Category: Anti-War Protesters

“Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic”

The Jewish magazine Forward has published two different letters written by Jewish university students insisting that the anti-genocide demonstrations on their campuses have NOT been antisemitic, but that all impulses towards

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violence and antisemitism have been imported by outside instigators.

Here is a brief excerpt of the Foward article titled “Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic“. All emphasis is mine:

Editor’s note: Today we published two open letters from college students regarding the protests that have been roiling campuses nationwide for weeks. Below, 750+ Jewish students from 140+ campuses say they “reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.” In the other letter, 280+ Jewish students at Columbia University argue that their “concerns have been brushed off and invalidated” when calling out antisemitism on campus. The original letters can be found here and here.

We the undersigned are Jewish students on college campuses in solidarity with student encampments for Gaza. We reject the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic and we call on our institutions to take action to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

In the last week, we have watched the movement of student encampments for Gaza spread across the country. We have also watched as these protesters have been met with repression, arrests, violence, and false claims of antisemitism. As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety. We believe that safety for Jewish students can only come when all students are safe, including Palestinian students, BIPOC students, and queer and trans students.  

While journalists, students, and even police have consistently reported encampments to be peaceful, school administrations and city officials have intentionally and consistently escalated through state violence. Their tactics have included arresting and brutalizing students, and denying students access to housing, medical care, and religious spaces. The majority of these acts have targeted Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students. This violence we’ve seen this week does not make any of us safer. We wholeheartedly condemn the brutal repression of the encampments. 

You can read the entire article here.

The Nation: “Student Encampments Aren’t a Danger to Jews. But the Crackdown Is”

“The narrative of protesters endangering Jewish students has been used to justify police repression. But at the Columbia encampment, I saw a commitment to confronting antisemitism.”

Journalist Hadas Thier has written a good article for The Nation magazine giving an insider’s look at the anti-genocide demonstrations happening on American campuses.

The article is titled “Student Encampments Aren’t a Danger to Jews. But the Crackdown Is.”

Here is a brief excerpt:

. . . Since then, the story of protesters endangering and threatening Jewish

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students has been used to justify the brutal repression that they’ve been met with. But I spent the last week speaking to students across many campus encampments, and last Wednesday I made my way to Columbia’s encampment to get a picture of it for myself. My experience was decidedly different from the story we’ve been fed.

In the middle of the lawn, surrounded by a low buzz of students sitting in study circles, making art, pointing out a hawk that flew nearby, working on laptops, I met Atesh, a Columbia student who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisal. He told me how meaningful it was for him to participate in his first Passover seder with about 100 other students and professors on the lawn. There, Jewish students had led their peers in songs and rituals. The Passover seder is a Jewish tradition that celebrates liberation and is rooted in community, inquiry, and questioning. It was a fitting celebration for the encampment.

As Atesh was talking to me, another student approached us, looking for a Jewish member of the encampment to connect with. Atesh shrugged and said, “We’re all Jewish. We’re all Palestinian.”

Later that day, I sat on the lawn with nearly 200 students to listen to Jewish students lead a teach-in about antisemitism. Some discussed their experiences growing up in predominantly Christian towns where pennies were thrown at them and conspiracy theories about Jews were ubiquitous. Others shared their impressions of why so many American Jewish communities feel connected to their Israeli counterparts and why conversations about Palestine are difficult to have. A few recounted why their opposition to the current war is rooted in their traditions and observance of Judaism. All of them expressed discomfort at having to take center stage. But they felt an obligation to do so because of the ways in which the “safety of Jewish students” has become a disingenuous rallying cry of everyone from liberal college presidents to MAGA-aligned politicians.

I am an Israeli-born Jew who has been involved in Palestine activism for over 20 years, and I have never experienced the level of solidarity and the depth of understanding about antisemitism that I am seeing across college campuses right now. In the past, I had seen antisemitism only on the fringe of the movement, turning up through an occasional odd and unsettling poster at a protest, summarily dismissed and removed by organizers. At the center of the movement, I always felt welcome and comfortable as an Israeli-born Jew. But, still, until the recent phase of the new movement for Palestine emerged on American campuses last fall, I had never before witnessed such a deliberate commitment to learning about and confronting antisemitism head on. . . 

. . . “It is not that they care about Jewish students,” JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] member Maya, told me. “They actually care about Zionist students.” Among those arrested and suspended were many Jewish students, she said. “They do not care about the safety of the Jewish students that are in the camp or that are part of this movement. And they’ve shown that by arresting and by attempting to erase the fact that we even exist.” Anti-Zionist Jews, she explained, “are not part of [the administration’s] fight against antisemitism.” . . .

