Campus Antisemitism Surges Amid Encampments and Related Protests at Columbia and Other U.S. Colleges
These groups include the national bodies and/or local chapters of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Dissenters, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Palestine Action, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Samidoun, Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and others.
Individual influencers, such as Mohammed el-Kurd and Jenan Matari, are also supporting this call to action.
Among the early encampments were those established at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN on March 26 and at Tufts University in Medford, MA on April 7. Students at Smith College in Northampton, MA also occupied the campus administration building from March 27 to April 9. The national profile of these protests rose on April 17, when students at Columbia University in New York, NY began their encampment in the center of campus. As of April 22, encampments are still ongoing or have recently been set up on the following campuses:
1. Columbia University (New York, NY)
2. Emerson College (Boston, MA)
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
4. New York University (New York, NY)
5. Rutgers University, New Brunswick (New Brunswick, NJ)
6. The New School (New York, NY)
7. Tufts University (Medford, MA)
8. University of Maryland (College Park, MD)
9. University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
10. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
11. Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN)
12. Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO)
13. Yale University (New Haven, CT)
Heeding calls from organizations already engaged in encampment protests, student groups at a growing number of additional colleges and universities across the country have held or announced plans to hold demonstrations for the coming days in solidarity with the student encampments and broader “Popular University for Gaza” initiative.
Solidarity protests were held over the weekend of April 19 on campuses such as Harvard University (Cambridge, MA); Northwestern University (Evanston, IL); Ohio State University (Columbus, OH); Princeton University (Princeton, NJ); and Temple University (Philadelphia, PA). Additional protests have been announced for the week of April 22 at more than a dozen additional colleges and counting.
Support for Terror Against Israel and Violence On Campus
Protesters at Columbia University, including students affiliated with the encampment and other individuals who have gathered at the campus’s main entrance gates in solidarity, have repeatedly expressed explicit support for violence.
For example, there have been multiple instances of support for Hamas and their October 7 attack on Israel. On April 17, a protester yelled “We are Hamas” and others chanted: “Al-Qassam [in reference to the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing] you make us proud, kill another soldier now!” On April 20, an anti-Israel protester on Columbia’s campus held a sign that read “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next targets” with an arrow pointing toward a group of pro-Israel counter-protesters standing nearby waving Israeli and American flags.
In the late evening hours of April 18, anti-Israel protesters who were gathered just outside the campus gates to support the student encampment reportedly screamed at a group of Jewish students, repeatedly referencing Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. One protester stated: “Remember the 7th of October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times…but 10,000 more times.” Another added: “Never forget the 7th of October…The 7th of October is about to be every f***ing day for you. You ready?”
During a speech on campus at the Columbia encampment on April 20, Tai Lee, a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) who has previously expressed explicit support for Hamas’s October 7 attack at anti-Israel protests in New York City, said: “Let it be known that it was the Al-Aqsa Flood [Hamas’s name for the October 7 attack] that put the global Intifada back on the table again. And it is the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every struggle on every corner of the earth to victory.”
Protesters at both Columbia and Yale have also glorified figures affiliated with US-designated terror groups, such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Protesters displayed a sign with the PFLP logo alongside an image of Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned general-secretary of the terror group. Signs also bore the names and photographs of figures such as Nasser Abu Hamid, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; Walid Daqqa, PFLP; Leila Khaled, PFLP; Ahmad Qatamesh, PFLP; and others.
Protesters at Yale, who began protesting earlier in the week as part of a hunger strike and officially launched their encampment on April 19, similarly displayed signs of Walid Daqqa and Leila Khaled.
At the University of Michigan, where students began their encampment on April 22, protesters hung a banner next to their tents that read “LONG LIVE THE INTIFADA.” Intifada is a reference to two historical periods in the late 1980s and early 2000s during which Palestinian terrorists committed indiscriminate acts of violence against Israelis, including suicide bombings, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,000 people.
At Columbia on April 20, protesters held signs that included such messages as “Fight for worldwide Intifada” and chanted familiar slogans like “Globalize the Intifada” and “There is only one solution; Intifada, revolution.”
Multiple student groups — including at The New School, New York University and Emerson College — advertised their encampments using inverted red triangle imagery. This symbol which first gained widespread use early in the Israel-Hamas war as a way to signify, in some cases, support for violent Palestinian so-called “resistance” against Israel. It first appeared in propaganda videos promoted by the al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which showed footage of Hamas terrorists attacking Israeli military targets while superimposing inverted red triangles over the heads of Israeli soldiers or other targets.
Vilification and Calls for the Exclusion of Zionists
Some of the protest slogans at the encampments have included calls to destroy Zionism and to hound Zionists. The overwhelming majority of Jews identify in some way with Zionism or with Israel, and such statements are essentially calls for the exclusion of Jews. At Columbia on April 17, a protester told the crowd: “We will never let up and we will never let down until Palestine is free, Zionism is destroyed, and Zionists start to hide like the Nazis.”
Protesters also chanted slogans that demonized Zionists and Zionism, including: “Say it loud, say it clear; we don’t want no Zionists here” and “Free our prisoners, free them all; Zionism will fall.”
On April 21, anti-Zionist slogans included: “Zionists, you’re a liar; you set Palestine on fire” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine is all you’ll see.” In other footage from Columbia, protesters could be heard calling Jewish students “Yehudim” (Hebrew for “Jews”) and telling them, “Go back to Poland.”
Students at Ohio State University held an emergency protest on April 20 in direct response to the Columbia encampment, with the announcement for their protest stating, “support of the courageous student activists of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments…We stand firmly in solidarity with these student activists and amplify their demands to their university.”
At the Ohio State protest, demonstrators marched through campus chanting: “Hey hey, ho ho; the Zionists have got to go.”
The article is published courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
