#Pro-Palestinian 🇵🇸 Encampments

[xtruss]

Students St Two Universities Strongly Associated With Lord Arthur Balfour Have Launched Pro-Palestinian Encampments On Campus To Protest “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Illegally Occupier of Palestine and The Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell’s War On Gaza.”

The protests at Edinburgh and Cambridge are part of a growing movement on campuses across the world, which involves students setting up protest camps to demand that their institutions break off ties with Israeli institutions, as well as companies involved in supplying arms to the state.

At Edinburgh, students wearing Palestinian scarves made their demands clear at the start of their protest at the university's Old College .

In one video taken on Monday and provided to Middle East Eye by activists, a student with a loudspeaker is seen addressing fellow protesters.

"We demand that the University of Edinburgh divest entirely from companies tied to Israel and complicit in the globally acknowledged genocide of the Palestinian people," the speaker says.

Middle East Eye has asked both universities for comment, while Edinburgh Univeristy has not yet responded, a spokesperson for the University of Cambridge said: "The University is fully committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law and we acknowledge the right to protest.

"We will not tolerate antisemitism, Islamophobia and any other form of racial or religious hatred, or other unlawful activity."

Balfour is infamous in the Middle East and beyond for his eponymous declaration, which paved the way for the Zionist settlement of historic Palestine and the eventual expulsion of its native Arab people.

He also served as British prime minister and was foreign secretary when he issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 promising Jews a homeland in Palestine.

The decision paved the way for the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine under the British Mandate, culminating in the Nakba of 1948, which saw the establishment of the Israeli state and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.

Many of those expelled found refuge in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, where their descendants remain today.

[decolonize-the-everything]

All from the last few hours.

Join and support the encampments near you!!!

🇵🇸 Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇸🇵🇸 🚨

POLICE VIOLENTLY STORM UCLA CAMPUS AS INSTIGATORS ATTACK STUDENT PROTESTERS

📹 Scenes from the UCLA college campus in Los Angeles, California, where student protesters with the Palestine solidarity movement are violently stormed, assaulted and arrested by police in riot gear who treat Americans as an occupying force.

Protesters at the campus were overwhelmingly peaceful and non-violent, chanting in support of Palestinians under siege, bombardment and blockade in the Gaza Strip.

Violence instead came in the form of pro-Zionist instigators and provocateurs who threw objects at protesters who refused to engage with them.

The violence then escalated when Police forces, who had looked-on as protesters were attacked by a group of pro-Zionists in masks, stormed the encampment and violently assaulted and arrested protesters, using batons to beat students while a police helicopter hovered overhead.

Dozens of protesters were arrested in the raid.

#source

#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[holeymolars]

hello, so so sorry if you already know this, but an engagement farm on twitter (@/yahthewise) has been using a photo of you for rage bait, and it's been reposted onto a large account (@/buffys). i reported both users already, but i wanted to warn you about this. i hope you manage to get the posts taken down, fuck both of these assholes and i loved ur poetry!

Hey lovely! this has been a crazy night and my friends aren't letting me look at the replies to this post but there have been some really kind ones they've read out to me! this is so crazy because i am very publicly pro palestinian, i was in a student encampment for 9 weeks over the summer and i march for palestine every week. i'm really grateful for everyone who has sent me an ask or dmed me to let me know about what was happening. considering what's happening all over the world right now this is the least important thing that's ever happened to anybody and probably won't affect my life much. the internet is so crazy.

while writing this my friend showed me that hundreds of people are defending me on twitter. i appreciate you all so much. it's actually really reassuring that this many people bullied me because they thought i was a zionist. fuck zionists 🖕

if you're in the UK, please consider going to a national march on Oct 5th. we need to reclaim the anniversary of the genocide, we need to show up in our thousands and show the world that we are still paying attention. free palestine! 🇵🇸

[emanblr]

I wonder how the zionists feel about the Palestinian flag flying high all over the world, like its literally everywhere. 💀😂

I mean zionists get so miserable and agitated when they see a tiny thing thats in anyway pro Palestine so it must be very hard on them watching this amazing global support and love for Palestine.

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[sokka-with-his-hair-down]

if you follow me i’d like to ask that you please go into the trending tags regarding Gaza/Palestine and the University encampments in the US (such as the Columbia University tag). there are tons of links you can donate to and share both for people trying to evacuate Gaza and for bail/legal funds for pro-Palestinian protestors who have been arrested. as always free palestine 🇵🇸🍉

[laconicmoon]

🇵🇸low spoons, low income ways to support a free palestine🇵🇸

For many low-income and/or disabled activists, we can't always do the obvious things to support Palestine like donating money or going to protests. I'm compiling this list to remind myself what I *can* do, and I'm hoping it might help some other people too.

Disclaimer: you might not find all of these to be low spoons for you--maybe drawing is physically difficult, or phone calls are distressing. These are just ideas! Please ignore and adapt them to suit your needs and abilities <3

🍉Get creative with stickers, posters, zines, whatever!

Adhesive shipping labels from USPS ship to your house for free (if you live in the US). You can order up to 750 at a time! Draw a Palestinian flag or "Free Gaza" on there and stick them everywhere (it's actually quite easy to vandalize without getting caught).

If you want to go bigger, try a wheatpaste, and if you have access to a printer or copier, leave some zines around (tutorial, canva template). If you are housebound, you can give them to a friend to spread around for you.

You can also make signs and have someone else take them to a protest. If you're a sewist, make a puppet or wearable patches!

🍉Display a Palestinian flag or pro-Palestine sign in your window

If you live in an area where this isn't safe, or if you don't have your own space, assess the risk before you do this. You could also put up a more subtle symbol, such as a watermelon, if you are nervous about backlash.

🍉Contact your reps!

I know people say this all the time, but for my US-based friends, some pointers to make it take as few spoons as possible--

Democracy.io makes it super easy to email both your senators and your representative at the same time.

Faxzero.com allows you to send a fax straight to your reps' printers. Not all of their offices have this enabled, but I've heard faxes are more direct than emails.

If you don't know what to say, you can adapt this template (it's a bit outdated). Or just write "Free Palestine" or "Ceasefire Now." Something is better than nothing!

🍉Participate in phone zaps

Often times, organizations like USPCN or Jewish Voice for Peace will ask for people to call a person or organization to put pressure on them, such as demanding that a university drop charges against student protestors. Monitor those accounts and, if you're up for it, call or leave a message. Or, you could even text the group chat and conduct your own phone zap!

🍉Check out library books about Palestine

You also may be able to request that your library purchase certain titles, or request titles they don't have through interlibrary loan!

🍉Write a letter to the editor

You can write either to a local paper or a school paper, if you're a student or alum. This is a great way to break out of the echo chamber--local papers often have an intergenerational audience.

🍉Send in a public comment to a city council meeting

Many cities have the option to send in a public comment electronically! So if you can't make it to an in-person meeting, this is a good option, especially if your city is trying to pass a ceasefire resolution.

🍉Attend online Jewish Voice for Peace "Power Half-Hour for Gaza"

JVP's Power Half-Hours are a wonderful space to grieve, process, and build stamina for the fight to come. Monday through Friday, 3pm ET/ 12pm PT, 30 minutes of solidarity-building and reflection facilitated by Jewish leaders but open to all. You can pre-register to join on Zoom or stream on YouTube.

