On the night of April 26, Mumia Abu-Jamal referred to as in to the Metropolis College of New York (CUNY) Gaza Solidarity Encampment. CUNY college students and employees, in addition to our Harlem neighbours, huddled across the flagpole on the centre of the encampment to listen to Mumia share a message of solidarity with the protesting college students, the folks of Gaza, and the 1000’s of political prisoners held captive in Israeli prisons.
Two days earlier, Mumia had celebrated his seventieth birthday in Mahanoy jail in Pennsylvania, the place he’s at present greater than 40 years right into a sentence of loss of life by imprisonment. Like lots of his comrades within the Black Panther Occasion, similar to Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim, and Herman Bell, Mumia has spent many years in jail following a political prosecution.
On June 12, 22 protesters from the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment went on trial. Like 13 college students arrested at Stanford College for occupying an administrative constructing, they face felony housebreaking prices. In my opinion these blatantly unjust prices, which might see them obtain a sentence of as much as seven years in jail, are a part of a political technique to repress the motion for Palestinian liberation.
The protesters, generally known as the CUNY 22, had been arrested on April 30, after the New York Police Division (NYPD) had been referred to as on to campus to raid the encampment alongside CUNY’s personal police pressure. The 2 police forces on campus that evening pepper-sprayed protesters and their had been reviews of damaged bones, and incidents of concussion amongst the protestors.
I imagine that senior authorities at CUNY failed in their obligation to guard college students and staff by inviting the NYPD to the campus, and bear e duty for the violence inflicted on our group on that evening, which has led to the politically motivated prices now confronted by the CUNY 22.
Prosecutors have additionally contributed to the hyper-policing of working-class communities of combined race by urgent felony prices towards the CUNY 22.
From the Cease Line 3 motion in Minnesota to the Cease Cop Metropolis motion in Georgia, many prosecutors use mass felony prices to crush organising, mistakenly believing that they will criminalise actions out of existence, when in actuality repression breeds bolder and ever extra inventive types of resistance.
Following the violent arrests of the CUNY 22, the New York state additionally revised its penal code to develop the scope of felony housebreaking prices, notably when prosecuting teams. Alongside the rising use of racketeering prices towards protesters and the criminalisation of bail funds, this modification within the penal code gives prosecutors with a brand new software to repress radical actions.
Making the most of the ethical panic round shoplifting, in New York the penal code change is getting used as an opportunity to extend the policing, surveillance, and imprisonment of working-class and poor New Yorkers.
The identical police pressure that attacked the CUNY encampment on April 30, and brutalised the Nakba day protest in Brooklyn just a few weeks later, recurrently harass Black, immigrant, and unhoused folks. We should struggle again towards the escalating repression and criminalisation of our motion. Liberation is collective, which means that we should tear down all of the partitions from Rikers to Palestine to the Mexican border. We wrestle for the abolition of all settler states from the US to Israel, in addition to prisons and police in every single place.
In 1966 James Baldwin wrote that “Harlem is policed like occupied territory”. This stays the case in the present day, and is why the CUNY encampment’s calls for embrace “cops off campus” and the demilitarisation of Harlem. It’s no coincidence that the NYPD trains with Israel’s navy and has an workplace in occupied Palestine; the policing of the Black group in Harlem and Palestinians from Gaza to East Jerusalem to Bay Ridge are a part of the identical system of settler colonial, imperialist, gendered racial capitalism.
The brutality deployed towards college students at CUNY on April 30 is precisely what police shall be skilled in on the proposed “Cop Metropolis”, a 16-agency compound that may price at the least $225m (however seemingly way more) to construct. This so-called “Cop Metropolis” is a part of Mayor Eric Adams’s imaginative and prescient for a New York that has 1000’s of police personnel on the subway and a brand new multibillion-dollar borough-based jail system, however no weekend library service. This imaginative and prescient, unsurprisingly, additionally contains large finances cuts to CUNY.
The CUNY encampment’s 5 calls for (a homage to the 5 calls for of the 1969 pupil occupation at Metropolis School) embrace a folks’s CUNY with free tuition, dwelling wages, and “complete assist for college kids together with Metrocards, housing, meals, healthcare, and psychological well being counseling”. The calls for additionally embrace a name to divest CUNY’s funds from the decades-long occupation of Palestine (simply as CUNY divested from apartheid South Africa in 1984), in addition to a name to boycott Israeli universities that are foundational establishments within the Zionist challenge and deeply intertwined with the Israeli navy.
Notably vital is the encampment’s third demand, “Solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Battle: Shield CUNY College students & Employees for expressing solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Battle.” This demand extends to group members as a result of CUNY is a public college and its actions have all the time included group participation.
Parts of the college institution are pushing a story that “exterior agitators” had taken over the protests at CUNY, posing a menace to student-employee security and necessitating NYPD presence on campus. This can be a grave insult to numerous Black Harlem organisers who’ve struggled for many years to make sure group management of Metropolis School, which in keeping with a 1965 Amsterdam Information editorial, as soon as was, “nearly as lily white in the course of the day because the campus of the College of Mississippi”.
Over the previous eight months, the Israeli navy (with the unwavering political, monetary, and navy assist of the US authorities) has bombed each college in Gaza, murdering 1000’s of scholars in a “scholasticide” of horrific proportions. As Israel escalates its genocidal asymmetrical conflict on Gaza with the invasion of Rafah, we should stand with the CUNY 22 from a spot of solidarity with the folks of Gaza and the wrestle for Palestinian liberation. As a professor at CUNY, I’m proud to assist the 5 calls for of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and stand in solidarity with the CUNY 22.
Drop the costs now! Free all political prisoners, free CUNY, and free Palestine!
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
