At Columbia, Israel-Gaza tensions simmer as leaders face House hearing

NEW YORK — Most days, the iron gates to Columbia University are wide open, with students hurrying to class along the brick walkways and tossing Frisbees on the lawns. But on a recent afternoon, security officers watched as people scanned their school IDs to get in: An unauthorized protest was about to happen.

Inside, a phalanx of students suddenly appeared alongside the school’s administration building, marching in black with kaffiyehs covering their faces. Another masked group appeared on the other side, descending the stairs. Soon protesters were massed at the center of campus, holding signs with messages such as “GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA.”

Xavier Westergaard, a doctoral candidate in biology, walked through the pro-Palestinian group wearing a yarmulke evoking the bright blue and white of Israel’s flag, sat down facing the protesters, and began reading psalms aloud.

A few tried to drown out the rally with a bullhorn. An Israeli professor kept demanding that university officials monitoring the event explain why it wasn’t being shut down. The campus had been warned that students could be disciplined for attending the unauthorized demonstration. Some had just been suspended for a previous event. But protesters kept coming.

“We will honor all the martyrs!” a tightly masked speaker called out. Protesters spoke of the deadly bombing of a hospital in Gaza, and — using a phrase heard by some as a Palestinian rallying cry and by others as an outright call to annihilate Israel — chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Six months after the Hamas attack, tensions over the Israel-Gaza war remain raw on college campuses, and administrators continue to face questions over their responses to protests such as this one. At Columbia, a school with a long history of student activism, some are asking whether the school is now censoring and stifling freedom of expression — or has repeatedly failed to protect vulnerable students from hatred.

On Wednesday, focus on what’s happening on the campus will intensify as Columbia President Minouche Shafik will face questions from lawmakers about whether the university has done enough to combat antisemitism. Like three other university presidents before her — all women, all relatively new to the role — she has been summoned to testify before a congressional committee.

At the previous hearing, the legalistic responses of the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — including when they declined to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate campus policies — outraged many and sharpened distrust of academia, especially on the political right. And it effectively toppled the presidencies of two Ivy League universities: Within weeks, Penn and Harvard’s presidents had resigned.

At a time of intense polarization, university leaders across the country are trying to strike a delicate balance to protect their academic mission: To allow people to speak their minds without harming others, and to cultivate listening as well as shouting.

Shafik declined a request for an interview. “Columbia is committed to combating antisemitism,” a university spokesperson said, “and we welcome the opportunity to discuss our work to protect and support Jewish students and keep our community safe.”

Tensions on campus

At Columbia, Israel-Gaza tensions simmer as leaders face House hearing

At Columbia, protests are far less frequent than they were immediately after the war began, and are confined by new rules. But they can still be hostile, pitting student against student. Some say there have been improvements to the campus culture this semester. Others say divisions are hardening, and rhetoric is becoming more extreme. Lawsuits have been filed against the university by both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. The Education Department has an open investigation.

It’s intense, said Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus of the Columbia Journalism School, one of three faculty members leading an antisemitism task force that has held listening sessions and made an initial set of recommendations. Issues from all over the world end up on campus, he said. “But this particular issue has a unique ability to raise the temperature way past the boiling point more than any other.”

The tensions extend far beyond Columbia. A study of thousands of college students by the University of Chicago found that, in surveys conducted in December and January, 56 percent of Jewish college students, 52 percent of Muslim college students and 16 percent of other college students felt they were in personal danger — suggesting that 2 to 3 million U.S. students have been living in fear.

At Yale University, students supporting Palestinians and divestment from weapons companies launched a hunger strike this weekend. Vanderbilt University expelled and suspended students earlier this month after a protest. The Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University was vandalized.

At Columbia in recent years, debate over Israel and Palestine has included divestment campaigns, calls for the university to end partnerships in Tel Aviv, student government votes, and faculty letters and petitions on opposing sides.

But the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ferocity of Israel’s response in Gaza ignited demonstrations that immediately felt all-consuming and very personal for some, further dividing groups of students, faculty and others, multiple people on campus said.

A lawsuit filed earlier this year against Columbia and Barnard College argues that Columbia enforces policies to avoid protecting Jewish and Israeli students from harassment, and hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda. Barnard is both an independent educational institution and a college of Columbia.

David M. Schizer, a professor of law and economics who is helping to lead the antisemitism task force, said Columbia has mostly been exceptionally welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students and all others — but there have been challenges, and those were exacerbated by the war. In one case, Schizer said, a

law student, who wears a yarmulke and is supportive of Israel, was observing a pro-Palestinian protest when someone spit on him, Schizer said. When he began to leave, Schizer said others at the protest began taunting him, saying things such as, “You bomb hospitals,” “You kill babies,” and, “Tell your Israelis we’re coming for you.”

Several students said that some student clubs — even for dance and activities unrelated to the conflict in the Middle East — had become unwelcoming for Jewish and Israeli students as broad alliances formed backing Palestinian groups.

What’s happening in Gaza is a tragedy, Westergaard said, and people should be able to debate Israeli policies. But using phrases such as “Death to the Zionist state,” or advocating for the destruction of any country is barbaric, he said.

Jonny Rosen, a junior from Baltimore whose grandmother survived the Holocaust, said he sometimes tries to talk with pro-Palestinian protesters, like when they chant “intifada,” to ask if they know the history of the word.

