Northwestern Student Files Complaint Over Israel ‘Checkpoint’ Protest
Guarded: Students at the University of California, Berkeley stage a mock Israeli checkpoint in protest of Israeli policies. Image by Joel Siegal
A Northwestern University student filed a harassment complaint over a campus demonstration that attempted to simulate Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
As part of their “Israeli Apartheid Week,” Northwestern’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter staged an event featuring demonstrators in camouflage mean to represent the Israel Defense Forces scrutinizing students on their knees meant to represent Palestinians, according to the Daily Northwestern.
An unnamed male sophomore undergraduate filed a harassment and verbal assault complaint for the event’s “bias against race and religion,” the Daily Northwestern reported.
The male student videotaped part of the event as an observer. After refusing a pamphlet from one of the event’s participants, he said that he was going to send the video to his friend in the IDF.
In response, one demonstrator said “You’re sending it to killers, great.”
The pro-Palestinian student group collaborated with MECha de Northwestern, the school’s Mexican students organization, to draw what the organizations see as parallels between how Mexican immigrants are treated on the United States’ borders and how Palestinians are treated on Israel’s borders.
“Not only did we intend to show the suffering that occurs, but we also intended to show the intersections of the two struggles,” senior and SJP member Imtisal Khokher told the Daily Northwestern. “Both peoples are subject to the same surveillance, the same racial profiling both here and in the state of Israel.”
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