CHICAGO — After the University of Chicago Police cleared a pro-Palestine protest encampment in a brief early morning raid, the main quad was calm with almost no trace of the student activists who had occupied it hours before.

Students and faculty walked to class, passing through the South Side campus where discolored grass replaced the tents that were first set up nine days ago.

“The quietness (of the quad) is deafening,” said Jeffrey Sun, an upperclassman at the university. “And it’s interesting because I think maybe four or five weeks ago, before the encampment, I would have been very happy on the quad, but it’s something where once you know what it could be, you can’t look at it again in a different light.”

About 50 UCPD officers began dismantling tents and makeshift barriers surrounding them around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, protester Christopher Iacovetti said. There were no arrests, according to school officials.

Police had brought printed “final notices” to occupants of the encampment, which were later ripped and strewn at protesters’ feet when they locked arms against a barricade and a line of UCPD officers outside a side entrance to the quad on South Ellis Avenue later Tuesday morning.

At the time, several dozen protesters faced university police and chanted, “We are the encampment! We are the encampment!” along with other slogans calling on the university of disclose and drop its financial ties to Israel.

Police put up a yellow plastic barrier and the chants got angrier. Some protesters screamed insults directly into officers’ faces.“How does it feel to be on the wrong side of history?” they asked. “Shame on you!”

Organizers had spent much of the night preparing for an anticipated police incursion, the second night in a row the expectation of clearance had circulated among those camping out beneath the gothic buildings that ring the university’s main quad.

The encampment has occupied the main quad of the University of Chicago since April 29. It’s one of many other large-scale student protests across the country in demanding the university divest from companies with ties to Israel, including weapons manufacturers supplying arms to Israel’s military amid the mounting death toll in Gaza. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Health Ministry.

Israel launched its bombardment of Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, where the group killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. President Joe Biden last week defended the right to protest but insisted that “order must prevail” at college campuses, as some in Chicago’s Jewish community demanded action at local universities to prevent hate speech.

...continued

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.