Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic?

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Pro-Palestinian student activists say their movement is anti-Zionist but not antisemitic. It is not a distinction that everyone accepts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/nyregion/college-protests-columbia-campus.html

https://archive.ph/YGHvh

Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” has inspired a national student movement against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times

In a video shared widely online, a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement at Columbia University stands near the center of a lawn on the campus and calls out, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.” Dozens of protesters, who have created a tent village called the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” repeat his words back to him: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.” “Walk and take a step forward,” the leader says, as the students continue to repeat his every utterance, “so that we can start to push them out of the camp.” The protesters link arms and march in formation toward three Jewish students who have come inside the encampment.

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“It was really scary because we had like 75 people quickly gathered around, encircling us, doing exactly what he said to do,” Avi Weinberg, one of the Jewish students, said in an interview. He and his friends had gone to see the encampment, not intending to provoke, he said. When it began to feel tense, one of the students started to record the encounter. They are not sure precisely how the protest leader determined they were supportive of Israel. “Suddenly we are being called ‘the Zionists’ in their encampment,” Mr. Weinberg said. “He put a target on our back.”

On Thursday, the incident took on new significance when a video from January resurfaced on social media showing the same protest leader, Khymani James, saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The next day, Columbia officials announced they had barred Mr. James from campus. Columbia has been ground zero in a national student movement against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, with protesters setting up encampments on campuses across the country. Hundreds of demonstrators — at Columbia, Yale, Emerson College, the University of Southern California and beyond — have been arrested.



Pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the country say Israel is committing what they see as genocide against the Palestinian people, and they aim to keep a spotlight on the suffering. But some Jewish students who support Israel and what they see as its right to defend itself against Hamas say the protests have made them afraid to walk freely on campus. They hear denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising as an attack on Jews themselves. The tension goes to the heart of a question that has touched off debate among observers and critics of the protests: At what point does pro-Palestinian political speech in a time of war cross the line into the type of antisemitism colleges have vowed to combat?

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