On Tuesday night, hundreds of police officers raided Columbia University in New York, as students had proceeded to occupy a building on the campus. It had been 13 days of demonstrations with students setting up tents in the main courtyard of the university protesting against the war on the Gaza Strip.

Heavy security forces entered the gates of the university, broke up the protest “camp”, headed to the Hamilton academic building and stormed it through the windows in order to break up the student occupation that had started the day before. Chaos quickly ensued with at least 280 students being arrested. Those students who did not remain on campus at the time of the police operation were ordered to either return, immediately, to their dormitories or leave.

The crackdown at Columbia developed almost simultaneously with the tension at other university institutions across the country. Students were arrested at City University in Harlem, while in the early hours of Wednesday, clashes broke out between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students around and between the tents at the university UCLA in California.

The student protests, which have snowballed across the United States, were further fueled by the police raid and arrests at Columbia University in mid-April with a total of at least 1,600 students have been detained across the country.

The students taking part in the demonstrations are not simply against the war. They are demanding that their universities sever ties with Israel-linked companies that do not oppose or support the months-long bloody conflict.

This demand of the students embarrasses US President Joe Biden, whose government supports Israel. Already the American president has been put under the microscope of criticism with gallops showing that his percentages among young people, compared to those in 2020, are falling dramatically.

Before America’s universities start boiling over, Joe Biden was ahead – according to Harvard research – just eight percentage points across ages 18 to 29 against the former American president, Donald Trump, while in 2020 the current American president was ahead of the unofficial, for the time being, Republican candidate by 23 points. In the same survey, 51% of young Americans are in favor of a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, with only 10% stating the opposite.

“I can’t understand how Joe Biden doesn’t say he realizes it … he lost us,” said a senior at NYU University in New York.

According to analysts, this does not equate to the fact that the protesting students will vote in favor of Republican Trump, who, speaking at a campaign rally, called the police raid on Columbia a “beautiful sight”… On the contrary, according to experts , they will not go to the polls in November to vote and this, as they note, is the most dangerous, since the participation will be the key to a victory or a defeat of the current American president.

At the same time the fact remains that Republicans overwhelmingly favor military action by Israel in Gaza, while on the Democratic side only three in 10 agree, and as long as anti-war protests continue in the country, Joe Biden will risk losing his own campaign… war.