🍉Support friends who go to protests/actions

That can be as simple as texting them before and after and making sure they are safe, lending them a bandana or rain gear, or providing a place to decompress afterward! If you have an animal that does well in crowds, consider allowing a trusted friend to take them to a protest or encampment for a short time. Seeing dogs in keffiyehs always makes my day <3

---

🍉Other Considerations and Reminders 🍉

Focus on the long haul. It's more important to create a pace of activism that's sustainable for you than it is to do everything all the time.

"Ought" implies "can." If you are unable to do something, or if it would be very difficult for you to do so, you are in no way obligated to do that thing!

Block words on social media if you need to. In a similar vein, you do not need to force yourself to constantly watch graphic videos or read upsetting posts. Yes, Gaza has asked us to bear witness to the atrocities there--"All Eyes on Gaza Now" is a common chant for a reason. But that doesn't mean you, specifically, must doomscroll forever.

Please reblog with your own favorite ways to advocate for Palestine when you're broke and spoonless 🇵🇸 🇵🇸

[cannibal-stag]

if you follow me i’d like to ask that you please go into the trending tags regarding Gaza/Palestine and the University encampments in the US (such as the Columbia University tag). there are tons of links you can donate to and share both for people trying to evacuate Gaza and for bail/legal funds for pro-Palestinian protestors who have been arrested. as always free palestine 🇵🇸🍉

[the-secret-garden1]

PALESTINE UPDATES 🇵🇸

Students at UCLA targeted by Zionist mob.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ROSY FAZIL PIRANI (@rosypirani)

Protests at UCLA turned extremely violent. When a group of hundreds of Zionists attacked the pro Palestinian encampment with bricks, fireworks, pepper spray and gas canisters. The encampment had no weapons. They had no intention to fight Zionists on campus. All they had were wooden barriers and umbrellas to defend themselves from these attacks.

Law enforcement and the security hired by UCLA to protect students, stood at the edge of the scene. And watched, doing absolutely nothing to help the students being attacked.

Here’s the Palestinian encampment’s statement:

May their sacrifice help inspire us to continue to speak out and show our support for the people of Palestine. May it inspire us to continue to protest. To continue to seek justice, not just for the Palestinians. But all those being persecuted, including the people of Congo and Sudan. May we look at this and be reminded that there are people still in need of our help. Our platforms, and our voices.

So continue to spread awareness, continue to protest. Continue to boycott, and donate to families trying to flee for their safety. Every single thing you do to help matters, it makes a difference. No matter how small.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Priscilla Luna 🇲🇽🖤 (@priscillaluna__)

tw: beating, and other acts of violence.

For all of you that also have tik tok, if you're looking for pro-Palestinian creators an account I would recommend is @yourfavouriteguy . He's one of my favourites, check him out if you're interested!

Remember to reblog, like, tell your friends, etc. To spread the word about what is going on. Thanks for reading, and as always free Palestine.

[catrillion]

Per WSB-TV Atlanta on April 29, 2024:

UGA students, staff arrested after set up of encampment on campus

ATHENS, Ga. — Around 17 protesters were arrested on the University of Georgia campus after some students and some Athens community members held a pro-Palestine demonstration Monday. According to a UGA spokesperson Greg Trevor, the Monday morning’s encampment on the North Campus Quad crossed a line and violated the school’s policies. Students say the university has chosen profit over the lives of the Palestinian people and the overwhelming force of student opinion.

...

A protester and UGA alum who only wanted to be identified as John waited for others to be released. “(I’m) trying to show solidarity and support for them,” John said. “A lot of them are students and definitely scared right now. There’s a lot of concern among the community.”

Police moved in quickly Monday morning. “There were police and people protesting, and people were in handcuffs,” student William Willis said. “It was pretty crazy.” Another protester said the police did not negotiate with the protesters. “They just showed up and were like, ‘Y’all need to leave,’ and they had guns,” one said.

[X]

These protests are happening across the US, and some have even succeeded in changing campus policy and ending investment toward Israel. We can't let up now; police will continue to try to silence these student's voices, just as the government has tried to silence Palestinian voices. But Palestinian freedom WILL come, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Justice for Palestine 🇵🇸

[sadgothicbitch]

first of all Free Palestine 🇵🇸

i am far from the right person to educate on this topic but i encourage you to listen to palestinian people. a genocide is happening right now.

i’m sure that you’ve heard about push back against people speaking out against the Israeli government. across the united states university are protesting.

Last night a protest at Cal Poly Humboldt got volatile fast. Students took over a building and experienced police force. if you would like to know more about the situation i’ll link articles about the situation below. again i want to reiterate the atrocities committed in Gaza are horrific. as an american i am aware that my country is benefiting and supporting israel. This includes the university that i attend.

[xtruss]

Social media users have heaped praise on Grammy Award-Winning Rapper Macklemore after his latest song took aim at US War Criminal Genocidal President Joe Biden and the American political establishment over their unwavering support for “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Zionist 🐗 Isra-hell.”

"The blood is on your hands, War Criminal Genocidal Biden, we can see it all," the US rapper said in "Hind's Hall," a track released late on Monday as Israel escalated its devastating assault on Gaza.

"What is threatenin' about divesting and wantin' peace?," Macklemore, Whose Real Name Is Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, said in the track, referring to calls on US campuses to divest from Israel and end potential complicity in Israel's ongoing war on Gaza.

The song, released on Macklemore's Instagram account, sampled iconic Lebanese artist Fairuz and praises the pro-Palestine protesters that have set up encampments across dozens of college and university campuses during recent weeks, while facing violent crackdowns from police.

The track was released alongside a video featuring shots of armed officers forcibly dismantling and arresting the peaceful protesters on US campuses.

Clips of American politicians and corporations are interspersed with scenes from the devastation in Gaza and the ongoing “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Zionist 🐗 Isra-helli” Assault.

The Title, Hind's Hall, is a reference to Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, which Pro-Palestine protesters had occupied and renamed after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old child who was killed by “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Zionist 🐗 Isra-hell” in January.

The song has been viewed nearly 100 million times across social media across X and Instagram.

Users Praised Macklemore for calling out celebrities and artists who are not speaking up on the war in Gaza, which has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Others Highlighted Macklemore's Lyrics That Reference The Nakba,Tthe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine In 1948 To Make Way For The Establishment of “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Zionist 🐗 Isra-hell,” and allusion to “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Zionist 🐗 Isra-hell” As a Colonizing Power.

Macklemore also posted on social media that all proceeds from the song once it begins streaming will go towards the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid provider in Gaza.

— ✍️ Noor El-Terk/Middle East Eye

US Rapper Macklemore Has Released A New Protest Track In Support Of Palestine 🇵🇸.

Entitled "Hind's Hall", the track is inspired by the ongoing student protests taking place around the world, and pays tribute to Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian child killed by an Israeli strike two months ago in Gaza while she was waiting for aid, trapped in a car and surrounded by the bodies of her slain relatives.

He Said That All Proceeds From Hind's Hall Will Go To United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Main Aid Provider In Gaza.

[workersolidarity]

🇬🇧🇵🇸 🚨

STUDENT PROTERSTERS ELUCIDATE THEIR GOALS IN INTERVIEW WITH ANADOLU NEWS, JEWISH STUDENTS SAY THEY FEEL PERFECTLY SAFE

📹 "I've been sleeping on camp since Monday and I would say that I feel safer here at this encampment than I usually do at the University of Oxford as a Jewish student."

Student protesters at Oxford University, in the UK, speak with Anadolu News Agency about their experiences at the Pro-Palestine encampment, where students are protesting their school's investments in the Israeli occupation and defense contractors, as well as the Israeli occupation's genocide in Gaza continues.

