American university campuses continue their agitation over the war between Israel and Hamas.
The demonstrations in favor of the ceasefire, an expression that President Joe Biden refuses to pronounce and that does nothing more than dig the abyss with respect to the young vote, have been repeated since Israel began its retaliation against the Palestinians after the attack on them. in its own territory on October 7. But this week there was one of the most notable.
Twenty students from Brown University, one of the eight members of the elitist Ivy League, have held an eight-day hunger strike for the institution's support for Israel and the oppression and punishment that the Palestinian people are suffering indiscriminately. . More than 28,000 Palestinians have died in Israel's retaliation, following the 1,200 deaths in the Hamas attack four months ago, which still holds at least a hundred Israelis hostage.
In this protest on the Rhode Island campus, which has had several hundred classmates as a support group, Palestinian, Jewish students and others not included in those two groups were allied. They have maintained themselves with only water and a rehydration serum.
Ariela Rosenzweig, 22, one of the leaders of the mobilization, told the media that she felt weak and sore, with tingling and numbness, but that every time she started to think about how she felt, she thought about Gaza and how the people there they have no choice about the circumstances they were enduring.
The inspiration to undertake this initiative was found in the eleven-day hunger strike that took place on this campus in 1986 while protesting against apartheid in South Africa. “This is part of the students' lineage,” he said. In a sit-in held in November, 61 university students were arrested. Demonstrations have spread across the country and the presidents of two Ivy League universities, Harvard and UPenn (the University of Pennsylvania), have had to resign.
“This is a desperate plea for Brown to not only hear our voices, but also those of the thousands who have died in Palestine,” he stressed.
The protest concluded this Saturday, after two days of meetings with those responsible for the institution, without their demands being met and with the understanding that their requests had become obsolete.
The end of the hunger strike, the organizers insisted, “does not mean the end of the struggle.”
