Pro-Palestinian protest camps at US universities have forced Jewish students to stay at home. Is the crisis heading to Britain?
THE drums have been beating for nearly a fortnight at Manhattan’s Columbia University, the noise reverberating around the campus of one of America’s most prestigious seats of learning.
It is energising some students and academics but putting others on edge, for the drums are the accompaniment to ceaseless chants about the virtues of the Palestinian cause and the wickedness of ‘colonial’ Israel.
Protesters insist they are demanding only peace in Gaza and an end to the humanitarian crisis there, and complain that antiZionism shouldn’t be confused with antiSemitism. However, many of the slogans and placards tell a very different story: ‘Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall’; ‘There is only one solution: intifada revolution’; ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, and ‘By any means necessary’.
They call, implicitly or explicitly, for the extinction of Israel.
As student protests, and mass arrests by police breaking up those protests, have this week spread like wildfire across the US to at least 30 campuses and rising, many say America is witnessing a crisis in academia that has been years in the making — and might yet spread to the UK.
Political alarm has reached the White House, where President Joe Biden called on Americans to condemn the ‘ alarming surge of anti- Semitism’ on college campuses and elsewhere.
Yet student protests are growing, feeding off each other. Every time police arrive on a campus to end an illegal gathering, three or four more sprout up in response at universities elsewhere. It is rapidly becoming a nationwide movement and drawing comparisons with the Vietnam War protests more than 50 years ago.
Critics say that university chiefs are reaping the whirlwind of years of pandering to woke Left-wing students with whom they frequently agree and, in the specific case of Gaza, losing their moral authority by failing to come down hard on anti- Jewish hate speech when the conflict first erupted.
They’re also accused of indoctrinating students to believe that Jews are white and therefore oppressors, while Israel is a colonialist state and thus illegitimate.
And while protest sympathisers insist the students are simply exercising their right to free speech, others counter that by disrupting classes with loudspeakers and inflammatory chants, and refusing to stop until their anti-Israel demands are met, this is coercion and intimidation.
The situation is so serious at Columbia that a campus rabbi has urged Jewish students to stay at home rather than risk being harassed and abused.
Earlier this month, Columbia’s embattled president, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born Anglo-American and former deputy governor of the Bank of England, told Congress that she was fighting anti-Semitism on her campus.
She said several Columbia academics were already under investigation, including Middle Eastern Studies professor Joseph Massad who caused outrage when he described aspects of the October Hamas attack on Israel as ‘awesome’. A senior colleague of hers at Columbia, Claire Shipman, testified bluntly: ‘We have a moral crisis on our campus.’
Following the Congress hearing, Oxford-educated Baroness Shafik — also a former vice-chancellor of the LSE — returned to New York and called in the police after students were filmed expressing anti-Semitic abuse and support for Hamas. Officers in riot gear made more than 100 arrests as they cleared a large tented camp on the university’s lawn that protesters have called the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’.
Undaunted, protesters responded by rebuilding the encampment, only bigger, and have vowed they won’t disperse until Columbia agrees, among other demands, to cut academic and financial ties with Israel.
Columbia has pledged it won’t use the police again after its university board accused Baroness Shafik of heavy-handedness.
But some of Columbia’s 5,000 Jewish students say they’ve been targeted, vocally and even physically, by protesters, some not even connected to the university.
The victims say that simply wearing a Jewish star on their clothing has been enough for demonstrators — many hiding their faces behind keffiyeh scarves — to throw liquids at them and scream in their face. One photographed a protester holding up a sign in front of Jewish students that referred to an armed wing of Hamas and read: ‘Al- Qassam’s next targets’.
And such is the sulphurous state of higher education and the fierce cultural wars being waged at universities that the abuse, harassment and protests at Columbia are rapidly being replicated dozens of times over.
At Yale, where pro-Palestinian protesters have turned part of its campus into a ‘Liberated Zone’, second-year student Sahar Tartak says she and a friend were hounded at a protest there after being identified as ‘ visibly Orthodox Jewish students’. She was treated in hospital after a demonstrator waved a Palestinian flag in her face, jabbing her in the eye.
