On the night of April 26, Mumia Abu-Jamal known 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 individuals 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 presently greater than 40 years right into a sentence of dying by imprisonment. Like a lot of his comrades within the Black Panther Occasion, resembling Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim, and Herman Bell, Mumia has spent a long time 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 fees. In my opinion these blatantly unjust fees, which may 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, often known as the CUNY 22, had been arrested on April 30, after the New York Police Division (NYPD) had been known as on to campus to raid the encampment alongside CUNY’s personal police power. The 2 police forces on campus that night time pepper-sprayed protesters and their had been experiences of damaged bones, and incidents of concussion amongst the protestors.
I imagine that senior authorities at CUNY failed in their responsibility 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 night time, which has led to the politically motivated fees now confronted by the CUNY 22.
Prosecutors have additionally contributed to the hyper-policing of working-class communities of combined race by urgent felony fees in opposition to the CUNY 22.
From the Cease Line 3 motion in Minnesota to the Cease Cop Metropolis motion in Georgia, many prosecutors use mass felony fees to crush organising, mistakenly believing that they will criminalise actions out of existence, when in actuality repression breeds bolder and ever extra artistic 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 fees, notably when prosecuting teams. Alongside the growing use of racketeering fees in opposition to protesters and the criminalisation of bail funds, this alteration within the penal code offers prosecutors with a brand new instrument to repress radical actions.
Benefiting from 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 power that attacked the CUNY encampment on April 30, and brutalised the Nakba day protest in Brooklyn a number of weeks later, repeatedly harass Black, immigrant, and unhoused individuals. We should battle again in opposition to 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 all places.
In 1966 James Baldwin wrote that “Harlem is policed like occupied territory”. This stays the case at the moment, and is why the CUNY encampment’s calls for embody “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 in opposition to 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 can value at the very least $225m (however seemingly rather 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 consists of huge price range cuts to CUNY.
The CUNY encampment’s 5 calls for (a homage to the 5 calls for of the 1969 pupil occupation at Metropolis Faculty) embody a individuals’s CUNY with free tuition, dwelling wages, and “complete assist for college students together with Metrocards, housing, meals, healthcare, and psychological well being counseling”. The calls for additionally embody 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 undertaking and deeply intertwined with the Israeli navy.
Significantly essential is the encampment’s third demand, “Solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Battle: Shield CUNY College students & Staff 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 at all times included group participation.
Parts of the college institution are pushing a story that “exterior agitators” had taken over the protests at CUNY, posing a risk to student-employee security and necessitating NYPD presence on campus. It is a grave insult to numerous Black Harlem organisers who’ve struggled for many years to make sure group management of Metropolis Faculty, which in response to 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 battle on Gaza with the invasion of Rafah, we should stand with the CUNY 22 from a spot of solidarity with the individuals 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 fees 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.
