Dozens of George Mason University students and other community members, many wearing face masks, kaffiyehs, sunglasses, and all-black clothing, blasted rap music, pumped their fists, and chanted, “They got tanks, we got hang gliders! Glory to the resistance fighters!”
The demonstration in Fairfax, Va., on Thursday afternoon, which grew to close to 100 people, was one of many “Day of Resistance” campus protests organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine in the days since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Many of the protests turned emotional and heated.
The Neutrality Debate
Just a handful of college presidents have issued statements, a marked break from past politically fraught events, and renewing a debate on when academic leaders should or should not speak out.
A demonstration outside the gates of the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College resulted in a shouting match across metal barricades between hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters and counterprotesters.
Columbia University closed its campus to the public on Thursday in preparation for protests following an alleged assault of a 24-year-old Israeli student, who was reportedly beaten with a stick after hanging up fliers featuring photos of Israeli hostages outside the campus library.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about 300 protesters clashed with about a dozen counterprotesters, according to reporting from The Daily Tar Heel.
Police reportedly escorted away a person who shouted “Nazis” at the Palestinian supporters, according to the campus newspaper’s post on the social-media platform X.
And at the University of Washington, in Seattle, a video went viral of Jewish students sobbing outside a protest.
“How is this allowed?” one student pleaded to a man in a suit who appeared to be comforting the group. “They want our people dead. They want us killed.”
The George Mason protest, which took place at its Roger Wilkins Plaza, was mostly peaceful.
Speakers from several student organizations, including the Native American and Indigenous Alliance and the Young Democratic Socialists, said the attacks against Israeli civilians were justified and a direct result of the Israeli government’s oppression of people in occupied Palestinian territory.
Protesters held cardboard signs with slogans like “The secret to freedom is resistance” and “Self defense is not a crime.” Some waved Palestinian flags while others draped them around their shoulders.
“Free, free Palestine,” protesters at one point sang.
Several protesters handed out masks to students who joined the crowd late and advised against speaking to any journalists or the handful of counterprotesters, who yelled, “Go Israel!” and “Free the hostages!”
“Palestinian students, pro-Palestinian students are under attack on every single campus right now,” one protester, who declined to give their name, told the group. “They’re slandering us, attacking us, painting us in a disgusting and vile narrative simply because we want our people to live. Because we want our people to break out of an open-air prison after 15 years, 16 years, almost 17 years.”
Ten organizations on Thursday, including the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, sent a warning to more than 500 college presidents, urging them to protect Jewish students by enacting extra security measures, providing mental and emotional support to students, and condemning “rhetoric by any individuals or student groups on your campus that celebrates or in any way excuses or justifies this violence.”
To Adam Lehman, the president and chief executive of Hillel International, the protests organized by the SJP are “unthinkable.” They create a hostile environment for students, especially those who are Jewish and Israeli, who could face harassment and violence while already experiencing mental stress as a result of the war, he said.
“We’re calling on university administrations to take the steps they need to enforce in creating a campus climate that is supportive of Jewish students in this moment and supportive of all students who should not be subjected at this time to that kind of vitriolic attack,” Lehman said in an interview.
Late Thursday, the national SJP issued a statement that in part demanded that “university administrations protect all students on campus exercising their constitutional right to speak, assemble, and protest.”
“The same voices that call for the protection of Jewish students must call for the same protections to be extended to the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students who have faced nothing but aggression and harassment by their peers, professors, and administrators,” the statement reads.
