The mass protests escalated dramatically across the country after students set up a tent encampment at Columbia University in New York on Wednesday 17 April, demanding the school divest from companies they claim "profit from Israeli apartheid". It was a strategy a small group of pro-Palestinian student activists had been planning for months, though one of them, Columbia graduate student Elea Sun, said a lot of the subsequent protesting has been heavily improvised."There's been a lot of work, a lot of meetings that went into it, and when we finally pulled it off, we had no idea how it would go," they said. "I don't think anyone imagined it would take off like it did."