Dozens of tents at Oxford were erected in the vicinity of the Pitt Rivers Museum, while students stand in solidarity the Palestinians under siege and bombardment in the Gaza Strip, while issuing concrete demands for their school's divestment from the Israeli entity and defense contractors, and also calling for boycotts of Israeli goods and the Liberation of Palestine.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[xtruss]

University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs Over “New McCarthyism” On Gaza, Forever Palestine 🇵🇸

As brutal police repression sweeps campus encampments, schools have been cutting ties with pro-Palestine faculty members without tenure.

— Natasha Lennard | May 16 2024

Columbia University professors demonstrate outside the Columbia campus demanding the release of arrested students in New York City on May 1, 2024. Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

Many Scholars Committed to Palestinian liberation can no longer do their jobs. That’s because many of the professors most supportive of Palestine don’t have jobs anymore.

This is nowhere truer than in the Gaza Strip — where all 12 universities have been reduced to rubble, and more than 90 professors have been reported killed during Israel’s assault on the territory. The gravity of what United Nations experts warn could amount to U.S.-backed “scholasticide” has no equivalent on American soil.

Yet Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with U.S. universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either.

Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics in fields including politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.

These educators have little in common. They live in different cities and states and hail from different countries. Some have been teaching in their institutions for decades, some were newly hired. Some taught at private universities, others public. They have varying degrees of job security, from a tenured professor to the most precarious adjunct contracts. And they are racially, ethnically, religiously, age, and gender diverse.

What they share is that, in recent months, they have all staked out positions in favor of Palestinian freedom — positions that lead them to be targeted by pro-Israel groups.

From campus to campus, professors have defended students’ right to protest, but when scholars themselves espouse support for Palestine and opposition to the Israeli state, professional consequences have frequently been grave.

There’s no official tally of the number of academic workers who have lost jobs or faced suspension over support for Palestine, not least because higher education in this country is disarticulated, often privatized, and reliant on short-term contract labor. By and large, professors facing job loss and suspensions over Palestine have brought these allegations into public view by speaking out themselves. Scores of academics across the country are likely under investigation, and many stand to have their contracts quietly expire without renewals.

The Intercept spoke with more than a dozen professors, both adjuncts and those with tenure, whose employment has been imperiled by their pro-Palestine speech. Of the professors I talked to, all were at one point under investigation since October 7; some of the probes closed without findings of wrongdoing. Several faced varying degrees of suspensions, and four of the professors lost their jobs or expect to lose them next week when the semester ends without the renewal of their contracts.

The interviews, including those with campus labor activists and academic associations, revealed a pattern of politically motivated repression where campaigns by pro-Israel advocates can mar the careers of academics because of comments that express outrage at Israel’s ongoing occupation and its war in Gaza.

“Of The Cases That We’ve Opened, None of Them Have Been Related To Pro-Isra-hell Speech. All of Them Have Been in Support of The Palestinian Cause.”

“The bulk of our inquiries, even our cases, have to do with violations of due process related to non-reappointment, to dismissal, to tenure award, et cetera,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors. Levy told me that the nonprofit organization, which advocates for faculty rights and academic freedom, currently has opened five cases in recent months related to pro-Palestinian speech.

“When we get five or six of these cases in a two-month period, where there are suspensions related to social media posts over a current event, shall we say, the war in Gaza, that is unusual,” she said. “Of the cases that we’ve opened, none of them have been related to pro-Israel speech. All of them have been in support of the Palestinian cause.”

We are at the dawn of a “new McCarthyism,” Levy said. “This may be the tip of the iceberg.”

Institutions are well positioned to eliminate political dissenters from their payrolls under the misleading banner of protecting Jewish people, primed by heightened Republican attacks on higher education.

“This is beyond the new McCarthyism. This has to deal fundamentally with Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinian racism,” said Mohamed Abdou, who is a visiting professor in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University — that is, until this semester ends.

Columbia President Minouche Shafik announced that the university was cutting ties with Abdou during a congressional hearing last month about antisemitism on campus. Abdou was one of five professors named by the school administrator but the only one without the relative protection of tenure. His one-year contract ends this month.

“What she effectively did was blacklist me globally,” Abdou told me of Shafik’s testimony. (Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.)

Abdou said he was smeared for words in a Facebook post on October 11 that were taken dramatically out of context. The activist-scholar was framed in Congress and in the right-wing media as an antisemite and Hamas supporter. His lengthy post asks readers to think about a future for Palestine, and support for resistance, beyond the binary of a secularized, Eurocentric state formation, or “Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s neoconservative idea of Sharia.”

“I’m against any form of authoritarianism,” Abdou — whose work focuses on Islam, anarchism, and settler colonialism since 1492 — told me.

One extramural social media post has been weaponized to undo Abdou’s career, after 20 years of teaching in Canada, Egypt, and the U.S. in fields including queer studies and Indigenous studies, leaving the scholar with scant recourse and limited options. He is hardly alone.

“Fired After 18 Years”

Anti-Palestinian repression on U.S. campuses since October 7 has not been subtle. Students and faculty face far-reaching discriminatory censure and defamatory allegations for pro-Palestinian advocacy, as administrators jump to appease pro-Israel donors and conservative political interests.

In the last months, school administrators called in riot cops to clear student encampments and arrest thousands at Columbia University, City College of New York, Emerson College, Emory University, New York University, the University of Austin at Texas, and more. It was brutal state violence against students not seen since the campus movement against the Vietnam War — justified this time by flimsy claims about student safety, undergirded by a conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

There have been scenes of faculty solidarity. Last week, faculty members at the New School in New York, where I teach, launched the first faculty-led solidarity encampment, following the shuttering of the student encampment with mass arrests. In late April, dozens of professors and others from New York University formed a line around their protesting students as police were called in to raid their encampment; faculty and students were all arrested together. Footage capturing the arrests of Emory Philosophy Department Chair Noëlle McAfee and economics professor Caroline Fohlin, the latter who was slammed brutally to the ground by cops, was shared widely online.

Yet once media attention moves away from encampment sweeps and violent arrests, many professors who have lost work will still be without their livelihoods or left facing precarious futures with their reputations unfairly besmirched.

“I was fired after 18 years as a professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,” Danny Shaw said. He was told last month by administrators at the college, which is part of the public City University of New York system, that he would not be reappointed to his longtime adjunct position. Shaw’s colleagues had moved to reappoint him but were overruled by John Jay President Karol Mason, according to an open letter from the economics department.

“The non-reappointment of Danny Shaw is an unacceptable action,” Shaw’s colleagues in the economics department wrote in their open letter. “Danny Shaw is a valuable member of his department who has been teaching at John Jay since 2007. Professor Shaw is an excellent teacher who has received a Distinguished Teaching Award.”

New York, New York — May 09: Cresa Pugh, new school professor of sociology, blocks of a police school safty van, holding arrested students outside the New School faculty's pro-Palestinian encampment on May 09, 2024 in New York City. The New School faculty set up the first faculty-led, pro-Palestinian encampment in memory of Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian professor, poet, and writer who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last December. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

The dismissal followed right-wing, pro-Israel online harassment, Shaw said, in response to his showing vocal support for Palestine and opposition to Israel following October 7 and the start of Israel’s bombardments.

“I saw a genocide in motion, so I began to organize demonstrations and teach-ins and conferences,” Shaw told me.

