New York, April 25, 2024 – In response to the crackdown on college students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

We stand in solidarity with the student activists facing repression for demanding that their universities end their complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. In a futile attempt to mollify politicians and donors, college presidents like Columbia’s Minouche Shafik have suspended students and called in the police to clear their encampments. Such repression is not new. Months before the first tent popped up on the lawn, Columbia suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and universities started suppressing speech by Palestinian rights advocates years ago.

The furor over campus protests hit the news cycle just as Palestinians uncovered another mass grave in a hospital recently evacuated by Israeli forces, and families are searching for signs of their loved ones among mutilated and decomposing bodies. Those condemning the students aim to draw attention away from the cause of their outrage: Israel’s genocide in Gaza and U.S. institutions’ unconditional support for it. In response to the lawsuit brought against President Biden by Palestinians and Palestinian human rights organizations, a U.S. federal judge found that “the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.” He then stated: “It is every individual's obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”

Students are doing just that. More headlines and outrage have focused on their nonviolent tactics than on Israel’s killing of  35,000 Palestinians, its campaign of starvation that could kill hundreds of thousands more, and its destruction of Gaza’s institutions and infrastructure. During his testimony in court, one of our clients described in agonizing detail how all the places in Gaza that Palestinians have known and loved – including their universities – have been wiped out. 

After nearly seven months of incessant, deliberate obliteration of Palestinian life, students are demanding that their schools take action. Suppression of their advocacy only intensifies their resolve and inspires other students to join the effort. The movement is growing by the hour. Following in the tradition of the students who protested the Vietnam war in 1968 – including our former president,  Michael Ratner – and those who compelled Columbia and other universities to divest from South Africa in the 1980s, today’s student activists stand on the right side of history. We commend their leadership and are proud to stand with them.