Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators Occupy Columbia University’s Main Library

Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators flooded into the main library on Columbia University’s campus on Wednesday afternoon and occupied part of the building, in an attempt to rekindle the protest movement that swept campus last spring.

The protesters, wearing masks and kaffiyehs, hung banners in the soaring main room of Butler Library’s second floor, renaming the space “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” according to the demonstrators and witnesses at the library.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a protest movement on campus, said in a Substack post that it had occupied the building to “show that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia’s profits and legitimacy.”