Report: Anti-Israel campus protesters were prepped for months by outside activists
WSJ finds students consulted with and received training from groups that have supported Hamas and attacks on Israel; NYT finds pro-Israel protesters started clash at UCLA
Students protesting against Israel at elite universities in the United States prepared for months with veteran activists before the immense flare-up of campus tensions over Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Backlash to the war has sparked the largest US student protests in decades, some of which have been aggressively dispersed by law enforcement, with over 2,000 students detained, by the New York Times’ estimate. Government and university officials across the country have claimed that non-student instigators have driven the unrest on campuses to a significant extent.
According to the Journal’s report, activists at Columbia University — whose encampment launched the anti-Israel activities on other campuses — had “for weeks and months” consulted with and received training from outside groups, including the National Students for Justice in Palestine, whose Columbia chapter was suspended by the university administration early in the war.
NSJP’s main sponsor, the Journal reported, is the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC) — which the Anti-Defamation League antisemitism watchdog says has funded groups that “have repeatedly propagated antisemitism or called for violence against Israel.”
Besides NSJP, some Columbia students also engaged with Samidoun, a Vancouver-based “Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network” which both Israel and Germany have banned over links to terrorism. Several of the group’s activists spoke at “Resistance 101,” a training session for pro-Palestinian Columbia students — some of whom were subsequently suspended — that was held online in March after being twice barred from the campus.
Charlotte Kates, a coordinator for Samidoun, reportedly said at that online meeting: “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”
“The more we look at Palestine as a cause for revolutionaries across the world, the more Israel fears us.”
See at @LegInsurrection:https://t.co/GcYXGqlcBD
— Jane Coleman (@JaneBColeman) April 25, 2024
Neither NSJP nor Samidoun responded to requests for comment. Robert Herbst, a WESPAC spokesman, pushed back on the report, telling the Journal: “WESPAC has not coordinated, trained or strategized with protest participants, nor do we support organizations that have supported violence, antisemitism or terrorism.”
In addition to specifically Palestinian-related groups, WSJ reported that Columbia protesters had reached out to erstwhile campus activists and former members of the Black Panthers — a Marxist “Black power” collective popular in the US during the 1970s (and which spawned a contemporary homage among Israel’s Moroccan Jews).
“We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” Sueda Polat, a Columbia graduate student and one of the organizers of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at the Manhattan university, told the Journal.
According to Polat, students fundraising for the encampment also drew on their experience in the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Tensions at Columbia reached a crescendo on Tuesday when the New York Police Department detained dozens of anti-Israel activists who had occupied and ransacked a campus building.
Saree Makdisi, an English professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, praised the current generation of pro-Palestinian campus activists.
“We had a lot of affect and feeling,” the UCLA scholar told the Wall Street Journal of his own generation, “but there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”
UCLA saw violence erupt between anti- and pro-Israel protesters Tuesday night after the latter tried to forcibly dismantle the encampment following reports that a pro-Israel student had been prevented from entering the campus by pro-Palestinians. Law enforcement broke up the violence after about five hours, and faced criticism from both sides for its delayed response. Footage from the event showed campus security guards staying on the sidelines as violence unfolded.
The New York Times, which constructed a timeline of the incident after analyzing hundreds of hours of footage, concluded that the pro-Israel counterprotesters — recognizable by the slogans they wore and music they blared — had initiated the violence, beating pro-Palestinian activists with improvised weapons including sticks and traffic cones. As of Friday, the paper said, no one had been detained in connection with the violence.
Elsewhere in the 10-campus University of California system, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activists secured on Friday an assurance from the administration of UC Riverside that it would consider separating its own endowment from that of the broader system in order to divest from companies the activists accuse of supporting Israel.
The announcement represented a win for the activists, as it came a week after the UC system said it opposes “calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel.”
“While the university affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses,” it had said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Students for Justice in Palestine at the UC system’s campus of Santa Cruz, in California’s Bay Area, issued its own list of demands, including a call for the university to “cut ties UC-wide with all [Z]ionist institutions.”
“Cut ties with the Helen Diller Foundation, Koret Foundation, Israel Institute, and Hillel International,” read the statement, referring, respectively, to two Bay-area Jewish charities, a non-profit for Israeli academics, and a social club for Jewish students.
The Bay-area Jewish Community Relations Council slammed the demand, saying it betrayed the activists’ antisemitic leanings.
“Three of the four organizations cited in the academic boycott demand by encampment activists at UCSC are Jewish charities and communal groups: Helen Diller Foundation, Koret Foundation, and Hillel International,” wrote the JCRC on X, formerly Twitter, calling the three organizations “pillars of the Jewish community.”
Three of the four organizations cited in the academic boycott demand by encampment activists at @UCSC are Jewish charities and communal groups: Helen Diller Foundation, @KoretFoundation, and @HillelIntl.
They are pillars of the Jewish community.
This isn't just about opposing… pic.twitter.com/I80BayaDHF
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) May 3, 2024
“This isn’t just about opposing Israel’s Gaza actions but seems aimed at Jewish institutions, revealing underlying antisemitism,” wrote the JCRC.
Campus tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza have wrought havoc on the upcoming commencement season, with multiple institutions revamping the events for fear of political heckling.
Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activists at the University of Vermont notched a victory on Saturday after the administration of the school caved to their demand to cancel a planned commencement speech from Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations.
The protesters, who erected an encampment Sunday, had demanded Thomas-Greenfield’s speech be removed from the upcoming ceremony because of her role in vetoing multiple UN ceasefire resolutions throughout the war.
On October 7, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and take over 250 hostages, amid rampant sexual violence and other atrocities.
Vowing to dismantle the Palestinian terror group and release the hostages, Israel launched an unprecedented offensive in the Strip, displacing over a million people, as conditions in the enclave approach famine, according to United Nations officials.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 34,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes some 13,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
