How a Columbia U student sees the Gaza war protests

Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD student at Columbia U, wrote a long essay, arguing that the protests against the Gaza war are being badly distorted and described as acts of antisemitism, which he claims is untrue:

I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being 

Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’

Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety

“Reprehensible and dangerous.” “Terrorist sympathizers.” “It’s not 1938 Berlin. It’s 2024, Columbia University, NYC.”

The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different. As a Jewish student at Columbia, it depresses me that I have to correct the record and explain what the real risk to our safety looks like. I still can't quite believe how the events on campus over the past few days have been so cynically and hysterically misrepresented by the media and by our elected representatives.

Last week, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition, representing more than 100 student organizations, including Jewish groups, organized the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, a peaceful campus protest in solidarity with Palestine. CUAD was reactivated after the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace in the fall. On Wednesday morning, hundreds of students camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn. They vowed to stay put until the university divests from companies that profit from their ties to Israel. Protesters prayed, chanted, ate pizza, and condemned the university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Though counter-protesters waved Israeli flags near the encampment, the campus remained largely calm from my vantage point.

Columbia responded by imposing a miniature police state. Just over a day after the encampment was formed, university President Minouche Shafik asked and authorized the New York Police Department to clear the lawn and load 108 students – including a number of Jewish students – onto Department of Corrections buses to be held at NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. One Jewish student told me that she and her fellow protesters were restrained in zip-tie handcuffs for eight hours and held in cells where they shared a toilet without privacy. The NYPD chief of patrol John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety. I saw politicians compare student organizers to neo-Nazis and call for a National Guard deployment, apparently ignorant of the lives lost at Kent State and in Charlottesville, and with very little pushback from national media. This is a repulsive form of self-aggrandizement that I can only assume is intended to preserve relationships with influential donors. Calls to more heavily police our campus actively endanger Jewish students, and threaten the regular operations of the university far more gravely than peaceful protests.

It’s true, the fact that CUAD organizers fundamentally reject bigotry and hate has not stopped unrelated actors from exploiting opportunities to shamefully harass Jewish students with grotesque or antisemitic statements. I condemn antisemitism – which should seem obvious since I have experienced it many times myself. (This likely won’t keep controversial Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai from calling me a kapo.) But the often off-campus actions of a few unaffiliated individuals simply do not characterize this disciplined student campaign. The efforts to connect these offensive but relatively isolated incidents to the broader pro-Palestinian protest movement mirror a wider strategy to delegitimize all criticism of Israel.

As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewish prayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.

.... a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.
 

I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine.

When I posted Thoughts about the pro-Palestine protest at Columbia University two days ago, I got some sharp criticism for not diving deep enough into the sources of information that alleged antisemitism b y the protesters. My big mistake was not wanting to give my email out to a source, Jewish Insider, that required it to read the article. I found out this morning that I was partly mistaken about the email. Anyway, I just blew it off and cited some allegedly antisemitic rhetoric that allegedly came from the protestors. It didn’t come from protesters. It came from outside infiltrators.

It was pointed out to me that the source of one bit of alleged antisemitism by protesters, Chants from protesters of "Go back to Poland", was basically made up. It was a lie. This is what Jewish Insider actually wrote:

After Saturday night’s widespread antisemitic harassment on campus, several Jewish Columbia students said they felt afraid for their safety for the first time.

“[Saturday night] was an absolute breaking point and the first time people were truly afraid,” Eliana Goldin, a third-year political science major, told Jewish Insider. “My friends and I saw [non-Columbia students] sneak onto campus through a gap in the fence and we were verbally harassed, and some of my friends were physically assaulted. Public safety and NYPD did not help us. We were essentially stalked and followed as we tried to leave the escalating situation.”

According to Goldin, the physical assaults included assailants slapping a Jewish student, another pouring water on several students and others attempting to grab Israeli flags and run away with them.

“They yelled at us to go back to Poland, that we have no culture and chanted, ‘Strike strike Tel Aviv,” Goldin recalled. “My rabbi’s decision to tell everyone to stay away from campus was the right decision,” she said of Buechler’s statement, “because last night proved that the NYPD isn’t capable of protecting us… the environment here is openly hostile and possibly dangerous.”

Well, there it is. Right out in the open. The antisemitism was not coming from Columbia student protesters. It was coming from thugs, maybe antisemitic (maybe not), who snuck onto campus and harassed Jewish students.

That same Jewish Insider source in my post of two days ago was also cited for most of the rest of the allegedly antisemitic rhetoric. 

One reliable source that was cited, the BBC reported rhetoric "echoing that of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the recent massacre against the Jewish people, is despicable." Is that necessarily antisemitic? 

Some people see the phrase or chant, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, as profoundly antisemitic. Others see it as a call for Palestinian liberation and dignity, in view of the lack of freedoms Palestinians have in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In short, the meaning ultimately depends on the speaker, listener, and context. 

Is it possible that the protesting students are not knowingly antisemitic and protesting what they see as genocide in Gaza and American complicity in it? Is the student who wrote this essay, Mr. Ben-Menachem, a cynical liar? He claims to be a Jew who was present and saw no antisemitism among the protestors. What reason would he have for lying? 

Q: Is Germaine a fool for even trying to figure out what is really going on here?