Nearly all Gaza campus protests in the US have been peaceful, study finds

Protesters at a pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia University in New York, on 26 April 2024. Photograph: Jimin Kim/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

An independent non-profit that tracks political violence and political protests around the world found that 97% of campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza that have taken place in the US since mid-April have been peaceful.

An analysis of 553 US campus demonstrations nationwide between 18 April and 3 May found that fewer than 20 resulted in any serious interpersonal violence or property damage, according to statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Acled).

Over the same period, Acled documented at least 70 instances of forceful police intervention against US campus protests, which includes the arrest of demonstrators and the use of physical dispersal tactics, including chemical agents, batons and other kinds of physical force.

Nearly half of the campus protests that Acled categorized as violent involved protesters fighting with law enforcement during a police intervention, according to the group’s data.

Protest encampments in solidarity with Gaza have popped up on college campuses across the US since April, with students voicing a variety of demands, including calls on universities to publicly support a ceasefire in Gaza, divest from Israeli companies and companies that supply Israel’s military, and end ties with Israeli universities. The protests have inspired similar actions across the UK and Europe, as well as in India and Lebanon.

Since 18 April, when 108 students were arrested at Columbia University, the administrators of many schools have called in law enforcement to forcibly remove the encampments, resulting in more than 2,600 arrests across more than 50 US campuses, according to an ongoing tally by the Associated Press.

University leaders have said that student protesters are disrupting campus life, jeopardising student safety, creating “a harassing and intimidating environment”, and, in the words of the University of Southern California president Carol Folt, “spiraling in a dangerous direction”.

Joe Biden has also criticized the campus protests, warning that “dissent must never lead to disorder” and that “violent protest is not protected”.

“Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations–none of this is a peaceful protest,” the US president said on 2 May. “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest.”

Acled’s analysis of more than 550 campus protests through 3 May found two instances of property damage serious enough to disqualify the demonstration as peaceful: protesters at Portland State University who shattered glass and damaged furniture and computers during their occupation of a campus library, and protesters at Columbia University who broke windows during their occupation at a campus building, both on 30 April.

“We don’t consider graffiti or spray paint to be enough property destruction to be indicative of a violent demonstration,” said Kieran Doyle, Acled’s North America research manager.

Acled defines peaceful protests as ones without serious physical violence or property damage, Doyle said. Its bar for categorising a demonstration as violent includes “physical violence that rises above pushing or shoving” or property destruction that involves “breaking a window or worse”, he said.

By that definition, the vast majority of recent US campus protests have remained peaceful.

Among the 3% of US campus protests through 3 May that Acled did categorize as violent, only a handful involved physical violence between pro-Palestinie protesters and counter-protesters or other bystanders, rather than property damage or confrontations with police.

In the most prominent incident of violence at campus protests so far, a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was attacked by a group of masked counter-demonstrators who tried to tear down the encampment and assaulted camped out students with projectiles, fireworks and chemical agents. Both groups clashed for hours, while law enforcement officials retreated or failed to intervene. The late-night attack at UCLA followed two previous instances of less serious violence at UCLA, according to Acled’s data, including reports of demonstrators on different sides “trading punches” on 28 April.

Other violent incidents at campus protests included a 1 May “skirmish” between protesters and pro-Israel counter-protesters at UC Berkeley over someone grabbing an Israeli flag, which resulted in minor injuries; and two early May incidents, one in Portland and one in St Louis, that involved violent confrontations between motorists and demonstrators.

Behind the 3%

Much of the public criticism of pro-Palestinian student protests in the US has focused not on physical violence, but on the rhetoric used by protesters, including fierce debates over when criticism of the Israeli government or Israel crosses the line into antisemitism and hate speech, and how much the protests have affected Jewish students’ feelings of safety on campus.

The chaotic week ending 3 May, which involved law enforcement crackdowns at universities across the country, sparked new debates over whether violent police interventions were an appropriate response to campus student protests.

Nearly half of the 3% of campus protests that Acled categorized as violent became violent because of demonstrators fighting with the police sent in to clear protest encampments. That included incidents at the University of Texas, Austin on 24 April; at Emerson College in Boston on 25 April; at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on 26 April; at Washington University in St Louis on 27 April, when campus officials said that three police officers were injured, including one who had a “severe concussion”, and another who broke a finger; and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on 1 May, when a state trooper was reportedly injured after being hit on the head with a skateboard.

Acled’s US protest statistics are based on its research team’s analysis of hundreds of local news outlets, independent news journalists and verified social media accounts, said Doyle, Acled’s North America research manager. The data sets are updated with new information as it emerges, and the numbers are reviewed for consistency by a separate methodology team. Analysis for whether a few recent campus incidents should be classified violent is still ongoing, Doyle said.

A previous Acled report, published on 2 May and based on protest data through 26 April, found that 99% of student-involved protests had been peaceful.

Looking across all Israel-Gaza war protests in the US since 7 October, Acled found that police have intervened forcefully against unopposed pro-Palestinian demonstrations involving students roughly five times as often as they have intervened against unopposed pro-Israel demonstrations involving students, according to updated data through 3 May. (This statistic is based on the percentage of protests of each kind at which police forcefully intervened, not the total number of protests.)

Since 18 April, police have not intervened against any unopposed pro-Israel demonstrations on university campuses, according to Acled’s data.