FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, 4/23/2024
Connecticut DSA (CTDSA) condemns the arrest on Monday morning, 4/22/2024, of over 40 protesters by the Yale Police Department (YPD) and New Haven Police Department (NHPD) at Yale University’s Gaza solidarity camp in Beinecke Plaza. We stand in solidarity with those who were arrested and all students calling for Yale to divest from apartheid Israel and its genocidal actions in occupied Palestine. We celebrate the efforts and leadership of student organizers, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP chapters and other Palestine solidarity formations, Yale YDSA, and National YDSA in the growing wave of college occupations.
This protest, taken alongside students and faculty in over 10 universities nationwide, is an act of civil disobedience with a long history, both at Yale and across the United States. In 1968, Columbia University, the site of the first encampment in solidarity with Gaza earlier this month, was occupied by students protesting the school’s connection with the United States’ genocidal war in Vietnam.
In 1986, students at Yale occupied the same Beinecke Plaza with a shanty town in protest of the school’s connection to apartheid South Africa. Yesterday’s events were a repeat of that moment, with Yale and the police acting as protectors of apartheid and the financial interests which serve it.
Despite attempts by Zionist agitators to distract from their goals, student protesters have remained resolute in their demands for Yale to divest from the Israeli occupation of Palestine and have drawn both faculty and their neighbors in New Haven into the fight. Despite the attempts by the police to break the demonstration with violent arrests, protesters reconvened to receive their comrades upon release with cheers, dance, and song.
We ask all our members, allies, and supporters to join and support the Yale divestment protests and the growing swell of support for Palestine at campuses nationwide in any way you can as they continue this week until universities divest from war and until the liberation of Palestine.
“Disclose, divest,
We will not stop
We will not rest!”
Steering Committee of Connecticut DSA