What do Pro-Palestine student protestors want?

Since October, students across university campuses have launched rallies, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and most recently, encampments against the war in Gaza. These protests are now roiling the top universities across the US. Over the past two weeks, tensions have boiled over into an uprising that can be compared to protests over the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street, and the 1980s anti-apartheid movement. Why are students pitching tents and refusing to leave? And what, specifically, do they want to achieve?

To understand the current escalation, we have to look back to last December when heads of Ivy League colleges testified on antisemitism on campus to the Congress. The officials who testified were accused of waffling, leading to the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigning. Last week, Columbia president Nemat Shafik was at Capitol Hill hot seat and took a much tougher stance on antisemitism. While she was in Washington, hundreds of students set up encampments on the campus. They demanded a ceasefire in Gaza and asked university leaders to divest from Israel.

On the second day of these protests, NYPD officers were called in to break up and clear the students. In the days that followed, similar arrests were made on campuses across the country, including New York University, Yale, Emory, Emerson College, and the University of Southern California. In most cases, protestors were arrested for trespassing, with many suspended and now potentially facing criminal charges.

These arrests have done little to quell the protests. Students continue to demand that their schools, many with massive endowments, financially divest from Israel and drop all financial ties. Student activists say that companies doing business in or with the nation of Israel are complicit in its ongoing war on Gaza – and so are the colleges that invest in those companies. University endowments are crucial to fund everything from research labs to scholarships. These endowments are usually returns from millions – and billions – of dollars in investments made by universities. They own shares of large companies from Amazon to Microsoft, and put money into private equity, hedge funds, and index funds.