A scaled-back pro-Palestinian protest took place at the University of Auckland last night — with a rally going ahead after plans for an overnight encampment were abandoned.
Student Justice for Palestine's Layan Khalil said an email from the university's vice-chancellor triggered the shift in approach.
"She requested that we don't do an encampment and that they will not support any camping on campus," she said.
"They don't mind us having a rally and they don't mind us protesting, because we do have the right to protest, but they were just against an encampment – and so, because the email went out really late, it sort of instilled fear into people.
"A lot of reconsideration had to be made regarding the encampment."
The University of Auckland protest occurred as the United States was swept with campus protests of its own.
Duelling groups of protesters clashed overnight at the University of California, Los Angeles, shoving, kicking and beating each other with sticks after pro-Israel demonstrators tried to pull down barricades surrounding a pro-Palestinian encampment.
Hours earlier, police burst into a building occupied by anti-war protesters at Columbia University, breaking up a demonstration that had paralysed the school.
After a couple of hours of scuffles between demonstrators at UCLA, police wearing helmets and face shields slowly separated the groups and quelled the violence.
Khalil told Breakfast the protesters at Auckland felt the responsibility of complying with the students' code of conduct, adding hundreds of students came to the event yesterday.
She said the demonstration was particularly in solidarity with students in Gaza who have had their educations disrupted by the war – and also with student activists globally who have been "unjustly arrested and expelled".
"We've also got demands for the university to cut ties with Israeli institutions," she added.
Asked what the university's response had been, Khalil said: "We haven't formally presented our demands yet, so I guess that's why we haven't had a response yet in terms of anything formally.
"We will definitely give them a very strict list of demands that we ask them to do, and then go from there."
University's view
Auckland University said yesterday: "The University of Auckland fully supports the right of our students and staff to engage in peaceful and lawful protest.
"However, we also have a paramount obligation to protect the health, safety and well-being of our university community.
"We have worked constructively with the student organisers to facilitate a peaceful and lawful protest rally on campus... however, we have not authorised the establishment of an overnight encampment.
"This compromise enables students and staff who wish to express their views to do so in a peaceful and lawful manner, without introducing the significant risks that such encampments have brought to other university campuses."
— additional reporting by the Associated Press
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