On his X account in mid-October, in the wake of stridently bellicose remarks from Israeli officials, Shaw wrote in a now-deleted post that Zionism “is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.” The target was unambiguously Zionist ideology and its adherents, not Jews for being Jewish. The speech is also clearly within the bounds of First Amendment protections. It was, of course, decried as antisemitic.

The pattern is now familiar. Zionist groups like Canary Mission and Antisemitism.org, which have made a business of going after faculty and students online, single out those on campus with pro-Palestine views. Universities then face political and donor pressure to censure the targeted professors.

Many academics now facing termination, suspension, or having their contracts not renewed told me their open support for Palestinian freedom was nothing new and had never been a significant issue before. “I’ve been doing Palestinian solidarity work since the 1990s when I was a teenager,” Shaw said.

At the time John Jay cut ties with Shaw, CUNY was facing increasing pressure from the city and state, with the threat of funding loss tied to trumped-up claims of spiking antisemitism on campus. In late October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered an independent investigation into antisemitism at CUNY. (A spokesperson for John Jay College said the school can’t comment on personnel matters.)

CUNY has ended its relationship with at least on other professor because of speech related to Israel’s war on Gaza. One, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, a scholar of Japanese literature formerly at CUNY’s Hunter College, told me in a statement that a student reported several of her pro-Palestine social media posts to the head of her department in November. Nothing in the posts, she noted, was antisemitic. “The only thing I have done,” she said, “is to criticize the state of Israel for its 75-year brutal occupation of Palestine and criticize Americans for their complicity or silence in this genocide.”

Pro-Israel speech incurs consequences much less frequently, but it does happen. In one case, Arizona State University put postdoctoral research fellow Jonathan Yudelman on leave after a video of a pro-Israel rally went viral. In the video, shot near campus in May, Yudelman gets in the face of a woman in a hijab, who says her religious boundaries are being violated. Yudelman replies, “You disrespect my sense of humanity, bitch.” A statement released by the school last week said that Yudelman “is on leave from Arizona State University pending the outcome of an investigation” into the incident. The statement said that, prior to the event, “Yudelman had already resigned his position at ASU, effective June 30, and he was not scheduled to teach any additional courses.”

Yudelman’s case is a rare exception to the rule that treats support for Palestine as a professional liability.

Tenure in the Age of Unsafety

What the late, legendary civil rights attorney Michael Ratner coined as “the Palestine exception to free speech” is not new, though its escalation in the months since October has been ferocious.

“Repression of anti-Zionism has a long and ugly history in academe. It really started to pick up after 1967,” Palestinian American scholar and author Steven Salaita told me by email, referring to the period of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, a time when support for Israel was growing in the U.S. “Too many people to remember have been negatively affected. But it’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it.”

Salaita was fired for pro-Palestinian speech in 2014, a forerunner for the current repressive moment. After Salaita was let go from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois over tweets criticizing Israel, a public records request on Salaita’s behalf revealed communications between the university and several wealthy donors threatening to withdraw financial support unless Salaita was fired. The university eventually settled a lawsuit by Salaita for $875,000.

“I’d say that on the one hand my situation with the University of Illinois a decade ago is exactly like what so many of my colleagues and comrades currently suffer,” Salaita told me. “On the other hand, my situation was different insofar as I was fired from a tenured professorship, which is highly uncommon.”

In recent years, right-wing culture warriors and administrators with their eyes on the bottom line have been trying to find ways to fire tenured professors. As political theorist Joshua Clover, a tenured professor at the University of California, Davis, pointed out, universities for the most part have only been able to achieve this by closing down whole departments on purported economic grounds. The attack of pro-Palestinian speech, though, offers a whole new avenue, under the guise of protecting Jewish students.

Broad and vague charges of “making students feel unsafe” allow universities to scrutinize everything a professor does, inside or outside of the classroom. Clover, who has himself been targeted by Canary Mission for anti-Zionist speech, told me this enables “extramural speech to be treated as something relevant to people’s work situation.”

“There’s nothing extramural anymore,” he said. “We’re all at work 24 hours a day, wherever we are.”

It was extramural speech — an essay for a leftist publisher — that earned a suspension from teaching for Jodi Dean, a tenured political theorist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, where she has taught for 30 years. (She remains employed at the university.) Her essay was condemned for describing seeing images of the breach of the Gaza wall on October 7 as “exhilarating,” and the college president said in a letter that there “may be students on our campus who may feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.”

“I have been here for 20 years and I haven’t seen anything like this,” Paul Passavant, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith, told Middle East Eye of Dean’s suspension. “​​It is a total violation of academic freedom. And it violates the integrity of the institution as an academic institution.”

In response to requests for comment, a Hobart and William Smith spokesperson forwarded three letters from university leadership that had been sent out to the college community in mid-April.

“Professor Dean has the right to express her views,” the school’s provost and dean of faculty Sarah Kirk wrote in an April 15 letter. “It is also true that Hobart and William Smith has the obligation under federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title VI, to investigate and take prompt action where the possibility exists that there is a hostile environment based on national origin, shared ancestry, or other protected classes that may interfere with a student’s ability to learn and enjoy the benefits of an education.” The letters all say that Dean has been “relieved” of classroom duties while she is under investigation by the school.

Activist and scholar Amin Husain likewise was punished for extramural speech. He had called for Palestinian liberation for many years, but he was only suspended from his adjunct position at New York University in January of this year.

“I’ve Been Teaching For Seven Or Eight Years. Never One Complaint.”

Husain told me that the university’s human resources department questioned him not only about his anti-Zionist statements, but also about social media content posted by an abolitionist art collective, Decolonize This Place, that he is affiliated with. None of the collective’s posts were attributed to Husain specifically.

“I’ve been teaching for seven or eight years. Never one complaint,” Husain told me. He added that his suspension was not the result of a student complaint but evidence taken from “doxing outlets.” While he is technically suspended, Husain is an adjunct with a contract ending this month. (NYU did not respond to a request for comment.)

“I’m never going to be hired by NYU,” he told me. Of the university, he said, “You destroyed my reputation, and you never even did the due diligence.”

A letter of support for Husain, signed by over 2,000 artists, writers, academics, and students, said, “These attacks on speech (and speakers) reflect the ideology behind the logic of destruction inflicted on the cultural infrastructure of Palestine itself.”

Professor Craig Campbell speaks alongside gathered faculty to demand that the University of Texas at Austin divest from Israel, on May 5, 2024, in Austin, Texas. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

“Now Is The Time”

The issue of academic freedom on Palestine is inseparable from the labor struggles that have been rocking universities over the past decade.

“Until recently, labor unions in this country have been incredibly weak, the impact of which is emboldened university leaders who are enacting increasingly repressive policies on their campuses,” Molly Ragan, a union organizer with UAW Local 7902, who teaches at the Parsons School of Design, part of the New School university. “What I’ve learned in my two years as a UAW staff organizer working with faculty and student workers in NYC is that the labor movement and pro-Palestine movement go hand in hand.”

Alongside the New School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, two student worker unions, both unionized with the UAW, organized the student-led encampment on campus. Two weeks ago, that protest camp was cleared out in a surprise police raid involving over 40 arrests.

Ragan noted that labor involvement aimed to provide “a legal shield for the encampment because any retaliation is a violation of our basic Section 7 right to concerted activity under the NLRA” — a reference to the National Labor Relations Act’s protection of workplace collective action. On Monday, ACT-UAW Local 7902 filed an unfair labor practice charge against the school over the arrests on campus and treatment of the encampment participants.

The importance of supporting scholars who speak out for Palestine, however, goes far beyond free speech and worker protections. Israel’s occupation and its ongoing brutal war are constant reminders of the more salient issues at work.

