Anti-Israel College Campus Protests Are Happening. Here's Why.

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Amid escalating student demonstrations on university campuses across the United States, a growing number of protesters are urging their institutions to divest from Israeli entities as a response to the country’s ongoing war in Gaza. Some students are vowing to take their protest further, promising to not vote for Joe Biden in this November’s election.

While students at Columbia University and other Ivy League campuses are grabbing the most headlines, public schools nationwide are also gearing up for entrenched protests.

So Mother Jones Video Correspondent Garrison Hayes visited one.

He spoke to Josh Rosenberg, a student organizer at the University of Virginia who led a die-in protest on the lawn this past Friday. When asked if he was planning to vote this November, Josh explained that he would vote for down-ballot candidates but would not support Biden unless he changed course in his unconditional support of Israel.

“I have a red line, and that red line is genocide,” he said. Rosenberg expressed doubt that Biden would change course in the remaining months before election day. “All of his actions to this point don’t indicate that he would do that, and I don’t just mean in the last six months, I mean in the last decades of [him] being a senator, vice president and now president.”

For more coverage of the large-scale student protests on university campuses, including their demands and ongoing tensions with administration, faculty, and police, follow along at motherjones.com

#ColumbiaProtest #StudentActivism #Israel #Palestine

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