But most refuse to interact, he said, when they see his yarmulke. “It really feeds into the polarization on campus,” he said. “How can anyone grow or learn, if we’re not having conversations?”

Some pro-Palestinian students said people on the opposing side are misunderstanding or distorting their views, as when they call them antisemitic for criticizing Israel.

Layla Saliba, a student from North Carolina studying social work, said she has been accused of being part of Hamas. “I would rather not engage with people who call me a terrorist,” said Saliba, who’s a Palestinian Christian. She said some Zionist students laughed at an event when she was describing her families’ bodies being pulled from the rubble.

She also said students are quick to take support for Palestinians as a personal attack. “No. I don’t want to attack you. I don’t want to do anything to you,” she said. “I just want the bombing to stop.”

Others on campus are alarmed by what they see as dangerous incursions into academic freedom, even censorship.

“There’s an enormous amount of pressure being exerted on presidents, not just President Shafik, but other presidents,” said David B. Lurie, an associate professor of Japanese history and literature at Columbia, “from people who would really like to see student speech and faculty speech constricted, as far as it applies to the ongoing conflict. So we’re at a very dangerous time.”

Lurie is president of the school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which has registered alarm at what the organization sees as violations of academic freedom since the war began.

Last month, the New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal filed a lawsuit against Columbia, saying the university’s decision this fall to suspend two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, was unlawful.

“I was only here for a year prior to this madness,” said Maryam Alwan, an organizer with Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a plaintiff in the case. “That’s been enough time to see the complete erosion of democracy, free speech, even my own sense of belonging and safety as a Palestinian student in the past six months.”

There’s a lot of external pressure on the university, she said, from donors and from politicians, to discipline pro-Palestinian students and activism.

In a note to the campus after the recent protest, Shafik wrote, “I did not become a university president to punish students.” But she said several students had been suspended as the university investigates an event held in campus housing that the university had barred, with outside speakers known to support terrorism and promote violence.

“I want to make clear that it is absolutely unacceptable for any member of this community to promote the use of terror or violence,” Shafik said.

A pro-Palestinian student who said she had received an interim suspension and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by the university, said she was told to leave her student housing within 24 hours. She said lawyers had volunteered to help, and hundreds of student activists were taking shifts to prevent them from being forced out.

The student alleged the suspensions were an empty spectacle designed to provide cover for Shafik when she testifies at the House hearing.

“This has nothing to do with Jewish safety,” she said. “Because when it comes to anti-Zionist Jews who demonstrate with us, who organize with us, Columbia does not care for their safety and actually enables violence, targeting and repression against them.”

The Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism issued its first report last month, suggesting stricter enforcement of existing rules to allow demonstrations in certain central spaces but to keep them from disrupting classrooms or dorms. It also suggested separating competing protests, and stopping them as they occurred, if necessary, rather than imposing discipline later. The recommendations, they wrote, could also help efforts to combat other types of bigotry, including anti-Arab bias and Islamophobia.

In February, the university implemented interim rules for demonstrations that included a requirement of two days’ notice, prohibition on protests in academic spaces and consequences for violations.

The task force is part of a broader university-wide effort to foster more civil, academic debates. It’s great to be in a setting where students can learn from people coming from different experiences, Tejasri Vijayakumar, Columbia College student body president, said, “but it’s not always going to feel comfortable, you know?” The war has been so personal and so traumatic for many on campus, she said, that it can be helpful to step back. “Let’s bring this back to the classroom a little bit.”

While students routinely come together without incident, as at a spring music festival earlier this month, fault lines can be thrown suddenly into stark relief. At the recent protest, after speeches punctuated by protesters drumming, blowing horns and banging pots together, pro-Palestinian protesters abruptly began to march away from the school’s central Sundial directly past Jewish and Israeli students. Rosen said the move made him nervous; his mind flashed to the idea that they might form a sort of wall around them.

A few counterprotesters, waving an Israeli and an American flag, kept taunting the crowd. “Free, free Palestine,” a student chanted sardonically, “ — from Hamas!”

During a protest in support of Palestinians, a student dressed in white posed on a pedestal as though she were a campus statue, holding a Palestinian flag.

Students kept their faces masked during a protest in support of Palestinians. The university’s president later said officials were in the process of identifying participants in the unauthorized protest, and that they would face discipline.

As the protest moved toward academic buildings, a university official handed papers to marchers warning that they were violating campus rules. Some fluttered to the ground as people refused to take them, or dropped them in disdain.

Marchers made a loop around the Morningside campus, chanting and waving signs. They slapped “ISRAEL BOMBS” stickers onto surfaces as they went, including a bronze sculpture of a lion, Columbia’s mascot. Rosen followed, at a distance, listening.

A Palestinian student approached him. He began by telling Rosen he was sorry if he had lost anyone on Oct. 7.

Rosen said he agrees with much of what has been said about the loss of innocent lives in Gaza. The other student told Rosen he wouldn’t chant for intifada because of the history of that word, which Rosen appreciated. As they spoke, there was understanding of the complexities. There was disagreement, especially about Israeli military strategies. The two of them sat down, joined by a few other students. The protest marched on.

“I was more interested,” Rosen said, “in having a conversation with him.”