“If Silence Is The Desired Outcome, Then ‘The Terrorist, Fascist And Criminal Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Organizations’ Are Failing Miserably.”

Despite continuous police raids, the protest camps are spreading. Nearly 200 campuses nationwide established encampments in the last month to demand divestment from Israel, its military apparatus, and the corporations that benefit from it.

“I don’t think the repression will work, not if its ultimate goal is to keep people quiet. If the goal is punishment in and of itself, then the tactic is effective,” Salaita, the scholar, told me. “But if silence is the desired outcome, then Zionist organizations are failing miserably, and will continue to fail miserably. Nobody’s going to stop talking about Palestine at this point.”

Clover, the Davis professor, echoed the sentiment. “If you’re going to be fired for standing up for Palestine, now is the time to do it anyway,” Clover said. “Now is the time to do it in the most serious and principled ways.”

Nowhere is this principled defiance better exemplified than among the Palestinian scholars who have lost the most.

“We will never tire, be frightened, or threatened to stop advocating for justice and peace and to stop the ongoing slaughter and genocide in Palestine,” Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of Israa University, one of Gaza’s most celebrated institutions of higher education and research, told me by email.

“It’s really a shame to witness such a disgrace in the American political system,” said Alhussaina. “There is a McCarthyite campaign to silence the Palestinian voice in all American universities, large and small, but there is broad determination and support for Gaza and Palestine in all universities, and it will be difficult to contain this youth tide.”

Alhussaina, who has lost 102 relatives to Israel’s onslaught, fled Gaza in November. At the start of the war, the Israeli military seized his university and turned it into a barracks and a detention center, before destroying it in a massive, controlled explosion.

[xtruss]

October 7 “Zionist Survivor 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗” Sue Campus Protestors, Say Students Are “HAMAS’s Propaganda Division!” “The Goal Is To Isolate Palestinians.”

Four Lawsuits Alleging Hamas Ties Against Students for Justice in Palestine 🇵🇸, the AP, UNRWA, and a Cryptocurrency Exchange Share Many of The Same Plaintiffs. They are Definitely Backed By the “Asshole Isra-helli 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Against Civilization (AIPAC)”

— Akela Lacy | May 10 2024 | The Intercept

New York, New York — November 20: People gather to protest the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at Columbia University on November 20, 2023 in New York City. Students, alumni of both schools, some dressed in caps and gowns, and supporters held a "Denouncement Ceremony" and pledged not to donate money to the schools after the banning of the student groups for holding a nonviolent but unsanctioned protest demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. More than 20 progressive elected officials have sent a letter to the university calling for the reinstatement of the groups. Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza continue as the death toll from Terrorist Israel’s invasion of Gaza has increased in the weeks since the October 7 Hamas attack. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Survivors Of The October 7 Attacks filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court last week alleging links between Hamas and the pro-Palestinian student groups leading nationwide protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The survivors claim the student groups are liable for monetary damages because of the purported terrorism links.

“When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists — believe them.” That’s the opening line the suit filed Wednesday against the Palestinian advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group supporting student organizers for Palestine, which supports more than 350 Palestine solidarity groups, including more than 200 campus organizations across the country.

The lawsuit is part of a nationwide crackdown on pro-Palestine activism, especially on campus. It was filed a day after police in New York City deployed militarized forces to remove students from campus encampments protesting the war on Gaza and arrested hundreds.

Some or all of the nine plaintiffs in the suit are involved in a raft of other civil suits related to the October 7 attacks. Among the defendants they’ve pursued in court are major media organizations and United Nations agencies.

The survivors of the October 7 attack alleged that American Muslims for Palestine “serves as Hamas’s propaganda division in the United States.”

“Through NSJP, AMP uses propaganda to intimidate, convince, and recruit uninformed, misguided, and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond,” the October 7 survivors wrote in their suit.

The lawsuits rely on anti-terrorism laws that made it possible to bring civil cases for acts of international terrorism, including provisions around bans on material support to terrorism that have long been controversially applied. At the time of their passage, members of Congress who pushed the anti-terror laws linked them directly to crackdowns on pro-Palestine activities, according to a recent white paper from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal.

“The Goal Is To Isolate Palestinians.”

“For years, CCR and others have been warning of the abuse of broad ‘material support’ laws to shrink the space for Palestinian rights,” said Diala Shamas, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The group represented another Palestinian rights organization in what Shamas said was “years-long, meritless litigation” brought by the Jewish National Fund, a group that funds Israeli settlements.

“The law’s provision of civil damages means that private actors — including those with seemingly endless resources — can bog you down in costly and distracting litigation,” Shamas said. “This means that Palestinians and those who support their rights become ‘high risk’ — and those who they rely on — charities, funders, banks or social media companies — are chilled from further engagement. The goal is to isolate Palestinians.”

The nine plaintiffs include six survivors of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Five people attended the Supernova music festival, and another was attacked at Zikim Beach, where 19 civilians were killed as Hamas militants tried to overrun nearby military outposts.

Two other plaintiffs who were not home on October 7 had homes in Kibbutz Holit, the site of additional Hamas attacks. Another plaintiff’s brother was killed at the festival. (Lawyers for the plaintiffs, AMP, and SJP did not respond to requests for comment.)

The AMP suit is the fourth federal suit filed this year by members of the group.

Last month, eight of the same plaintiffs sued the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, claiming that it gave material support to Hamas by allowing the militant group to fundraise on the platform. In November, the Treasury Department said Hamas and “a range of illicit actors” had used Binance to funnel money to their groups. Binance lawyers asked for an extension to reply to the complaint and have until August to do so. In April, the company’s former chief executive was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering violations.

Five of the plaintiffs in the American Muslims for Palestine suit also sued the news agency The Associated Press in February. The plaintiffs alleged that the AP used photographs from “known Hamas associates who were gleefully embedded with the Hamas terrorists during the October 7th attacks.” Lawyers for the AP moved to dismiss the complaint for failing to state a claim and asked to stay discovery pending adjudication of the motion to dismiss.

In March, the same group of nine plus another October 7 survivor sued the U.S. committee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNWRA, the largest humanitarian organization operating in Gaza. The suit against UNRWA claims that the group “financed and aided” Hamas, a frequent refrain from Israeli officials that has gone unsubstantiated, according to an independent review released in April. UNRWA lawyers were granted an extension and have until May 28 to respond to the complaint.

Following Israeli officials’ allegations, major donors initially cut funding to UNRWA, but later reversed the decisions — except for the United States, the group’s biggest donor, where Congress blocked funding as part of the budget package approved this spring.

The major corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken on the latest case. The National Jewish Advocacy Center has taken on the three other cases. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

Pro-Palestinian students stand their ground after police breached their encampment the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles, California, early on May 2, 2024. Police deployed a heavy presence on US university campuses on May 1 after forcibly clearing away some weeks-long protests against Israel's war with Hamas. Dozens of police cars patrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles campus in response to violent clashes overnight when counter-protesters attacked an encampment of pro-Palestinian students. Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP) (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images

Crackdown on Student Groups

Student advocates for Palestine have faced concerted and sometimes violent crackdowns by school administrators and police. Mainstream media outlets uncritically repeat unsubstantiated claims that they support Hamas.

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which are at the center of much campus organizing, have faced harsh censorship since October. The group was singled out in congressional hearings that have pressured university administrators to further crack down on Palestinian advocacy on campus.

Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter and its chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in November. The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal sued the university over the suspension in March in the New York Supreme Court. The case is pending.

