Within the week since a protest camp exploded throughout the grounds of Columbia College in solidarity with Gaza, PhD pupil Jonathan Ben-Menachem has been fielding apprehensive calls from his household. They’d been watching the information and had been involved for his security.
“I’ve needed to reassure them that I’m not about to get mobbed by antisemites anytime I am going to campus,” he advised The Unbiased. “It’s simply folks making an attempt to take a stand for what they suppose is correct, very peacefully.”
Mr Ben-Menachem is one among many Jewish college students who joined the protests at Columbia and different universities throughout the US calling for his or her establishments to chop ties with corporations linked to Israel over the warfare in Gaza.
He stated he has watched with amazement because the media and political figures have tried to characterise the protests as antisemitic and harmful, regardless of Jewish pupil organisations enjoying a central function in them.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as the pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia and different US universities “antisemitic mobs” which are taking on “main universities,” on Wednesday. Home Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia College on Wednesday and referred to as these protesting “lawless agitators” and “antisemitic.”
Mr Ben-Menachem stated his expertise on campus had been utterly totally different.
“There was this discourse that Columbia is that this hotbed of antisemitism, however it’s only a bunch of nerds sitting on the bottom enjoying video games, chanting and doing homework. There was a Passover Seder held on Monday,” Mr Ben-Menachem stated. “It’s loopy how dangerous religion that discourse has turn out to be.”
Scholar protests over the warfare in Gaza have been frequent throughout faculty campuses for the reason that warfare in Gaza broke out in October, following a shock Hamas assault that killed 1,200 in Israel. The ensuing warfare has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, most of them ladies and youngsters, and assist blockages have resulted in famine situations in northern Gaza, making a humanitarian catastrophe. A whole lot of colleges, and all of Gaza’s 12 universities, have been broken or destroyed for the reason that Israeli assaults started.
After Columbia College ordered the New York Police Division to interrupt up a protest camp on its campus final week, resulting in the arrests of greater than 100 college students, the protests have unfold throughout the nation and grown right into a motion that some have in comparison with the student-led protests towards the Vietnam Warfare of the Nineteen Sixties. Related protests have since erupted at Yale and New York College (the place arrests had been additionally made), Ohio State College, Stanford College and Berkeley, to call a number of.
The protests at Columbia specifically drew nationwide consideration because of movies of a number of antisemitic incidents close to the campus, together with one through which somebody shouted “Return to Poland” at a gaggle of Jewish college students. In a separate incident, the Columbia chapter of the Orthodox Jewish motion Chabad stated Jewish college students had been advised to “Return to Europe.”
Whereas Mr Ben-Menachem stated there had been credible studies of antisemitism in and across the campus, they weren’t consultant of the a whole bunch of protesters who had camped out to protest towards Israel’s warfare. What involved him greater than exterior agitators was the college’s makes an attempt to crack down on the protests — together with the rumours that it could quickly enlist the Nationwide Guard to intervene.
“We’re terrified that there’s going to be a second Kent State at Columbia,” he stated, referring to the killing of 4 unarmed faculty college students at Kent State College in Ohio in 1970 throughout protests over the Vietnam Warfare.
“It’s absurd to say that they’re gonna carry within the Nationwide Guard and the NYPD to guard Jews when it’s really Jews who’re being arrested,” he added.
Sarah, a Jewish pupil at Columbia who requested for less than her first title to be revealed, was amongst these arrested for collaborating within the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, together with her palms in zip ties, after they moved in on the camp on Thursday. She was suspended the subsequent day, however snuck again onto campus a number of days later to participate in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.
“It was undoubtedly one of many extra joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she advised The Unbiased. “So many people received arrested or suspended, it was very nice to see so many Jewish faces on the Seder.”
Sarah stated she too had been appalled by makes an attempt to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the time period had been “weaponized in a very deceitful approach by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
“There’s by no means any substantive response to folks like me who’re anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah famous. “There’s an extended custom of Jewish anti-Zionism. I’ve a lot love for the Jewish folks of my neighborhood, we simply have a political dispute, and that’s it.”
The crackdown on protests has additionally drawn criticism from employees. Nara Milanich, professor of historical past at Barnard Faculty, which is partnered with Columbia College, was amongst almost two dozen Jewish school members to put in writing to Columbia president Nemat Shafik earlier than the protests broke out, forward of her look at a Congressional committee on antisemitism on campus, warning towards the “weaponization of antisemitism” at Columbia by politicians desirous to stoke division.
She advised The Unbiased it was the college’s determination to carry the NYPD onto campus that “infected” the state of affairs and “shut down areas of debate.”
“It’s not the scholars who’ve created the chaos,” stated Professor Milanich. “It’s the management of the college that has participated on this ridiculous police raid and has thrown the school and college students of the college below the bus.
“Are Jews on campus, or anybody else, safer as a result of a whole bunch of police in riot gear with firearms had been invited to return onto campus and haul our college students off in zip ties? I don’t really feel safer,” she stated.
Professor Milanich stated the protesters on the encampment had written a code of conduct for inclusion and held coaching occasions on de-escalation to stop extremists from exterior inflicting hassle.
Protestors even have a transparent set of calls for, asking for the college to divest from corporations that assist fund Israel’s warfare in Gaza, which Columbia Faculty college students voted on in a referendum and handed with over 75 per cent of the vote.
“The story is basically not one among ‘pro-Hamas mobs’ operating rampant on campus,” stated Professor Milanich. “The story is of an administration that’s thrown the values of the college to the wind.”