condemn Israel’s military offense in Gaza and review partnerships with Israeli universities and private donors.
Police officers went into Sciences Po on Friday morning to clear out a group of pro-Palestinian protesters who had occupied a campus building overnight, according to a spokesman for the university. The intervention came after a town hall debate about the Gaza war on Thursday at the university — which counts top politicians, civil servants and business leaders among its alumni — failed to defuse tensions.
The main Paris campus was closed on Friday, the Sciences Po spokesman said. According to live video shared on Instagram, students sitting in a hall chanted, “We ask for justice! We get the police!” as officers pulled them out.
In Britain, small encampments have begun to spring up at universities in the cities of Bristol, Newcastle and Warwick. And a coalition of students and staff members at University College London put up tents on the campus grounds on Thursday to pressure the school to divest from companies complicit in what they called “the genocide of Palestinians,” among other demands.
