Jewish student protesters say Columbia’s pro-Palestine demonstrations aren’t antisemitic

“There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism, but it’s just a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground praying, chanting and doing homework,” said one student who has been at the college protest camp.

In the week since a protest camp exploded across the grounds of Columbia University in solidarity with Gaza, PhD student Jonathan Ben-Menachem has been fielding worried calls from his family. They had been watching the news and were concerned for his safety.

"I’ve had to reassure them that I am not about to get mobbed by antisemites anytime I go to campus,” he told The Independent. “It’s just people trying to take a stand for what they think is right, very peacefully.”

Mr Ben-Menachem is one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel over the war in Gaza.

He said he has watched with amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a central role in them.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia and other US universities “antisemitic mobs” that are taking over “leading universities,” on Wednesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University on Wednesday and called those protesting “lawless agitators” and “antisemitic.”

Mr Ben-Menachem said his experience on campus had been completely different.

“There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism, but it’s just a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground praying, chanting and doing homework. There was a Passover Seder held on Monday,” Mr Ben-Menachem said. “It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.”

A collective of groups organised by Jewish students at Columbia and Barnard in solidarity with Gaza and the protest encampment host Passover Seder at Columbia University on April 22, 2024 (REUTERS)

Student protests over the war in Gaza have been common across college campuses since the war in Gaza broke out in October, following a surprise Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel. The resulting war has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and aid blockages have resulted in famine conditions in northern Gaza, creating a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of schools, and all of Gaza’s 12 universities, have been damaged or destroyed since the Israeli attacks began.

After Columbia University ordered the New York Police Department to break up a protest camp on its campus last week, leading to the arrests of more than 100 students, the protests have spread across the country and grown into a movement that some have compared to the student-led protests against the Vietnam War of the 1960s. Similar protests have since erupted at Yale and New York University (where arrests were also made), Ohio State University, Stanford University and Berkeley, to name a few.

The protests at Columbia in particular drew national attention due to videos of several antisemitic incidents near the campus, including one in which someone shouted “Go back to Poland” at a group of Jewish students. In a separate incident, the Columbia chapter of the Orthodox Jewish movement Chabad said Jewish students had been told to “Go back to Europe.”

While Mr Ben-Menachem said there had been credible reports of antisemitism in and around the campus, they were not representative of the hundreds of protesters who had camped out to protest against Israel’s war. What concerned him more than outside agitators was the university’s attempts to crack down on the protests — including the rumours that it may soon enlist the National Guard to intervene.

The Ohio National guard move in on anti-war protesters at Kent State University in 1970. (AP)

“We’re terrified that there’s going to be a second Kent State at Columbia,” he said, referring to the killing of four unarmed college students at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970 during protests over the Vietnam War.

“It’s absurd to say that they are gonna bring in the National Guard and the NYPD to protect Jews when it’s actually Jews who are being arrested,” he added.

Sarah, a Jewish student at Columbia who asked for only her first name to be published, was among those arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties, after they moved in on the camp on Thursday. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.

“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”

A Seder for Passover held on Monday April 22 at Columbia University (REUTERS)

Sarah said she too had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been “weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

“There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. I have so much love for the Jewish people of my community, we just have a political dispute, and that’s it.”

The crackdown on protests has also drawn criticism from staff. Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, which is partnered with Columbia University, was among nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members to write to Columbia president Nemat Shafik before the protests broke out, ahead of her appearance at a Congressional committee on antisemitism on campus, warning against the “weaponization of antisemitism” at Columbia by politicians eager to stoke division.

She told The Independent it was the university’s decision to bring the NYPD onto campus that “inflamed” the situation and “shut down spaces of debate.”

New York Police officers arrest a protestor who participated in an encampment on the Columbia University campus, Thursday, April 18, 2024, in New York (AP)

“It’s not the students who have created the chaos,” said Professor Milanich. “It’s the leadership of the university that has participated in this ridiculous police raid and has thrown the faculty and students of the university under the bus.

“Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties?  I don’t feel safer,” she said.

Professor Milanich said the protesters at the encampment had written a code of conduct for inclusion and held training events on de-escalation to prevent extremists from outside causing trouble.

Protestors also have a clear set of demands, asking for the university to divest from companies that help fund Israel’s war in Gaza, which Columbia College students voted on in a referendum and passed with over 75 per cent of the vote.

“The story is fundamentally not one of ‘pro-Hamas mobs’ running rampant on campus,” said Professor Milanich. “The story is of an administration that’s thrown the values of the university to the wind.”