‘It’s really painful to realise your peers have joined the Nazi Party,’ she said.
In the past week riot police have made more than 700 arrests at over 76 universities, including New York, Princeton, Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, and Emerson in Boston.
‘BPD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same,’ chanted protesters at Emerson — lumping together the Boston Police Department and the Ku Klux Klan with the Israeli Defence Forces military — as more than a hundred, including two professors, were loaded into police vans. At Emory in Atlanta, police used chemical irritants and, in one instance, a stun gun on protesters.
Student encampments have also appeared at Harvard, the University of California in Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and myriad other well-heeled private universities.
Some have pointed out that the encampments are for the most part cropping up on the smartest campuses whose wealthy students often have the luxury of not needing to hurry off after classes to a part-time job.
Detractors also ridicule the way the protesters and their supporters on the Left are only now complaining about preserving free speech in universities, after years in which conservative voices have been relentlessly silenced on campuses.
And, of course, it’s not just the students who are up in arms. Faculty members and lecturers are showing solidarity with the demonstrators. At Columbia, they have even donned ‘Hands Off Our Students’ T-shirts.
Baroness Shafik faces calls from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to step down over what they say is her failure to restore order and protect Jewish students and the faculty itself.
Democrat Senator John Fetterman went so far as to compare the situation at Columbia to the 2017 Unite The Right rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a supporter drove his car into counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 35 others.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, also called on her to resign ‘if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos’ when he visited Columbia on Wednesday. ‘Go back to class and stop the nonsense,’ he told protesters. ‘Stop wasting your parents’ money.’
Perhaps more serious for universities than political condemnation has been the displeasure of financial donors. Private US universities — especially the immensely rich Ivy League elite — are about nothing if not making money and Columbia has now lost the confidence of at least one of its biggest donors.
Robert Kraft, a billionaire Jewish businessman and owner of the New England Patriots football team, has given millions of dollars to the alma mater he says he ‘loves so much’. But now he has ‘lost faith’ in the university and can no longer support it ‘until corrective action is taken’, he said.
Mr Kraft, who set up a foundation to fight anti-Semitism, went on: ‘I am deeply saddened at the virulent hate that continues to grow on campus and throughout our country.’
Kraft’s horror echoes that of alumni benefactors of other ‘Ivies’ who last December helped force out the heads of Harvard and Pennsylvania after they caused widespread revulsion when, questioned in Congress, said students who called for Jewish genocide wouldn’t necessarily be reprimanded.
Back at Columbia, Baroness Shafik has complained that the ‘tensions have been exploited and amplified’ by non- Columbia activists who have ‘ come to campus to pursue their own
‘Go back to class and stop this nonsense’
‘We have a moral crisis on our campuses’
agendas’. Certainly, her university allowed in a string of controversial pro-Palestine speakers last week to address the protesters.
They included activist and writer Mohammed El-Kurd, investigated by the Metropolitan Police after he told protesters in London in January that ‘ we must normalise massacres as the status quo’ (El-Kurd later claimed he ‘mis-spoke’).
Academic Cornell West, another Columbia protest speaker, has said Israel and the US were most to blame for Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
But while they were admitted to the campus, one of Columbia’s own Jewish academics was barred from it after he planned a pro-Israel counter- demonstration. He said he was told the university couldn’t guarantee his safety. ‘This is 1938,’ complained Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the Business School, echoing a comparison that critics have drawn to that watershed year in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews.
JOHN McWHORTER, a professor at Columbia and New York Times columnist, highlighted what he saw as the shameless hypocrisy of those who have defended the protests. ‘I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-black slogans,’ he said.
Meanwhile, a festival atmosphere reigns at Columbia’s ‘solidarity encampment’ where some 100 tents have been pitched. Volunteers hand out face masks on entry (so useful to avoid identification) and offer art classes and poetry readings, organic snacks and bagels. When not chanting slogans and dancing, many protesters spend their days hunched over their studies — though still keeping an eye out for ‘Zionist’ intruders.
A student spokesman for the Palestinian protest said this week that they’ll stay until forcibly removed. ‘When you try to repress us, the movement only grows,’ she said. In that, at least, she seems to be entirely correct.