Netanyahu likens US campus encampments by ‘antisemitic mobs’ to 1930s Nazi Germany
PM claims anti-Israel protesters are also chanting ‘Death to America’; standoff at Columbia continues amid dueling claims about talks with management on taking down tents
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lambasted “an antisemitic surge” in the United States in an English-language video message Wednesday, amid widespread anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses across the US.
Activists angered by Israel’s war on the Hamas terror group in Gaza have engaged in an escalating standoff with university administrations who have sought to dismantle the encampments, with Jewish students and faculty saying the demonstrations include antisemitic harassment and calls for violence against Jews, as well as support for Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.
“Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty,” Netanyahu charged in his statement, which likened the scenes to those that preceded the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
“This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned unequivocally,” the Israeli premier said.
“But that’s not what happened,” he added. “When you listen to them, they say not only ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to the Jews,’ but also ‘Death to America.'”
Netanyahu lamented the “antisemitic surge” in the US “as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.”
Anti-Semitism on campuses in the United States is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s.
The world cannot stand idly by. pic.twitter.com/oHlwig1vCl
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 24, 2024
“We’ve seen in history that antisemitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander… We have to stop antisemitism because antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world,” Netanyahu said.
Meanwhile, Columbia University said on Wednesday that students had agreed to take down “a significant number” of the dozens of tents set up at the school’s New York City campus as part of the anti-Israel encampment.
The university administration said it had extended a midnight deadline by 48 hours to reach an agreement with student leaders of the protest, pointing to “significant progress” in the talks.
While the two sides were working to end the standoff, similar protests spread to other college campuses across the US, including an encampment that was being set up on the Los Angeles campus of the University of Southern California.
Student representatives of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups, said on Wednesday morning that Columbia had agreed to extend the talks through to at least 4 a.m. on Friday.
Their statement said nothing about an agreement to dismantle tents. They said talks had faltered late on Tuesday night after Columbia threatened an “imminent sweep” of the encampment by the New York Police Department or the National Guard, but the school had since given a written commitment withdrawing the threat.
Asked about the students’ claim of a threatened law enforcement sweep, Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang told Reuters in an email: “There is absolutely no basis to make that claim re: National Guard.”
Students at a growing number of United States colleges have gathered in protest encampments with a unified demand of their schools: Stop doing business with Israel — or any companies that empower its ongoing war in Gaza, joining a decades-old campaign against Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians that pro-Israel groups say is tantamount to calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Visiting the Columbia campus on Wednesday, US House Speaker Mike Johnson called on President Minouche Shafik to resign “if she cannot bring order to this chaos,” while decrying “the virus of antisemitism.”
“If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard,” he said
After meeting with Jewish students, Johnson spoke at a press conference on the campus, during which he was interrupted by demonstrators, including with shouts of “Mike you suck.”
Inspired by ongoing protests and angered over the arrests last week of more than 100 students at Columbia University, students from Massachusetts to California are now gathering by the hundreds on campuses, setting up tent camps and pledging to stay put until their demands are met.
Critics of the protests, including prominent Republican members of the US Congress, have stepped up accusations of antisemitism and harassment by at least some protesters. Civil rights advocates, including the ACLU, have raised free speech concerns over the arrests.
The Israel-Hamas war erupted when 3,000 terrorists poured across the border with Israel on October 7 in an unprecedented Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while 253 were kidnapped to Gaza.
The ensuing Israeli offensive has killed over 34,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. The figure cannot be independently verified and includes over 13,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed since the beginning of the war. The IDF says 261 of its soldiers have been killed in the fighting.
Protesters want university endowments to divest from Israeli interests and the US to end or at least condition Israeli military aid on improving the plight of Palestinians.
On Wednesday, about 60 tents remained at the Columbia encampment, which appeared calm, with students going in and out — one girl holding a toothbrush. A woman spoke on a loudspeaker about the reasons for the protest. Security remained tight around campus, with identification required and police setting up metal barricades.
Columbia last Thursday called in police who arrested more than 100 students at the encampment on trespassing charges, an unusual move that outraged some faculty members. The students were suspended and the tents were dismantled, but students have since erected more than 100 tents on one of the lawns.
“The encampment raises serious safety concerns, disrupts campus life, and has created a tense and at times hostile environment for many members of our community,” Shafik said late on Tuesday, before the agreement to extend the negotiating deadline. “It is essential that we move forward with a plan to dismantle it.”
Columbia said it had agreed with protest representatives that only students would remain at the encampment and they would make it welcoming, banning discriminatory or harassing language.
Standoffs also persisted at other universities across the country, including California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where protesters this week used furniture, tents, chains and zip ties to block a building’s entrance and barricade themselves inside. And new student encampments continued to pop up, including at Brown University in Rhode Island and Harvard University in Massachusetts.
Elsewhere, at the University of Minnesota, Democratic US Rep. Ilhan Omar attended a protest late Tuesday, hours after nine protesters were arrested on the campus when police took down an encampment in front of the library. Hundreds had rallied in the afternoon to demand their release.
Omar’s daughter was among the demonstrators arrested at Columbia last week.
Also Tuesday night, police arrested more than 200 protesters blocking traffic in Brooklyn, near the home of Senator Chuck Schumer, during a non-college demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace on the second night of Passover.
Students at some protests were hiding their identities. At an encampment of about 40 tents at the heart of the University of Michigan’s campus in Ann Arbor, almost every student wore a mask, which was handed to them when they entered.
Student protesters declined to identify themselves to reporters, saying they feared retribution by the university. Organizers of the protest said some students who had participated in prior protests at Michigan had been doxxed and punished. But some students passing by shouted at the protesters to remove their masks and show their faces.
The upwelling of demonstrations has left universities struggling to balance campus safety with free speech rights. Many long tolerated the protests, but are now doling out more heavy-handed discipline, citing safety concerns.
At New York University this week, police said 133 protesters were taken into custody and all had been released with summonses to appear in court on disorderly conduct charges.
More than 40 protesters were arrested Monday at an encampment at Yale University.
Harvard this week limited access to its famous Harvard Yard to those with school identification. Protesters said they set up a camp in the yard with 14 tents and about 30 people Wednesday, after a rally against the university’s suspension of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Literature doctoral student Christian Deleon said he understood why the Harvard administration may be trying to avoid protests but said there still has to be a place for students to express what they think.
“We should all be able to use these kinds of spaces to protest, to make our voices heard,” he said.
Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said college leaders face extremely tough decisions because they have a responsibility to ensure people can express their views, even when others find them offensive, while protecting students from threats and intimidation.
