Columbia Professor Says Student Protesters Are Being Smeared

Student protesters opposing Israel's war in Gaza are being smeared by false allegations of antisemitism, a Columbia professor told Newsweek.

Demonstrations have been surfacing at college campuses nationwide since more than 100 students were arrested at Columbia University after university officials called in New York police to clear a pro-Palestinian protest camp on the main lawn. The encampment was back up days later.

Inspired by the action at Columbia, hundreds of students have set up protest camps on several other campuses, demanding their universities cut financial ties with Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the war in Gaza. Other universities have also cracked down, with the number of arrests nationwide nearing 900.

The protests are in response to Israel's ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip. which began after Hamas' deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7, when militants killed about 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostages. In the months since, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, The Associated Press reported, citing the local health ministry.

Israel and many of its supporters have labeled the protests antisemitic, and say they pose a threat to the safety of Jewish students. Some have pointed to videos of protesters outside Columbia's gates who were caught on camera making antisemitic remarks, but the student protesters—some of whom are Jewish—have said those individuals do not represent them and that their movement is peaceful.

"What happens outside the gates has NOTHING to do with the student protest on campus: these are outside groups for which neither students, faculty nor Columbia are responsible," Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, told Newsweek via email. "Conflating the two is a malign tactic used to smear the students, which much of the media has shamefully fallen for."

He added: "There is nothing antisemitic about opposing a genocidal war, or in criticizing Israeli apartheid."

The Columbia student protesters timed their encampment to coincide with Columbia President Minouche Shafik's testimony before a congressional panel investigating concerns about antisemitism on college campuses.

Shafik later said that she took the "extraordinary step" of calling police to clear the encampment because it had created a "harassing and intimidating environment" for many students. Columbia has also moved to hold classes remotely amid the protests.

"If you look at how many Jewish students are involved in the protest, and at the fact that one of the groups banned is JEWISH Voice for Peace, it is clear this is not true," Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, said.

"Pro-Israel students may feel uncomfortable with slogans critical of Israel, but they are not necessarily even a majority of Jewish students on campus."

Khalidi also noted that almost two dozen Jewish faculty members of Columbia University and Barnard College signed a letter published in the Columbia Daily Spectator rejecting the "weaponization of antisemitism" more than a week before the encampment went up.

"To argue that taking a stand against Israel's war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term," the faculty members said in the letter. "Labeling pro-Palestinian expression anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity."

Khalidi also noted that many Jewish professors were among hundreds that took part in a faculty walkout in protest against the university's decision to allow students to be arrested without consulting faculty.

The arrests of students "recalls the worst days of 1968 at Columbia, after which institutions like the Senate and procedures for dealing with student discipline were put in place, all of which the administration has completely ignored," Khalidi said.

In1968, Columbia and Barnard students protesting the Vietnam War occupied five campus buildings and briefly held the acting dean hostage before police violently ended the occupation a week later, arresting more than 700 students.

The Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors issued a statement condemning the university's decision to call in police to clear the encampment. Shafik "demonstrated flagrant disregard of shared governance in her acceptance of partisan charges that anti-war demonstrators are violent and antisemitic and in her unilateral and wildly disproportionate punishment of peacefully protesting students," the statement said.

The students arrested on April 18 have been suspended, and promptly barred from campus and classes, unable to attend in-person or virtually.

A group of negotiators representing the student protesters has been meeting with university administrators in recent days to discuss their demands, as well as amnesty for students and staff who are facing discipline for taking part in the protests.

The suspensions of those students are "illegal," Khalidi said, and "imposed arbitrarily on the basis of rules made up on the spot, by unqualified administrators who had no right to make such decisions."

Students and administrators are continuing to negotiate, the university said in a statement Saturday night. "There is no truth to claims of an impending lockdown or evictions on campus."

But the crackdowns on student protests at Columbia and beyond show that university administrators have been "cowed by powerful forces, including politicians, donors and trustees, and much of the media," Khalidi said.

They "are standing against majority sentiment among their student bodies and faculties, who support an immediate end to Israel's war on Gaza, and divestment from companies supporting Israel's illegal 56-year occupation."

Khalidi said President Joe Biden—who recently said he condemned "antisemitic protests" on college campuses—is "as misguided about this as in everything else about Palestine."

Biden "stands in opposition to most of the country and most of the grassroots of his party in his blind support for Israel's war on Gaza," Khalidi added. "History will judge him very severely."

Recent polling has found that younger Americans are more likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinian people, and a growing number think Biden is favoring Israel too much.

"The tide has been turning for several years, on and off campus," Khalidi said. "No one bothers to report it, but unions, churches and minority groups have been shifting in the same way, if less dramatically than students and faculty, have young people generally."