Who Are the Anti-Israel Campus Protesters?

By Zach Kessel

Thursday, May 16, 2024

 

New York City — The first thing anyone walking the perimeter of the erstwhile Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” could see was a sign — “WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY FOR PALESTINE” — that hung on the fence surrounding the school’s South Lawn. On the other side of the quad, at the entrance to the encampment — and behind a legion of self-identified Columbia faculty blocking reporters from accessing the occupied zone — were two billboards, one advertising a list of the protesters’ demands and the other laying out the encampment’s “community guidelines.”

 

“We will remain until Columbia concedes [sic] to our demands,” the sign read. The encampment organizers demanded that the university divest itself from “corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.” They insisted that the university provide “complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.” They would not leave, they wrote, until the university provided “amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian liberation.” Next to the list of demands stood the encampment’s Ten Commandments.

 

Occupiers are to be “grounded” in solidarity with Palestinians, mindful of their environmental impact (they do, after all, “recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land”), and respectful of physical and emotional boundaries. Members of the encampment should not engage with media or use drugs and alcohol, the guidelines note, but, if mistakes are made, occupiers must “grant ourselves and others grace” and approach “conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.”

At the bottom of the list were a request to contact leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group in charge, to suggest additional guidelines and a reminder to “free Palestine!”

 

Those two signs and the scene that formed around them demonstrated in real time the strange contradictions of the current campus-protest movement. On the list of guidelines were the therapy-tinged recommendations of being “grounded” and “granting ourselves and others grace”; the rhetoric of decolonization in describing the land as having been stolen from a Native American tribe; and the presumed heroic self-reliance and antiestablishment, sticking-it-to-the-man attitude of “We keep us safe.” The catalogue of demands — not requests, not exhortations — betrayed a sense of entitlement seemingly at odds with the protesters’ self-conception of earnest advocacy for their cause. The wall of professors preventing members of the press — including National Review — from entering served as evidence of the institutional power that the ideologues possess despite their every effort to claim otherwise. And right there, behind the infantry line of the professoriate, shrieking at reporters attempting to enter, in a voice that would later become instantly recognizable, was Khymani James.

 

James, a self-described “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist,” was one of the lead organizers of the encampment and a Columbia student in good standing until video emerged of a disciplinary hearing in January. Brought before an administrative committee after announcing on Instagram that, if a Zionist were to attempt to fight him, he would “fight to kill,” James live-streamed the hearing on his account, capturing his own assertions to administrators that “there should not be Zionists anywhere” and that “the world is better without them.” He stayed on the air after the meeting ended, arguing to his followers that “Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and reminded viewers to “be grateful” that he was “not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

 

Before the video made the rounds, James had been known as the protester who commanded a legion of followers to “create a human chain” to drive the “Zionists” who had “entered the camp” from the occupied territory, encircling the Jewish students who had accessed the encampment and chanting at them in a call-and-response routine. After the video circulated — and not as a direct result of his statements during the January disciplinary hearing — he was suspended.

 

Though certainly not the only encampment organizer, at Columbia or elsewhere, to hold such bloodthirsty beliefs, James is emblematic of those who have been active in the anti-Israel protests and occupations. Their inner circle is an unholy alliance of radical Islamists, rabid antisemites, and revolutionary Marxists. These are the students who lead chants of “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Mohammed soufa ya-oud!” — “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed will return!” — in reference to the seventh-century Battle of Khaybar, at which Mohammed and his army besieged and conquered one of the last remaining Jewish communities in what is now Saudi Arabia. They are the organizers who, as seen at New York University, guide the mob in the recitation of slogans such as “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada.” They are the ones who yelled at Jewish students that “October 7 will be every day,” who shouted “Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too,” who in signage described their goal as including both “death to Israel” and “death to America.” Their faculty archetype may be Northwestern University’s “chair of social justice in reporting,” Steven Thrasher, who in a speech delivered to that school’s encampment bragged that he had been in touch with the son of a former Houthi official, described the protests as “a colonial war of occupation . . . playing out on this lawn,” and told the students they had “gone up against the American empire.” While members of this group do indeed hate the Jews, they hate the Jews as avatars of everything they hate about the West, and they hate Israel as a colonial outpost of the United States in the Middle East. They see Jews as the force behind the domestic and global order they seek to dismantle “by any means necessary.”

 

While there is a distinction between organizers on campus and the unaffiliated professional activists — the “outside agitators” — who have joined the students, faculty, and staff in their protests, it is possible to draw that distinction too sharply, as many seeking to play down the nature of the campus side have done. Indeed, individuals with no relation to the universities where the rallies have taken place arrived on campuses in droves. Many of those who broke into Columbia’s Hamilton Hall with hammers in hand and faces covered with keffiyehs were not enrolled at the university and, as Northwestern students and parents told NR, outside activists took buses from Chicago to Evanston and arrived on campus in the middle of the night. The student organizers have used Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, to disseminate information about their encampments, inviting outsiders to “escalate for Gaza” and go “all out” in defense of the tent cities against police officers dismantling them.

 

The second circle of students involved in the protests are those whom conservatives once called “social-justice warriors.” They include a Vanderbilt University student who, after being expelled for occupying the chancellor’s office, complained that his high-school activism was the reason Vanderbilt had admitted him in the first place — he said he had received a scholarship reserved specifically for activists and had written his college essay about organizing protests. These students take notions of “intersectionality” — defined perhaps most succinctly by the United Nations’ Global Citizenship initiative as “how multiple identities interact to create unique patterns of oppression” — as gospel and have extended the idea to mean that all forms of oppression are intertwined.

 

This helps explain the seemingly incoherent activists “Queers for Gaza,” as well as the signs in Columbia’s encampment bearing rallying cries such as “Black Artists for Divestment,” “Asian American Alliance Stands with Palestine,” and a Spanish-language message that translates to “From the ruins, thousands of seeds will be born and Puerto Rico and Palestine will be free.” While these groups of people may not be Islamist, antisemitic, or Marxist, they have no issue making common cause with those who are. It was not just the most radical students who went along with “We don’t want no Zionists here” chants as protesters escorted a Jewish man from the area in which the demonstration was held. Through the Manichaean oppressor–oppressed lens through which they view life, they see Israel and the Jews as villains. Fitting snugly into this cohorot is the Jewish student at NYU who told NR that, despite having family in Israel, she views the Jewish state as a force for evil by virtue of its response to October 7.

 

The third circle — by far the largest — is composed of the uninformed. A video showing one such protester at NYU circulated online in April. She did not “know all of what NYU is doing” when asked about the point of the protests. When she turned to a friend to ask “Why are we protesting?” the friend revealed her own ignorance by saying, “I wish I was more educated.” Also at NYU, a university employee told NR that, while she believed that the demonstrations and encampments presented an “opportunity for students . . . learning about systems of oppression in their classrooms,” she did not “know too much about” the “intifada” chants in the background. But these protesters’ lack of knowledge about Israel, the history of the conflict, and geopolitics in general is not the only trait they share. Many, like the keffiyeh-clad Columbia student outside the encampment who told NR that the protests were the first time she’d felt a sense of community at her university, are in search of meaning. Members of this third group — many of them presumably from well-to-do suburban families, some of them wearing Cartier bracelets along with their keffiyehs and masks — seem more than anything to crave belonging.

 

At the Columbia encampment, breaking the chatter in the background, a Muslim call to prayer rang out. As if on cue, a gaggle of white students — mostly women, as has been the case at these protests for reasons yet to be explained — gathered around, gazing reverently at the worshipers. They saw people who believed something and saw what was missing from their lives.