American University placed its SJP chapter on probation in April after the group held a silent indoor demonstration; the school banned indoor protests in January. Rutgers University suspended the SJP chapter on its New Brunswick campus in December and claimed that the group had protested in “nonpublic forums” and caused disruption on campus; the suspension was lifted in January. (I am a co-teacher of a class at Rutgers.)

George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter in November after the group projected statements onto a library building calling for the university to divest from Israel. The projected images said GWU had blood on its hands and used the phrase “Glory to our martyrs,” a cultural reference to any Palestinian killed by Israel that was interpreted by outsiders as an endorsement of Hamas.

Brandeis was the first private university to ban its SJP chapter in November, claiming that the group “openly supports Hamas.”

State-level Republican officials have also taken steps to legalize the suppression of SJP. In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order targeting campus activism, calling on all the state’s higher education institutions to “review and update free speech policies” to address antisemitism. The order defined the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic and linked the use of the widely adopted phrase to Hamas.

And in October, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered colleges to shut down all SJP chapters. The University of Florida SJP chapter sued DeSantis in November and said the governor’s order was a violation of free speech. A federal court denied the chapter’s request for a preliminary injunction in January and found that Florida officials did not intend to deactivate all SJP chapters after comments by the Florida University System chancellor walking back DeSantis’s order.

In October, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares opened an investigation into AMP and said his office had reason to believe that the organization was soliciting contributions without proper registration. Miyares, a Republican, had also called on state law enforcement agencies to donate tactical gear to Israeli citizens.

Last week, Congress adopted a resolution that would further chill speech from organizations like SJP. The resolution employs a controversial definition of antisemitism that includes any attempts to draw comparisons between the actions of the Israeli government and Nazis. The House voted 320 to 91 to adopt the working definition of antisemitism published in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The lead author of the definition has said it “was never intended to be a campus hate speech code.”

[xtruss]

How Columbia’s Campus Was Torn Apart Over Gaza, Forever Palestine 🇵🇸

The University Asked the N.Y.P.D. to Arrest Pro-Palestine Student Protesters. Was it a Necessary Step to Protect Jewish Students (The Zionist 🐗🐖🐷 🐖), or a Dangerous Encroachment on Academic Freedom?

— By Andrew Marantz | April 25, 2024

Photograph by C.S. Muncy/NYT/Redux

In the Predawn Hours of Wednesday, April 17th, more than a hundred student activists walked onto a lawn in front of the Butler Library, in the middle of Columbia University’s campus. The center of campus is usually open to city foot traffic, but, because of recent tensions, campus administrators had restricted access to Columbia I.D. holders; many of the activists, trying to stay anonymous, were careful not to swipe their I.D.s on the way in. They set up a few dozen green tents, a couple of Palestinian flags, and some handwritten signs (“columbia funds genocide”; “while you read, gaza bleeds”). One of the signs in the encampment read “liberated zone,” a reference to a wave of protests at Columbia in the late sixties. “We’re calling it an occupation,” Maryam Iqbal, a first-year Barnard College student wearing hoop earrings, told me. “We’ve been building up to this action for months.”

Since October 7th, Columbia, like many universities, has been roiled by protests and counter-protests. (“It’s basically the only thing anyone here can talk about,” one student told me.) Iqbal, an eighteen-year-old from Seattle, is a leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that was suspended in November, after administrators alleged that the group had “repeatedly violated University policies.” Next to the lawn, about a hundred more protesters marched in support of the encampment, though here the message discipline was more lax (“we will not be silent,” but also “globalize the intifada”). Eventually, some counter-protesters showed up, chanting “Am Yisrael chai” (“The people of Israel live”) and waving a huge Israeli flag.

In the past six months, several students have reported being physically assaulted on or near Columbia’s campus. Some of these students were apparently targeted for being visibly Jewish or pro-Israel, others for being visibly Muslim or pro-Palestine, and some for being Jewish but critical of Israel (including some who were called “self-hating Jews”). “Any time there is violence in the region where Israelis and Palestinians kill each other, there is an increase in antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S. and Europe,” Yinon Cohen, a professor of Israel and Jewish studies at Columbia, told me in November. The majority of the controversy at Columbia, though, has concerned not violence but speech: radical slogans, hastily planned protests, even contentious discussions in classrooms. This included squarely political speech (“Free Palestine,” say, or “Israel is an apartheid state”) of the sort that many members of the Columbia community might disagree with, but which few would be inclined to punish. (“Some of these reported antisemitic incidents are not really antisemitic but rather anti-Israel or anti-Zionist,” Cohen added.) And, even when the speech was abhorrent, or plainly antisemitic, it was still generally protected by the First Amendment. Still, for Columbia’s administration, the First Amendment was not the only guiding principle; the university also has an institutional duty, and indeed a legal obligation, to foster a safe environment for its students. According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, entities that receive federal funds are required to prevent discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. “Columbia is mandated by federal law to ensure equal access to all University services for Jews and Israelis, including those who identify as Zionists,” a group calling itself Columbia Faculty and Staff Supporting Israel wrote in an open letter.

Maytal Polonetsky, a Barnard first-year and a modern Orthodox Jew, told me, “I have a necklace with a pendant in the shape of Israel, and in class I’ll often tuck it in, because I don’t want to deal with the blowback.” Polonetsky grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and spent a year studying at a religious school in Jerusalem before college. She said that she thought of the necklace as both a political symbol and religious one. Obviously, it would be unacceptable to ostracize anyone simply because of her Jewish identity; being criticized for one’s political ideology, however, might be painful but not beyond the pale. “For the past month, my mom has been seeing stuff on the news about Columbia and telling me, ‘Come home, you’re not safe there,’ ” Polonetsky said. “I told her, ‘Mom, it’s emotionally wrenching, it’s exhausting, but I’m not in physical danger.’ ”

Columbia’s administrators seemed at pains to show that they had things under control. They set up a Doxing Resource Group, after the identities of many student activists were revealed by outside agitators, and a Task Force on Antisemitism, to insure that Columbia would be “safe, welcoming, and inclusive for Jewish students.” (Many people noted, with indignation, that there was no Task Force on Islamophobia.) Still, the more the administration intervened, the worse things seemed to get. In February, a Jewish student sued Columbia under Title VI, claiming that its failure to “prohibit discrimination and retaliation against Jewish persons” had rendered the university a “hostile environment.” Later that month, in a separate lawsuit, fifteen more students filed a hundred-page complaint, which detailed several allegations of antisemitism on campus; it also argued that “anti-Zionism is not merely a political movement—although many try to disguise it as such—but is a direct attack against Israel as a Jewish collectivity.” While these students maintained that the university had not done enough to crack down on demonstrations, another lawsuit, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Palestine Legal, argued that the university had already gone too far, violating the demonstrators’ legal rights in the process. “The tactic of our administration, and of other people in power, has been to conflate critique of Israel with anti-Jewish hate,” Debbie Becher, a sociology professor at Barnard, told me. “It’s not a novel tactic, but it’s been very effective and very damaging.” Becher is Jewish, as are the members of Jewish Voice for Peace, another student group that was suspended from Columbia in November after protesting the war. On Wednesday, a couple of the activists on the lawn wore yarmulkes, as did many of the counter-protesters. “ ‘To protect the feelings of some of our Jewish students, we’re going to ban the political speech of our other Jewish students,’ ” Ilan Cohen, an undergraduate pursuing a dual degree at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary told me, paraphrasing what he saw as the university’s position. “Make it make sense.”

Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux

Another student at Barnard and the Jewish Theological Seminary was more muted in her critique. “Is there antisemitism at Columbia? Of course,” she told me. “We’re in New York City. Even before this protest, we had a self-declared neo-Nazi standing outside the campus gates and shouting things. Now, it’s only gotten worse.” She has found it hard to discuss this honestly with her progressive friends, she continued, “because of how antisemitism is exploited. The conservative pro-Israel position is ‘Columbia is this horrible den of antisemitism. People are only protesting Israel because they hate the Jews’—which is wrong, so then the pro-Palestine students’ instinct is to deny that there’s antisemitism within the movement at all.” She maintained that the antiwar protests were not primarily motivated by antisemitism. “Those people, they’re in no way a majority—often they’re not even Columbia students,” she said. “But, still, it’s the movement’s job to acknowledge it, and root it out.” Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote that he was “deeply troubled” by “the University’s severe and seemingly viewpoint-discriminatory enforcement of rules relating to student demonstrations.” Although the university obviously had “a responsibility to take action against genuine threats and harassment,” he continued, it also had an obligation to encourage “free inquiry and the production of knowledge.”

At the Center of the Encampment, shortly after 10 a.m., Mahmood Mamdani, an anthropologist at Columbia, spoke about the protests against segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa, and added, “This is the next great international-solidarity movement.” A police helicopter hovered overhead. “I won’t talk too loud. I don’t want the police to hear,” he added—a joke, or maybe a half-joke. The rumor passing through the crowd was that anyone who did not leave the lawn by 11 a.m. would be risking suspension, and possibly arrest. In April, 1968, when hundreds of students were occupying several buildings on campus, the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, asked the N.Y.P.D. to remove them. Police officers in riot gear stormed in, arresting more than seven hundred students and beating many of them in the process. (The Times later referred to Kirk’s “ill-fated decision” as “an emblem of the generational conflict characterizing the Vietnam War era,” and it ultimately cost Kirk his job.) Since then, the N.Y.P.D. has been invited onto the campus only in rare circumstances, and never without controversy. A professor standing near the lawn told me, “If they think they can calm down this situation by arresting students, that will absolutely have the opposite effect.”

The demonstration had been timed to coincide with events in Washington, D.C. The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, was about to testify in Congress, before the same committee that had grilled the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and the University of Pennsylvania four months earlier. Representative Elise Stefanik—a Harvard alum, and a former Bush Administration moderate turned pugnacious Trump loyalist—implied that the college presidents had allowed students to call for the “genocide of Jews.” Her framing was disingenuous, but she was rewarded with glowing coverage in the conservative press and mentioned as a potential running mate for Donald Trump. Four days after the hearing, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned. “One down. Two to go,” Stefanik tweeted. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, also resigned a month later.

Now it was Shafik’s time in the barrel. The title of her hearing—“Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism”—seemed to assume that the sole cause of campus turmoil was antisemitism, and that a more robust “response” might be needed. Going into the hearing, Shafik seemed determined to demonstrate to Congress that she was not afraid to take the situation in hand, with force if necessary. “This isn’t like the anti-apartheid protests we had here in the eighties, and this isn’t like 1968, either,” someone familiar with the thinking of Columbia’s administration told me. “These protests are pitting groups of students, and some faculty, against each other. They can turn vicious, hateful at times, and quickly become about personal identity.” Shortly after Shafik announced that she would testify, Becher and two dozen other Jewish professors at Barnard and Columbia drafted an open letter to Shafik, acknowledging that antisemitism “exists everywhere, including at Columbia,” but objecting to “the ways charges of antisemitism are being weaponized.” Becher and her colleagues mentioned McCarthy-era “Red-baiting” and recent book bans in Texas and Florida, and urged Shafik to respond “with an affirmation of our values”—academic freedom, for instance—“that refuses to concede the premise of these traps.” (I, too, signed an open letter last year, calling for “a diplomatic path towards peace.”) Some students had sympathy for Shafik, who was both the first woman and the first person of color to serve as Columbia’s president, and who seemed to be in a nearly impossible position. “I don’t see things getting better if she gets fired,” one told me. Others were unmoved. “She’s our ‘first African president,’ ” a student of Black and Arab ancestry told me, with an eye roll. “But, trust me, we do not claim her.”

In Columbia’s student center, in a lounge called the Audre Lorde Community Space, the leaders of a few student-activist groups were hosting an impromptu hearing watch party. A projector and a Bluetooth speaker had been set up between the Community Conference Room (a sign outside the room read “What does community mean to you?”) and the Liberation Conference Room (“Without community, there is no liberation”). One of Columbia’s trustees, Claire Shipman, was on the screen, testifying in a tone of steely resolve: “We’ve suspended two student groups for noncompliance—more than a dozen individual students—and we disciplined faculty members,” she said. “We are far from done.”

Members of the committee questioned Shafik in tones that ranged from lightly veiled intimidation to theocratic farce. Rick Allen, a Republican congressman from Georgia, shared his opinion that “Washington, D.C., is not the center of the universe—Jerusalem is the center of the universe,” and suggested that Columbia should offer “a course on the Bible.”

“The Bible is in our core curriculum!” a student at the watch party cried. “Did this man even Google us?”

Allen loosely quoted Genesis 12:3—“ ‘If you curse Israel, I will curse you’ ”—and asked Shafik, “Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” (Shafik clarified that she did not.) “ ‘Columbia: Cursed by God,’ ” a student in the lounge said. “Somebody has to put that on a T-shirt.” When it was Stefanik’s turn, the room grew quiet. In the back of the room, a student knitting a scarf nervously picked up the pace of her stitches. Stefanik brought up, by name, several professors who had made controversial statements since October 7th, asking what disciplinary actions had been taken against them. “She is really out for blood,” Becher, the Barnard professor, said.

Shafik could have condemned some of the speech she’d heard on campus while asserting the rights of students and scholars to free expression. Instead, when lawmakers urged her to discipline her students and faculty, she sometimes seemed almost eager to comply. If one of the goals of the hearing was to strike fear into the hearts of student activists, then, judging from the silence in the Community Space, it seemed to be working. And yet some observers, especially on the right, still insisted that Shafik had not done enough to prove her commitment to protecting Jewish students. “Watch Columbia President Shafik squirm, hem & haw,” Jason Greenblatt, Donald Trump’s former envoy to the Middle East, tweeted. “Wake up America.”

Before Shafik’s testimony was over, campus-security officers handed out flyers to the students in the encampment, warning them to “stop your disruption now.” The next day, Shafik sent an e-mail to the “University community.” “Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn,” she wrote. “ ‘Clear and present danger’ is the language used by Columbia University in their letter to us,” John Chell, a bureau chief at the N.Y.P.D., said, at a press conference.

Police officers moved in, wearing riot helmets and carrying plastic zip ties. The campus was packed with hundreds of people who supported the encampment, forming a picket line on all sides of the lawn; when the police broke through, the supporters erupted in chants and jeers. According to the National Lawyers Guild, the officers arrested two legal observers; they also arrested more than a hundred students, cuffing their wrists and loading them onto white Department of Correction buses. “We walked past the entire school, everyone we knew, chanting ‘Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,’ ” Iqbal, the Barnard student from Seattle, told me. “Almost all of us made the decision not to resist.” (“The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, just saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” Chell has said.) Once the protesters had been removed, the police broke down some of the tents and banners and tossed them into an alley. Among the scattered belongings that were left behind on the lawn were a few rumpled Palestinian flags, some sleeping bags, and a copy of “Culture and Imperialism” by Edward Said.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan, a former actor running for governor of California, gave a campaign speech about what he called the “morality and decency gap at the University of California at Berkeley,” which he blamed on “a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates.” In his opinion, these “so-called ‘free-speech advocates’ . . . should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off of the campus permanently.” Richard Nixon sounded a similar note two years later, during his Presidential campaign. None of this rhetoric did much to pacify the campuses in question, and it certainly did nothing to address the root causes of the unrest, such as Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. It did, however, help both candidates win their respective elections.

