Campus comrades: Anti-Israel tent cities and mass protests spring up at elite — and pricey — colleges across US
The inflammatory anti-Israel protests that have engulfed Columbia University are metastasizing — spreading to other elite schools and to campuses around the country as more pampered students join the bandwagon.
One of the biggest protests outside Columbia was at Yale University, and it was met with force on Monday morning.
Riot gear-glad cops rushed the Ivy League campus in New Haven, Connecticut — arresting at least 47 protesters who refused to disperse after warnings from cops.
The crackdown followed a weekend anti-Israel rally in which a Jewish student journalist covering the encampment was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag.
More than 150 demonstrators have been busted for trespassing in recent days as cops clash with protesters who have pitched campsites on campus quads from Michigan to Massachusetts.
At Columbia University, which has come under increasing fire for being unwilling or incapable of thwarting demonstrators intent on occupying the school’s West Lawn, 114 protesters were detained Thursday after Columbia president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD.
However the protesters were back out in force at the New York City campus less than 24 hours later.
There are now more than 200 protesters camping out in dozens of tents.
Harvard University, whose former president Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace in January after becoming embroiled in an antisemitism scandal, has taken preemptive steps to stay out of the fray this time around, announcing Harvard Yard would be closed all week in anticipation of anti-Israel protests, according to the Harvard Crimson.
However, the movement at Columbia appears to have inspired numerous other “solidarity demonstrations”– all with student protesters erecting ramshackle encampments and occupying university buildings and campuses, declaring them “liberated zones.”
At The New School in Manhattan, anti-Israel students took over a university lobby on Sunday at the Union Square campus, setting up tents and displaying signs and banners demanding the private research university begin “refusing collaboration” with the NYPD, protect anti-Israel professors and “enact an academic boycott of the genocidal Zionist apartheid state.”
A call to assemble was posted on the New School Students for Justice in Palestine Instagram group, along with posts expressing support for “our fellow comrades” at Columbia University.
The progressive liberal arts school costs $54,000, plus another $30,000 for books room and board, according to US Department of Education data.
Meanwhile, similar tent cities were erected in front of the NYU Stern School of Business Monday morning, as students called for the school to divest from the Jewish state and pushed for an end to the conflict in Gaza.
Students waved flags on the streets and sidewalks outside the downtown Manhattan university, others hanging signs to “honor the martyrs of Palestine.”
NYU’s business school — which is named after Jewish billionaire Leonard N. Stern, whose family fled Germany in the 1920s — costs more than $60,000 per year, with another $18,000 for housing.
Similar encampments started springing up in Boston Sunday, where students at MIT, Tufts University and Emerson College joined in the fledgling uprising.
In an interview with NBC 10 Boston, Emerson student Dylan Young called the protest “an ongoing occupation” and vowed “we will be continuing to hold down this territory.”
“This has taken hundreds of people to put together,” he boasted to the station.
At Emerson, a large gathering of Students for Justice in Palestine set up tents blocking Boyleston Place Alley, a public right-of-way that includes access to the state transportation center as well as the college.
No arrests were reported as of Monday afternoon, but in a letter to students sent Sunday evening Emerson College president Jay Bernhardt warned them to refrain from engaging in “bigotry or hatred in any form.”
“We encourage thoughtful dialogue and meaningful expression but will not tolerate actions threatening safety, operations, or education access,” his letter reads in part.
In a post on X Sunday night, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctoral student Francesca Riccio-Ackerman announced that “the students and workers of MIT” had established “the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment” on MIT’s Kresge Lawn.
Students put up tents and laid a massive blue tarp over the grass, displaying signs reading “Liberated Zone” and “Gazan kids were not born to die.”
“MIT has received OVER $11 MILLION in research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel since 2015…. We will NOT REST until MIT cuts research ties with the Israeli military,” Riccio-Ackerman wrote.
One of the most prestigious schools in the country, an MIT education doesn’t come cheaply, running $83,000 per-year all-in.
On Monday afternoon, a note to Jewish students on campus informed them that MIT’s Passover Seder — marking the beginning of the Jewish holiday — had been moved to a different location to avoid the students having to cross through the tent protest area.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the pro-terror protests at colleges across the US:
- Tear gas sprayed at UCLA encampment as cops face off with anti-Israel protesters wielding fire extinguishers
- Stanford submits ‘deeply disturbing’ photo of campus anti-Israel protester wearing Hamas headband to FBI
- Iranian college offers free tuition to US students expelled for participating in anti-Israel protests: ‘Our people’
- MAP: US colleges where students have been arrested over anti-Israel protests
Just outside of Boston in Medford, Massachusetts, a small group of students created a similar encampment on the campus of Tufts University consisting of about seven tents, calling for divestment from “Israeli apartheid,” according to CBS.
In a statement to WBZ-TV, Tufts spokesman Patrick Collins said the university vowed to “hold accountable any community members who engage in conduct that violates university policy.”
Collins simultaneously threw cold water on the student activists’ goals when he made the university’s position crystal clear: “We do not support the (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.”
On Friday, students at University of North Carolina set up tents, lawn chairs and blankets on the grounds of the school’s Chapel Hill campus, playing music and chanting “in both English and Arabic,” according to the Daily Tar Heel.
During the demonstration, chants of “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” rang out through the quad, which was festooned with red, green, black and white streamers — the colors of the Palestinian flag.
According to the publication, university administrators warned the group around 2 p.m. that their tents violated fire and safety codes and would have to come down.
In response, students defiantly lifted their tents and placed them on chairs so they would no longer be touching the grass.
However, less than an hour later the tents came down and the crowd dispersed without incident as police began to line the campus.
In Ann Arbor, anti-Israel student demonstrators occupied a large portion of the University of Michigan’s central portion known as “the Diag” early Monday.
The protests was organized by the TAHRIR Coalition, a cohort of more than 80 pro-Palestinian student organizations, according to Michigan Daily.
Rackham Graduate School student Shreya Chowdhary told the outlet the encampment was “an act of solidarity with other student organizers across the country, from Columbia, to UNC Chapel Hill.”
It’s a national movement we’re participating in to demonstrate that students across the United States are not going to stand for our universities funding genocide and profiteering from genocide.”
The group issued a press release, demanding the university “come and talk to us and negotiate with us.” They further accused the school administration of “consistently demonstrating” a willingness to “repress” pro-Palestine protests more often than those supporting other causes.
Four students holding up Israeli flags planted themselves in front of a banner reading “intifada” — a reference to the Palestinian uprisings against Israel in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israeli civilians.
Ryan Silberfein, who chairs the university’s Hillel Governing Board, told the Michigan Daily that she took issue with the group’s use of the word.
“We want to be here to block out the word intifada because that is a big trigger word for a lot of Jewish and Israeli students,” she said.
“It means violence. It means uprising. A lot of our family and friends were killed in Israel on purpose in terror attacks. And so personally, I have a problem with that word.”
Silberfein said she and her small band of pro-Israel counter-demonstrators were there “to show other Jewish and Israeli students that they also have a community on this campus, and having to walk by something as upsetting as this, they should be able to see that.”
Back in the Empire State, House Republican conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik was joined Monday by every New York House GOP lawmaker in demanding Columbia president Minouche Shafik immediately resign her post after failing to crack down “a large unauthorized antisemitic riot” that has embroiled the Ivy League campus for the better part of a week.
“It is time for Columbia University to turn the page on this shameful chapter. This can only be done through the restoration of order and your prompt resignation,” Stefanik and the nine other Republican representatives from the Empire State wrote in a letter exclusively obtained by The Post.
