🇫🇷 Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the student group behind the 2024 Gaza encampment at Columbia, sent the French high school students leading the protests sweeping France a list of lessons from the U.S. campus movement, "including what we failed to do." The group urged them to follow the money and trace "the supply chains that connect a classroom in Saint-Denis to a mine in the Sahel," then "disrupt them." It admitted that "the Student Intifada's downfall was our failure to widen our terrain of struggle beyond the campus gates," and told the students to "link the lycées to the factories, the factories to the ports, the ports to the ships." It warned them against the "liberal trap," recalling that "by the second week of our encampments, liberals had shifted the conversation away from Gaza to what protest is allowed to look like." It also told them not to let "union executives, party spokespersons, or televised commentators translate your rage," and to protect those taking the greatest risks, because "a movement that abandons its front line to save its respectability will soon find itself with neither." Writing as "veterans of the Student Intifada," CUAD said it saw its own struggle in students "blocking school gates, wearing keffiyehs and hoisting Palestinian flags." The revolt began in the working-class, largely immigrant suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, where, the letter says, "the police who patrol your gates are the descendants of those who patrolled the Casbah," a reference to French colonial rule in Algeria. "Do not demand a better future from those who are actively burning the planet and plotting your demise," it said. "Do not negotiate the terms of your future. Liberate the present."