‘Our struggles are connected’: Atlanta protesters link Cop City to Gaza war

The student-led protests at Emory University in Atlanta have distinguished themselves from others occurring across the US in at least one way: protesters are seeking transparency about and divestment from Israel but also from a $109m police training center known as “Cop City”.

A broad-based movement against the training center, now in its fourth year, has drawn national and global headlines, particularly after police shot and killed one environmental protester at a campsite in a public park last year – the first such incident of its kind in US history.

Emory protesters opposing Israel’s war in Gaza as well as Cop City have led some in local media to seek to raise doubts about who was behind the protests and their merging together. A recent opinion piece in the the Atlanta Journal-Constitution stated: “Anti-war protests are susceptible to being co-opted by the activists seeking to prevent the construction of the public safety training facility.”

But multiple interviews at the school by the Guardian reveal that the issue of Cop City and its connections to Israel, have been on the minds of at least part of the student body – and the faculty – for some time, especially after Emory’s president, Gregory L Fenves, allowed Atlanta police on to campus in April 2023, when students set up a camp on the school’s quad protesting against Cop City.

Emory undergraduate student Oren Panovka was at the protests last year and this year. Sitting on a stone bench bordering the school’s grassy quad dotted with oak, pecan and maple trees on a recent afternoon, he gestured across the campus. “Just look around,” he said, pointing to names on some of the buildings nearby.

“Names like Woodruff, Cox – some of the biggest donors to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Then there’s Rollins, Blackstone, who are on the [Emory] board of trustees,” said Panovka, who like many students involved in the Emory protests of recent weeks, is Jewish.

He was explaining why students were demanding the school reveal involvement with and divest from Israel and Cop City, seeing the two as connected.

Foundations bearing the names of Woodruff – a former longtime head of Coca-Cola, and Cox – a global communications, automotive and mass media company, have each given $10m to Cop City. These same foundations have donated generously to Emory. Board members are also linked to donations backing the project.

The issue of transparency is of particular importance to students at Emory, with an endowment of $11bn – the 11th-highest in the US, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Students across the metro area – not just at Emory – have also long been protesting against a direct connection they see between policing in Atlanta and Israel: the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (Gilee), a non-profit program that sends US police officers to Israel and vice versa, for training and other activities.

The Rev Keyanna Jones, a Baptist minister and part of an Atlanta-based faith coalition against Cop City, was asked by Emory student organizers to speak about this and other connections on 25 April, as part of the launch of a protest encampment.

Jones arrived at Emory and had barely gotten through her remarks at a press conference when officers from Emory, Atlanta and Georgia state patrol rushed the quad. “I looked around and saw pepper balls and rubber bullets being shot,” she said. “I saw three young women in hijabs. One was paralyzed; she could not move … I went over and told them, ‘If you don’t move, you’re going to get hurt!’”

One of the women kept screaming, “What is happening?” Jones recalled. Finally, the three ran away from the quad.

At the time, it was probably the fastest shutting down of a student protest encampment of the dozens occurring across the country. It also was probably the first in which police used Tasers on protesters.

“There are reasons why the movement to stop Cop City and the push for a ceasefire now are related,” Jones said. “You have the same Israeli forces in both places. [Gilee] trains APD, GSP and other local police departments … and you see the marked militarization … You can’t deny it when you see local police officers walking around in riot gear, and local governments trying to make you believe it’s normal.”

A few days after, a Black Muslim Emory student named Nadia, who was at the encampment, said: “The cops being trained by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a connection that can’t be overlooked. The show of force we saw [on 25 April] shows that all our struggles are connected.”

The Emory history professor Clifton Crais spent six months meeting with colleagues about how the school should respond to students protesting against these and other issues, after Fenves called Atlanta police on to campus a year ago. This involvement also includes the president’s membership of Atlanta Committee for Progress, a group that supports the training center.

“It’s very important to remember the profound contradictions, if not hypocrisy, in what happened last April,” Crais told the Guardian. “A peaceful protest against the Atlanta police department was met with the Atlanta police department.” The move was “a flat-out violation of our open expression policy”, he said.

Fenves pledged in a 31 October letter shared with the Guardian that a report examining the events of April 2023 would be forthcoming. The report was never produced, Crais said. The history professor wrote a motion of no confidence in Fenves after police were once again called on to campus during the most recent protest; three-fourths of the college of arts and science faculty approved the motion last week. Emory students have also expressed no confidence in the president.

The history professor drew attention to students’ motivation in the protests of recent weeks. “One thing that’s gotten some people confused is how Cop City is bleeding into Palestine,” he said. “Students see them as interrelated. Atlanta police training in Israel raises profound concerns for students, and this very often gets lost in the noise.”

Recalling the university’s response to the two protests students have staged at Emory in the last year, Jones said: “It seems like there are two things that can’t be talked about – Cop City and Israel.”