Police escort Lee Roberts, interim chancellor of the University of North Carolina, through a crowd of protesters to restore an American flag to a pole at the center of campus. Photo by Heather Diehl/The Daily Tarheel

By Arno Rosenfeld May 2, 2024

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The coalition concerned about campus antisemitism spans from liberal Jews concerned about hostile rhetoric at protests to ultra-conservatives with little connection to the Jewish community who are seizing on an opportunity to push their longstanding critiques of elite institutions of higher education.

But on college campuses themselves, most of the students who have been actively opposing the Gaza solidarity encampments and demonstrating in defense of Israel are young Jews, a generally liberal group.

A new campus coalition

That’s why I was struck by what happened at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, early Tuesday morning. Before dawn, riot police raided a tent encampment at the center of campus, detaining dozens of students and barricading the lawn.

A few hours later, hundreds of students pulled down the barricades and took down the enormous American flag flying at the center of the area, replacing it with a Palestinian one.

That act seemed to shake something loose at the school, where I’d been just a few days before, reporting on how the war had changed the campus climate.

Police charged the crowd using pepper spray and regained control of the flagpole, escorting Lee Roberts, a Republican banker who is serving as the school’s interim chancellor, to march in and restore the U.S. flag.

Jacob Ginn, a Jewish graduate student who helped organize the tent encampment with Students for Justice in Palestine, described the scene to me: “In the first row, you have police trying to clear and attack — punching people and throwing them to the ground — and behind them is the chancellor with this group of Zionists carrying the Israeli flag, these right-wing people carrying the American flag and then some fraternity brothers.”

After Roberts had hoisted the Stars and Stripes, he stopped to pose for photos and shake hands with a supportive crowd who had been chanting “USA, USA” and singing the national anthem.

“That flag will stand here as long as I am chancellor,” Roberts said. He then pledged to keep Jews safe and, according to the student newspaper, walked away when asked about his message for Palestinian students.

Arrests and violence mount

There has been a lot written these last few weeks about how the student uprisings around the country, and especially at Columbia University, compare to the anti-war sit-in protests on campuses in the late 1960s. An antecedent for the counterdemonstrators of today can be found as well: In 1968, student athletes at Columbia formed a barricade to prevent people from delivering food to the activists occupying campus buildings.

Conservative students teaming up with pro-Israel Jews, as we saw at UNC, comes as more than 2,000 demonstrators have been arrested on campuses over the last three weeks, according to news reports.

Protesters at the tent encampments, who have occupied buildings on campuses including Columbia and Cal Poly Humboldt, also seem to be encountering violence from counterprotesters. Ginn told me that before police retook the flagpole, a man rushed into the crowd of protesters and grabbed a student by the neck. My colleague Louis Keene bravely reported overnight Tuesday from the University of California, Los Angeles, where someone fired an exploding firework into the center of the protesters’ encampment.

Such assaults, and the police involvement, in some cases appear to only embolden the protesters. The North Carolina protesters had camped peacefully around the flagpole for days, but after several were arrested, they began throwing water at officials and breaking through police lines to tear the flag down. Police and school officials said that one protester arrested at the University of South Florida and at least one at the University of Texas were carrying guns.

At 3 a.m. Wednesday, as UCLA’s tent encampment was under siege by counterprotesters, the editors of the Daily Bruin — which has sought to cover the war’s repercussions with scrupulous neutrality for months — posted a desperate appeal decrying the lack of police protection.“Laser pointers flashing into the encampment. People in masks waving strobe lights. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Violent beatings,” the editorial board wrote. “Will someone have to die on our campus tonight?”

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