No arrests as University of Chicago Police clear pro-Palestinian encampment

Mike Heuer
·3 min read
UPI
Workers clear debris from a pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA in Los Angeles on Thursday, in which scores were arrested. University of Chicago Police also cleared its campus but without making any arrests Tuesday morning. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI

May 7 (UPI) -- University of Chicago Police early Tuesday morning removed a pro-Palestinian protest encampment without making any arrests, the Chicago Tribune, WLS-TV and ABC News reported.

"Protest is a strongly protected form of speech in the UChicago culture, and the demonstrators had multiple opportunities to express their views," Chicago University President Paul Alivisatos said in an online message.

"Many aspects of the protests also interfered with the free expression, learning and work of others," Alivisatos said. "Safety concerns have mounted over the last few days, and the risks were increasing too rapidly for the status quo to hold."

Students and others set up the encampment nine days ago, but about 50 campus police officers dressed in riot gear showed up just before 5 a.m. Tuesday and began clearing the encampment.

The campus police printed and distributed final notices for protesters to evacuate the encampment, but the protesters ignored them.

Crews in trucks arrived and cleared dozens of tents and barriers from the university's outdoor quad area and moved the protesters off the quad while disassembling the encampment.

When students and other protesters tried to push back against the campus police, the officers used yellow barriers to push the students back farther while clearing the quad area.

Campus police let students return to the quad after clearing the camp at about 8 a.m.

Alivisatos said university officials engaged with encampment organizers to try to reach a resolution, but a "number of intractable and inflexible aspects of their demands were fundamentally incompatible with the university's principled dedication to institutional neutrality."

"The university remains a place where dissenting voices have many avenues to express themselves," Alivisatos said, "but we cannot enable an environment where the expression of some dominates and disrupts the healthy functioning of the community for the rest."

Although no arrests were made while clearing the encampment, Alivisatos said "disciplinary action will proceed" where appropriate.

Pro-Palestinian protest encampments have sprung up on campuses across the nation with the National Students of Justice in Palestine typically leading and funding the protests and encampments.

The NSJP has branches at about 350 respective colleges and universities that are not registered nonprofit organizations, so they are not required to disclose the sources of financing for their activities, according to NGO Monitor.

NSJP co-founder Hatem Bazian, a University of California-Berkeley faculty member, also is a co-founder of American Muslims for Palestine, which is incorporated in Illinois.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy on Friday published a report saying the NSJP receives funding from Hamas-linked organizations, such as the WESPAC Foundation, Tides, AMP, Jewish Voice for Peace and Tides, The Jerusalem Post reported.

The U.S. government in 1997 added Hamas to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.