Over 200 anti-Israel demonstrators protest Bennett event at Columbia University
Pro-Palestinian groups accuse former prime minister of being a war criminal; small group of pro-Israel activists hold counter-protest; talk goes ahead as planned
More than 200 anti-Israel protesters gathered Tuesday in front of Columbia University in New York to demonstrate against former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who was at the campus for a speaking engagement.
After more than a year of campus protests by anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian opponents of the war in Gaza started by the Hamas-led attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, the appearance of a former leader of Israel was met with expected pushback.
“The decision to host a man with such a violent and openly discriminatory record sends a message that the university values some voices over others,” a spokesperson for Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition, one of the groups taking part in the protest, said in a statement.
None of the individual protesters at the event, many of whom wore masks or traditional Palestinian keffiyehs, agreed to speak with AFP journalists.
Police at the scene worked to separate the protest from a small group of pro-Israel counter-demonstrators nearby, though the two demonstrations passed without any incident.
A university spokesperson told campus newspaper The Columbia Spectator that administrators had coordinated with the local Hillel chapter on safety preparations for the event “including with respect to any campus protest activity and to minimize potential disruptions to academic activities.”
“The event was well attended and took place without disruption or interference,” the spokesperson said.
In a statement ahead of the event calling for protest against Bennett’s visit, CPSC said it learned about the talk from a leaked email in which organizers allegedly sought to keep the gathering under the radar, urging that the speaker’s identity be kept confidential.
CPSC cited two past statements attributed to Bennett. In 2018, when he was education minister and three years before he became prime minister, Bennett said he would instruct the army to shoot and kill Palestinian children who breach the border fence with Gaza, saying, “They are not children — they are terrorists.”
He was also cited by CPSC over a remark he reportedly made in 2013 in which he said, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that,” apparently a reference to his army service in a commando unit.
The group also accused him of war crimes over a controversial incident during the First Lebanon War in 1996 when one of the units under Bennett’s command found itself facing Hezbollah mortar fire as it advanced near Qana in southern Lebanon. A supporting IDF artillery strike accidentally hit a UN compound, killing 106 civilians and injuring many more.
The protest was held as US President Donald Trump’s administration threatened federal funding for the New York university over antisemitism. The federal government on Monday said it was considering ending contracts it has with Columbia worth over $50 million, accusing it of failing to protect its Jewish students from antisemitism amid the protests.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote Tuesday on his platform Truth Social.
“Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on… the crime, arrested,” the post continued.
THE STUDENTS UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED!! FREE PALESTINE ❤️????❤️???? pic.twitter.com/0kHOaZWq1m
— Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC) (@Columbia_psc) March 5, 2025
Last week anti-Israel protesters invaded a campus building at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, injuring a university employee. Earlier, Barnard expelled two students who disrupted an Israeli professor’s class at the start of the spring semester. A campus protest group said on Monday that a third Barnard student had been expelled.
Anti-Israel protesters forcibly occupied a building on the Columbia campus last year, leading to a police raid to clear them out and dozens of arrests.
That incident came amid a wave of anti-Israel protests in US colleges against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that responded to the October 7, Hamas-led attack, when over thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages to Gaza.
Some Jewish students complained that the protests made them feel unsafe.
The Times of Israel Community.