Exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation at Columbia University was violently cleared by the New York Police Department, hundreds of police officers moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday night to quell a different kind of antiwar protest.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested as police officers entered Columbia’s main campus, which was on lockdown, and cleared Hamilton Hall of a group who had broken in and occupied it the night before.

It was a…