Students at Trinity College in Dublin, best known in recent years for its starring role in the fiction of Sally Rooney, organized a protest encampment this week in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In the United States, universities like Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles responded to similar encampments by calling in the police to violently disperse and arrest the protesters. Trinity, on the other hand, negotiated with the protesters and reached an agreement on divestment from Israeli companies.
It’s a strange feeling — not only did we win, but we took the win. How did this happen?
The students obviously deserve the credit, those supposedly goldfish-memoried flibbertigibbets that bounce from cause to cause. In reality, they’ve been consistently campaigning on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) since at least 2015.
During that time, they’ve been building skills and…