President says commitment to Israel is ‘ironclad’ as protests continue
Joe Biden warned against a “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America” at a Holocaust event yesterday, as student protests against Israel’s military strikes in Gaza continued on campuses across the US.
Addressing a bipartisan remembrance event at the US Capitol, the president reasserted his “ironclad” commitment to the “security of Israel and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state … even when we disagree”.
Hatred towards Jews didn’t end with the Holocaust, he said – it was “brought to life on 7 October 2023” when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis.
He added: “Now here we are not 75 years later, but just seven-and-ahalf months later, people are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror … I have not forgotten, and we will not forget.”
Biden’s forceful evocation of the shadows of the Holocaust and the ongoing scourge of antisemitism was made at a volatile moment when Israel’s retaliatory military operation in Gaza has killed 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, and brought 2.3 million people to the edge of starvation.
Demonstrations against the war and calls for a ceasefire have led to turmoil at scores of US universities and colleges – and opened fissures within Biden’s Democratic party that could imperil his re-election hopes in November.
The president, who has generally avoided commenting on the campus protests since they started at Columbia University in New York three weeks earlier, acknowledged that his remembrance speech fell “on difficult times”.
He also said that he understood that “people have strong beliefs and deep convictions”, adding that the US respected free speech.
However, he criticised antisemitic posters and “slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel” on college campuses. Biden said: “Jewish students [have been] blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.”
He said there is “no place on any campus in America or any place in America for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind”.
He added: “Violent attacks destroying property is not peaceful protest – it’s against the law.”
Student protesters strongly denied hatred motivated the pro-Palestinian encampments. A group of more than 750 Jewish students from 140 campuses issued a joint letter yesterday calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and rejecting Biden’s comments.
The letter said: “As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.”
Hours before the president delivered his speech, police cleared a protest encampment at the University of Chicago.
The encampment was completely dismantled within about three hours, but about 400 protesters later reassembled outside the university’s administrative building and staged an ongoing standoff with police.
In a statement, the university’s president, Paul Alivisatos, said that protesters had been given a chance to voluntarily dismantle the encampment, and he stressed there had been no arrests.
But he said negotiations with encampment representatives had broken down because of the “intractable and inflexible aspects of their demands”.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, protesters regained access to the barricaded encampment after they were removed by police on Monday.