College students are already protesting — and getting arrested — over Israel this semester
An aerial view of Michigan Stadium as the sun rises on the University of Michigan campus. (University of Michigan/Flickr)
(JTA) — University of Michigan security broke up a pro-Palestinian student “die-in” demonstration Wednesday and police arrested four people, in the latest sign that campus activism across the country is resuming as the fall semester begins.
None of the four people arrested were students, a university spokesperson told press. One is a temporary university employee. At least one arrested protester got into a physical altercation with police, according to the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper.
The protest was backed by a pro-Palestinian student coalition that includes the university’s chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and was staged during a popular outdoor showcase for fall student activities. Members of the collective claimed on Instagram that one student had been arrested and later released.
Many universities, including Michigan, have said they will enforce rules surrounding demonstrations more assertively this term. The school agreed to change its enforcement policies after the U.S. Department of Education determined that it had violated the civil rights of its Jewish students by not doing a better job disciplining protesters. Jewish and free-speech groups had also expressed concern that the demonstrations, and subsequent mass arrests, created a hostile environment on campuses in the spring.
But in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, groups pushing for divestment from Israel have also returned to campus determined to continue their activism.
The evening before the arrests, Michigan’s student government tentatively passed a budget for fall student activities after its student body president was elected on a platform of denying funding to all student groups until the university divests from Israel.
The scene at Michigan was the most striking example of volatile campus protests returning with the start of classes, but other campuses have also already encountered controversy surrounding Israel and Gaza. A pro-Palestinian flyer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology referenced the Mapping Project, a website targeting Boston-area Jewish institutions that has been condemned as antisemitic by a host of Jewish groups and politicians. The project has also been disavowed by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
The incident prompted condemnation from MIT’s Jewish president, Sally Kornbluth. Kornbluth faced intense blowback last year over antisemitism at MIT but has held onto her job.
“I believe the Mapping Project promotes antisemitism,” Kornbluth wrote in a letter to students this week. She added, “I have heard from students who felt the flyers sent the message that they are not welcome at MIT. Do we really want to draw lines on Day One and risk making any of our newest students question whether they belong here?”
And on the first day of classes at Cornell University on Monday, around 150 protesters staged a demonstration against Israel in a campus dining hall. They unfurled signs reading “If Not Now, When?” in Hebrew, a reference to a famous quote by Hillel, an ancient Jewish sage. At one point the protesters were joined by unionized university employees striking over pay. No arrests were made, but the university condemned spray-painted blood on an administrative building.
Some schools, including Harvard, preemptively warned their students this week against participating in disruptive protests. Yet even at schools that have taken extra steps to gird their campuses against unrest, a fresh round of protests is still expected.
At a consortium of California universities, pro-Palestinian activists have planned a coordinated action Thursday. A masked protest group at Pomona College, a private school near Los Angeles, shut down its school’s convocation Tuesday. The event was switched to streaming; no arrests were made, despite the school warning ahead of time that violators of its mask ban would be disciplined.
New kinds of student protests seem designed to flaunt their school’s restrictions: After a federal judge ruled that a university can’t allow protesters to restrict Jewish students’ movement through campus, student protesters at Sonoma State University set up fake Israeli “checkpoints” and blocked student access through campus.
Conservative political pushback to the protests is also mobilizing again. This week 24 Republican state attorneys general warned Brown University not to move forward with a plan to vote on divestment from Israel in October, saying that it could lead to the states cutting off all business with Brown in accordance with their laws against boycotting Israel. Brown had agreed to the vote as part of negotiations with its pro-Palestinian encampment movement in the spring.
Some campuses that were hotbeds of protest last year have so far remained relatively calm. At Columbia University and Barnard College in New York City, where students have begun moving in but classes have not yet begun, small groups of activists offered leaflets denouncing Israel to passersby on Broadway, the city street separating the campuses, but staged no protests on Thursday. Both campuses are closed to people unaffiliated with the schools to mute the effect of outsiders on activism there.
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