Although Columbia is a private university, it is not immune to government pressure. Its Manhattan real-estate holdings are exempt from more than a hundred million dollars in property taxes, an exemption that could be reversed by state legislation. It receives federal grant money, which could also be rescinded. (On April 23rd, Stefanik wrote a letter to the Secretary of Education, demanding that he “revoke any federal funding flowing to Columbia and similar institutions.” The following day, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, gave a speech at Columbia, while onlookers heckled him. “We respect diversity of ideas,” he said, “but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that’s not what this is.”) The ostensible purpose of the congressional hearing had been to protect Jewish students, but some on campus argued that the lawmakers’ true motive was to exert control and ideological influence. “I think they want to frame élite universities as engines of woke indoctrination, and this gives them a perfect pretext,” Becher said, of “maga Republicans” in Congress. “And meanwhile they hope they can strong-arm administrators into doing their bidding, like hiring more conservatives or firing professors who seem too far left.”

Every politician, college president, and public intellectual claims to be in favor of free speech, a stance that is about as brave as being in favor of puppies and ice cream. The more difficult question, not just for politicians but for all of us, is not whether freedom of speech is an essential value but what to do when it comes into tension with other essential values, such as, in this case, Columbia’s mandate to insure that it does not create a hostile environment for Jewish students, Muslim students, or anyone else on campus. For the past few years, the prevailing narrative, culturally dominant even when not entirely justified by the facts, has been that conservatives are champions of free speech and progressives are delicate snowflakes who can’t handle challenging ideas. Now, suddenly, the left was sticking up for unfettered expression, and Republican legislators were the ones asking Columbia to provide a safe space. In the opinion of some Jews (including, full disclosure, the one writing this piece), Judaism and Zionism are closely related, but they’re not the same, something that has seemed to be a source of confusion not only at Columbia but around the world. Title VI protects Jewish students from discrimination on the basis of being Jewish, but it does not shield anyone from experiencing discomfort over political disagreements. In other words, it seems to me that antisemitism is against the rules, but criticism of Israel’s actions is not, or at least it shouldn’t be.

After the encampments were cleared, much of the protest activity was pushed off campus, and the mood became even more volatile. On Saturday night, Polonetsky, the Orthodox Jewish student from Maryland, was walking across campus, on her way home from Shabbos services. She told me, “Some Jewish kids I knew were standing on the Sundial”—a raised platform in the middle of campus—waving Israeli and American flags. She stood off to the side, waiting to see what would happen. The students sang “One Day,” by the vociferously pro-Israel singer Matisyahu. (“There’ll be no more wars / And our children will play / One day.”) They were surrounded by protesters, but, for a while, things were relatively calm. Then one of the Jewish students dropped an Israeli flag, and one of the protesters ran over and tried to grab it. A lot of people seemed eager for a confrontation. Another protester—blond hair, face obscured by a kaffiyeh—stood next to the Sundial holding up a handwritten cardboard sign that said “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing up at the Jewish students. (Al-Qassam Brigades are the military wing of Hamas.) Polonetsky and a few friends decided to leave campus in a group, so that none of them would have to walk home alone. When they got to the only gate that was open, on Amsterdam, protesters heckled them, shouting “Yehudim! Fuck you!” and “Stop killing children!” and “Go back to Poland!” Most of these antisemitic hecklers seemed to be unaffiliated opportunists, not Columbia students, but in the chaos no one could tell for sure. Polonetsky got back to her dorm safely, but she found it hard to sleep. “The next morning, I called my mom, and said, ‘You’re right, I’m not sure I’m safe here,’ ” she told me. She had not been planning to leave campus until the following day, for Passover, but instead she booked a ticket on the next train home.

When I asked a university spokesperson to comment on the mass arrests, she pointed me to the letter that Shafik had sent to the N.Y.P.D., requesting its presence on campus. The letter read, in part, “Columbia is committed to allowing members of our community to engage in political expression—within established rules and with respect for the safety of all.” And yet, at least in the short term, none of this seemed to be making anyone feel safer. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, visited Columbia, and then suggested in a video that it was time to “bring in the National Guard” to protect Jewish students. “This is an unhinged thing to propose,” Harry Reis, formerly Greenblatt’s special assistant and now a student at Columbia Law School, wrote in response, arguing that Greenblatt was “actively ‘causing us harm’ by cosplaying as the Tom Cotton of Jewish-American politics.”

On Saturday night, Columbia’s School of General Studies held a gala at the Museum of the City of New York. An Arab American student who attended told me that the event was full of tense confrontations between students who wore kaffiyehs, including herself, and others who were supporters of Israel, including former members of the Israeli military. “One of them called me a sharmouta, the Arabic word for ‘bitch,’ ” she told me. “Another student was punched in the face.” Shortly before Iqbal, the Barnard student from Seattle, was arrested, she was given an interim suspension, meaning that she was banned from campus, effective immediately. Another student suspended from Barnard was Isra Hirsi, whose mother, Ilhan Omar, was one of the representatives who had just finished questioning Shafik on Capitol Hill. Campus-security officers were given printouts with Iqbal and Hirsi’s photos and disciplinary records, in the style of a “Wanted” poster, with “No entry” scrawled at the top. On her way to jail, Iqbal received an e-mail from a dean, written in brusque bureaucratese. “You will not have access to the residence halls, dining facilities, classrooms, or any other part of campus,” it read. “If you need to come to retrieve any of your belongings from your residence hall . . . you will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need.” That night, when she came back to gather her possessions, Iqbal told me, “They literally set a timer. They stood there next to me, watching me, and I haphazardly threw my stuff in a bag.” She was staying with a Barnard alumna near campus. She was trying to decide whether to keep staying nearby, in case her suspension was lifted, or to go back to Seattle for the rest of the semester, or possibly for good. Her suspension hearing and her nineteenth birthday are both this week.

On Friday, after the encampment had been cleared, a lot of supporters stayed on the lawn, singing and giving speeches. Eric Lerner, who participated in the 1968 demonstrations as a Columbia undergrad, drove to the campus from his home in Warren, New Jersey, to encourage them. That evening, after the students took a prayer break—Shabbos for the Jews, Salat-al-Jum'a for the Muslims—Lerner addressed the crowd. “This is a historic step forward,” he said. “We have to escalate.” These days, Lerner is a physicist working on nuclear-fusion technology, which he sees as an extension of his anti-capitalist aims. (“Fusion,” he told the students, “is essential to socialism.”) Afterward, I reached him by phone. “Shafik isn’t interested in free speech,” he told me. “She was just trying to demonstrate to Congress that she’ll do their bidding.” Over the weekend, Columbia’s campus filled with encampments again, and some classes on Monday were held online to accommodate suspended students. There had already been rallies at Yale, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Michigan, in solidarity with the Columbia students, and there would be more to come. “The Vast Majority Of Youth Oppose This War,” Lerner Said. “Their Movement Will Only Grow From Here.” ♦