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LONDON: Student protests in the US and elsewhere have been a “crash course” in educating millions of people about the situation in Palestine, the co-founder of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement has said.

Omar Barghouti likened the impact of the demonstrations to anti-apartheid protests in the West against the South African government in the 1980s. 

“The current student-led uprising on campuses in the US, Europe and globally is a sign of Palestine’s South Africa moment, as the support for ending complicity in Israel’s genocide and underlying 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid is reaching a tipping point in the struggle for Palestinian liberation … The ‘B’ and ‘D’ in BDS have gone much more mainstream than before,” he told The Guardian.

The student movements, most noticeably in the US, have demanded that their universities reveal all ties to Israeli military-linked companies, and have called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

At Columbia University, students are also demanding that the administration sever financial ties with companies operating in Israel, including Google, Amazon and Airbnb.

Other movements have demanded that their colleges end academic relationships with Israeli counterparts that operate in the Occupied Territories or that support the Israeli government.

“This student uprising has been a crash course on Palestine for millions in the West in particular, undoing many years of silencing and erasing Palestinian voices, Palestinian history, Palestinian culture (and) aspirations,” said Barghouti, who studied at Columbia in the 1980s.

“It gives us hope and inspiration in these dark times of Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.”

In 1985, students, predominantly driven by the experiences of the US’s own civil rights movement, occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in a bid to force the college to sever ties with South Africa over apartheid.

This year, the hall was again occupied by protesters and unofficially renamed Hind Hall after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in Gaza in January.

Barghouti said: “Everyone who participated in that fateful (1985) protest and thousands like it worldwide will always cherish that we were part of a righteous struggle that triumphed over a seemingly invincible regime of oppression. It always seems impossible until it’s possible.”

BDS, launched in 2005, was established to operate along similar principles to the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements.

“Large universities, especially in the US and UK, have become akin to large investment firms, with massive endowments, yet with students, faculty and workers that often do not like to see their institution investing in companies that harm humans and the planet,” Barghouti said.

“This tension has with time led to heightened repression, silencing and sophisticated methods of censorship to minimize the influence the (wider university) community may accumulate.

“This violent and often racist repression aims to achieve two main goals, first, to colonize the minds of the protesting students with despair, to dismiss their inspiring uprising as futile, and second, to distract from the demands of the movement.

“(But the) creative, fearless and selfless students are amplifying the demands for boycott and divestment like never before, inspiring us greatly and, at a personal level, filling me with a warm sense of deja vu.”

BDS says the current protests have started the process of forcing universities to change their policies on Israel, but Columbia recently experienced violence on campus after its president allowed New York City police to break up a student encampment in April.

Hundreds of students were arrested and forcibly cleared from the site, including Hamilton Hall.

“The violence deployed by police to repress the student-led protests has been shocking, yet indicative of the power of these mobilizations,” said Barghouti.

“Such grave violations of freedom of expression, academic freedom and the civic right to peacefully protest attest to the fertile potential of this uprising to pave the way to cutting ties of complicity with Israel’s regime.”

The protests are also linked to climate change demonstrations that have regularly targeted US university campuses for their links to the fossil fuel industry.

It is estimated that the first 60 days of the Gaza war generated carbon emissions that exceeded the total annual emissions of 23 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, while satellite images seen by The Guardian in March showed that as much as 48 percent of tree cover and farmland in Gaza had been destroyed, alongside sewage and renewable energy systems, with weapons used in the conflict causing severe contamination.

“The struggle to dismantle Israel’s decades-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid in Palestine goes hand-in-hand with global struggles for justice, including climate justice. The catastrophic climate crisis is exacerbated by global inequality and oppression and mainly caused by complicit governments and corporations that put profit before people and the planet,” said Barghouti.

“With Israel monopolizing resources, destroying agricultural land, denying access to water, rising temperatures are exacerbating desertification as well as water and land scarcity, entrenching climate apartheid (in Palestine).”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the protests “antisemitic.” So far, around 37,000 Palestinians are thought to have been killed in Gaza since Israel invaded the enclave last October.