From adl.org
Anti-Zionist student groups on over a dozen U.S. college and university campuses have established “encampments” in recent days to ostensibly protest Israel’s actions in Gaza and their academic institutions’ alleged “complicity” in those actions. College campuses have been the site of many tense anti-Israel protests and antisemitic incidents since the start of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war that began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack. These recent encampments and related protests in support of a “Popular University for Gaza” initiative have brought those tensions to a boiling point as protesters ramp up their activity to push universities to divest from Israel.
Several protesters, including those who are participating in the encampments or have demonstrated in support of the encampments, have expressed explicit support for Hamas terrorism and urged Hamas to commit further violence against Israel. Some protesters have also directly confronted Jewish students on and near campus, at times using antisemitic rhetoric. Many protestors have called for “Zionists” to be excluded from campus communities. The concerning actions and rhetoric that has often stemmed from the encampments only serves to further marginalize Jewish students as they already face a disturbing level of antisemitism on many of the impacted campuses.
Background
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters have played a key role in organizing many of these encampments. National SJP, the umbrella organization of these local chapters, put out a call to action on April 20, 2024, urging college students, staff and faculty to “join the Popular University” and “take back our institutions,” adding “we will seize our universities and force the administration to divest.” On April 22, National SJP released the “mission statement” of these “Popular University for Gaza” protests, writing:
- “…We as students will reclaim our power on campus—there will be no classes or compliance with our institutions so long as their shameless profiteering off of our genocide persists. Through the student movement for a popular university, we will transform our mass mobilization into sustained, tangible power…We will seize control of our institutions, campus by campus, until Palestine is free.”
In addition to SJP, numerous other campus and community anti-Zionist groups — many of which have played key roles in organizing anti-Israel protests since October 7 — have supported calls for college encampments. These groups include the national bodies and/or local chapters of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Dissenters, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Palestine Action, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Samidoun, Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and others.
Individual influencers, such as Mohammed el-Kurd and Jenan Matari, are also supporting this call to action.
Among the early encampments were those established at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN on March 26 and at Tufts University in Medford, MA on April 7. Students at Smith College in Northampton, MA also occupied the campus administration building from March 27 to April 9. The national profile of these protests rose on April 17, when students at Columbia University in New York, NY began their encampment in the center of campus. As of April 22, encampments are still ongoing or have recently been set up on the following campuses:
- Columbia University (New York, NY)
- Emerson College (Boston, MA)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
- New York University (New York, NY)
- Rutgers University, New Brunswick (New Brunswick, NJ)
- The New School (New York, NY)
- Tufts University (Medford, MA)
- University of Maryland (College Park, MD)
- University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
- Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN)
- Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO)
- Yale University (New Haven, CT)
Heeding calls from organizations already engaged in encampment protests, student groups at a growing number of additional colleges and universities across the country have held or announced plans to hold demonstrations for the coming days in solidarity with the student encampments and broader “Popular University for Gaza” initiative.
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