PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, USA, April 9, 2011 (WAFA) – Students at Brown University in Rhode Island Friday erected a wall in the middle of their campus to highlight the separation wall Israel is building in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The wall had the same name as the wall which divided the University of Arizona campus for 10 days last month, and which was erected to protest US government support for Israel and the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian Territory.
Crystal Vance Guerra, one of the organizers of the mock wall at Brown University, said that the purpose of this activity was “to present the reality of the situations facing Palestinians.”
Students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass Amherst) are planning a similar mock wall on April 20, according to student organizers. Similar activities are planned for the University of New Mexico, The Evergreen State College (TESC), and others. Many of the organizers have been coordinating cross-country over the past year to launch their walls.
Students at the University of Arizona (UA) made history last month when they erected the largest, 400 meters long, mock apartheid wall in the US to divide their more than 50,000-person campus in protest of American policies of support for Israel’s 44-year military occupation and settlement of Palestinian ancestral lands.
An open letter by South African Archbishop and Nobel peace prize winner, Desmond Tutu, addressed to UA, has coincided with the onset of a national student movement of massive mock walls to divide numerous campuses in just about every corner of the US to demonstrate Palestinian solidarity.
In the letter dated March 30 (Palestinian Land Day), also known as international BDS day, Bishop Tutu expressed admiration for the students who erected the mock wall at the UA.
He remarked that the effort reminded him of student activists who erected mock shanty towns throughout American campuses in the 1980s to protest the brutal conditions of the South African apartheid regime while using the tactic to demonstrate student support of divestment from companies profiting from Apartheid.
“It is my hope,” Tutu wrote, “that the creative action by the students will inspire a new movement of mock walls dividing campuses across the US.”
M.A.
