US student protesters target Israeli veterans wounded on October 7

Ohio State University activists demonstrate against lecture by 2 soldiers hurt in Hamas attack who are on American campus tour

Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.

IDF veteran Maya Desiatnik speaks to students at Ohio State University, January 27, 2025. (Courtesy)
IDF veteran Maya Desiatnik speaks to students at Ohio State University, January 27, 2025. (Courtesy)

Israel Defense Forces veterans Saar Arie and Maya Desiatnik were on their way to Ohio State University on Monday when they got word that anti-Israel protesters on the campus planned to target their lecture at the university’s Chabad.

The demonstrators had announced a protest and shared photos of Arie and Desiatnik, who are touring US campuses with Belev Echad, a New York-based group that assists wounded IDF veterans. Organizers of the Ohio State event sent the post to the two soldiers before they arrived.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Arie told The Times of Israel in a phone interview, recounting how he and Desiatnik arrived to find around 60 protesters outside the event in Columbus.

“The first couple seconds I was halfway scared, but after I saw the security at the place and I saw all of the great people that came to support us I wasn’t scared anymore,” he said.

Arie was a medic with the Givati infantry brigade who was dispatched to Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border, on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. He was shot in the stomach and foot during the attack.

Desiatnik was a non-combat surveillance soldier in Nahal Oz, also near the border, when Hamas invaders overran the base. She was in the base’s command room when the terrorists attacked the building and set it on fire. She escaped through a window, and was the only survivor from the command post, she said.

The two arrived in New York last week for a tour of 10 campuses around the United States. The Ohio State protest was the first demonstration they encountered. Protesters had announced a rally against the soldiers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but didn’t show up. Rabbi Uriel Vigler, Belev Echad’s director, said it was the first protest against one of the group’s events since October 7, but that there had been rallies against soldiers from the group before the Hamas attack.

The Ohio State protest was led by the campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine. The group’s advertisement for the protest included the names and photos of the soldiers, calling them “war criminals.”

“The blood of millions of martyrs are stained on their hands,” the group said. “We will not stand by and allow them to be welcomed onto our campus.”

Local police, campus security officers, and members of a local Jewish security group were on site to protect the event.

Video of the lecture shared with the Times of Israel showed Desiatnik, 20, describing her role as a surveillance soldier to a packed room of students. She recounted how terrorists had infiltrated her base, killed and kidnapped her friends, and attempted to kill her and others. The anti-Israel protesters’ chants were audible in the room.

Desiatnik, who has asthma, said the smoke from the terrorists’ fires made her feel “like I was drowning.”

“The truth is I was dying. I was actually coughing blood, I was coughing up black stuff, and it was terrifying,” she said, as the protesters chanted and blew airhorns outside the building.

“It was very difficult to speak while they were yelling outside. It was hard to concentrate,” Desiatnik told The Times of Israel, adding that she still suffers minor effects from the smoke inhalation.

“We didn’t have a choice and we used it as an opportunity and it actually made our stories stronger because we used the people outside as an example” of enmity toward Israel, she said.

Video showed the demonstrators gathered on the street near the Chabad house, and Jewish students watching from the building’s front entrance.

“We will honor all our martyrs,” the protesters chanted. Most were wearing masks or keffiyehs over their faces.

“They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘intifada’ without even knowing what it means, which is kind of scary,” Desiatnik said.

Arie said that after his initial surprise at the protest, he went outside to take selfies with the demonstrators in the background.

“It was pretty hard to talk but we enjoyed it,” he said.

The soldiers kidnapped from the base included some of the women released from Gaza last week, friends of Desiatnik. Others, Desiatnik said, “were murdered in their bedrooms while hiding.” Another of the soldiers, Agam Berger, is supposed to be released on Thursday.

The protest gained attention among pro-Israel students, causing attendance at the IDF veterans’ lecture to swell. The morning of the event, 45 attendees had registered, but around 130 showed up. The student attendees spilled out of the Chabad house’s room for the lecture, with participants standing in the hallway and sitting on stairs outside.

Desiatnik and Arie were in Indiana for another lecture on Wednesday and will return to New York on Thursday to speak at Columbia University’s medical center.

Belev Echad, a nonprofit founded in 2010, provides wounded veterans assistance including trips to the US, medical care, hospital visits, prosthetic limbs and therapy. The group operates a house and rehabilitation center outside Tel Aviv.

One of the group’s staffers, Border Guard veteran Raz Mizrahi, 21, was killed in the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival.

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