US Professor Detained In Pro-Palestine Campus Protest Recounts Police Violence

A Palestinian-American professor who was injured while being held to the ground by police officers during his arrest at a pro-Palestine campus protest Wednesday thinks his detention is racially motivated.

"There were three faculty that were detained, and violently a little bit, and three of us were people of color," Samer Alatout, an associate professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose image of violent arrest went viral, told Anadolu in a video interview.

"So it's a legitimate question to ask. Does that mean there is purposeful violence enacted on people of color?" he said.

Alatout said he thought the police were targeting him, adding he was trying to hold his position between the police and the students.

"My role has always been to mediate between the students and the administration...I'm not sure why the targeting," he said.

"In the last five months, I have been probably one of the really instrumental voices on campus for de-escalation and worked with the university administration to make sure that students have the right to speak while at the same time be respectful and not to get kind of the problems that are happening on other campuses," he added.

For Alatout, it was a "big surprise" for him and other people that the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is known for its long history of student protests during the civil rights movement, deployed the police on campus.

He noted that after the violence on campus, the university started negotiations with students from the pro-Palestine encampment, listening to their demands, including divestment with Israel.

"Let's hope that the administration will heed the demands of the students and everything will go back to normal," he added.

On his arrest, Alatout said, "what happens is really what has been happening in the last few months on US campuses, which is the administrations at different universities seem to be thinking that deploying military force or militarizing the campuses is the way to go in order to silence the students."

"The institution, the university, should reflect the whole mosaic of what it constitutes...and of course, many of the students and many of the faculty and staff also don't see themselves reflected in the institution's identity when the institution is supporting or investing in companies that produce war and death," he said about the pro-Palestine protests across universities in the US.

Alatout said that he and other faculty members and staff decided to support the students on Monday and try to protect them from any deployment of police as they joined nationwide pro-Palestine protests across US campuses.

The university administration did not talk with student protesters for two days and called the police onto campus on Wednesday, Alatout recalled.

"I as a faculty member, I take really seriously the notion that I am there, for the most part, to protect the students' rights academically, socially, emotionally, and even physically if it comes to that," he said.

"I stood with them, trying to protect them," he said.

Nearly 2,500 people, including students, have been arrested by US authorities during the pro-Palestine demonstrations, with protesters demanding universities divest from Israel and condemning the war on Gaza, where more than 34,700 people have been killed.

Nationwide demonstrations gained momentum last month after Columbia University asked the New York Police Department to forcibly evict a group of students who staged an encampment on a campus lawn. Over 100 people were arrested, but the protesters quickly adapted and formed another sit-in before they were forcibly removed last Tuesday night by police from that site, as well as a building they occupied.

Students in other countries including Canada, Australia, France, and Egypt have also organized demonstrations at universities in solidarity with Palestine.

According to Alatout, the pro-Palestine student movement is "significant" and tells a lot about the future.

"I think that the students who are participating in it are really multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-religious," he said. "What it shows us is that younger generations are building a new way of belonging to one another, a new way of seeing the world in which justice, equality, love and respect, peaceful coexistence, discourse, freedom, and liberty for everyone are really important elements."

"The encampment is a student activity, and it's beautiful, peaceful, amazingly wonderful. It builds a new world. It shows us how a new world is possible," he added.

"Of course, people here didn't really recognize that, and they didn't necessarily know about the degree of violence that Israeli genocide and Israeli apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism has been doing for the last 75 years," he said, blaming the coverage of the US media.

He said people in the US started to question the "ethical frameworks" of US foreign policy and why their country provides Israel $3.3 billion every year.​​​​​ -