You can read the entire article here.

Counterpunch: “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza”

Helen Benedict has posted a good story at Counterpunch magazine investigating the student protests launched against the Gaza genocide.

The article is titled “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza.” I include a brief excerpt below:

. . . Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent. . . 

You can read the entire article here.

Everything the Corporate Media is Telling Us About Campus Protests is Wrong

Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.

Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.

“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”

Israeli Holocaust Scholar Discusses Gaza, Student Protests and Antisemitism

Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).

Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:

“Why Young American Jews are Turning on Israel”

One important fact that the mainstream media will not tell you about the current anti-war protests condemning Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza is that many of the leaders and participants are Jewish Americans.

Two important Jewish organizations — If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace — are leading the way in these student protests.

Remember this the next time you hear someone accuse these protests of being “antisemitic.”

They are not anti-semitic. That is a standard Zionist lie used to distract from the real issues.

Rather, they are anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian, pro-humanity.

Simone Zimmermann is a young Jewish woman, and cofounder of the Jewish organization IfNotNow, who is also one of the creators of the important, recent film Israelism. I encourage everyone to watch this story of how an increasing number of young Jewish Americans are turning away from Zionism and embracing the just cause of Palestinian liberation.

Why Are American Police So Violent Without Provocation?

I have experienced unnecessary, unprovoked police violence myself. I was marching in a perfectly peaceful anti-NATO rally in Chicago.

For no reason other than a chance to flex their muscles, hundreds of Chicago policemen attacked the crowd and arrested dozens of people for nothing more than exercizing their Constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.

We see this happening now across the country as police violently assault college students gathered together in peaceful demonstrations.

One of the reasons this happens — but only one reason out of many, which I will address in future posts — is because many US law enforcement agencies have outsourced their police training programs to the state of Israel.

But here is the outrageous catch: It you have watched any of the recent anti-Netanyahu marches in Israel’s cities over the past six months, you will notice a sea of Israeli, Jewish humanity protesting the current government without a police officer in sight.

The only time Israeli police really clamp down on protests or demonstrations is when they are carried out by Palestinians. And all Israeli security forces always treat Palestinians as The Enemy.

And the Palestinian Enemy always “deserve” the harshest, most brutal treatment prior to their arrest, no matter how peacefully they behave.

It is these brutal tactics in “crowd control” that American police bring back with them from their Israeli training. (Often Israeli security forces come to the US to train entire departments here.)

The result is that American demonstrators are treated as if they, too, were The Enemy. Thus, protesters are literally attacked for no reason.

Our civil rights are trampled underfoot. Innocent people are beaten, tasered, handcuffed and jailed simply for speaking out and exercizing their civil liberties.

This Israeli-like behavior is a very large part of “the violence” reported now on US campuses. The students are not out of control, folks. It’s the police.

Watch Kim Iversen’s video explaining it all below, titled “Shocking IDF Link Exposed”:

 

Chris Hedges: “Revolt in the Universities”

The journalist Chris Hedges recently posted the following article at his substack page. It’s titled “Revolt in the Universities.”

I wish he had said “Peaceful Revolt” because the vast majority of anti-war demonstrations now occurring on American campuses are peaceful.

Sure, there are always a few exceptions. But the vast majority of the “violence” you see on the reports carried by mainstream media are due to:

  • rare exceptions to the rule, often by non-students
  • violent attacks instigated by the police
  • outside instigators, often connected to pro-Israel, Zionist agitators

I ‘ve searched for but cannot find any student protests of this sort happening in my part of the country, unfortunately. If I could find one, I would be chanting and carrying signs to stop the slaughter in Gaza right beside them.

These young people and their moral sentiments are the future hope of American civil society.

The fact that many Christian evangelical leaders are standing with Israel in vilifying these young men and women is a spiritual disaster of epic proportions.

Below is an excerpt of Chris’s article:

PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.

She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.

She wonders where she will spend the night.

The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.

“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”

Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students —  many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.

Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.   

Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.  

Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.

The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists. 

As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”

The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.

“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”

Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.

“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”

These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.

Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”

“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”

She starts to cry.

. . . There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. 

The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. 

History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

You can read the entire post here, though it may be behind a paywall.

Thankfully, There is an Anti-War Peace Movement in Israel

The Israeli peace movement is certainly small when compared to the pro-war majority, but the image of God shines brightly in these brave anti-war protesters.