Explainers

How the Israel-Hamas war left US campuses in an uproar

From Harvard to Stanford and Columbia University, campuses in the United States are witnessing bitter face-offs between supporters of Israel and Palestine. Experts say polarisation and social media has deepened the divide and that universities are in a tough spot

FP Explainers Last Updated:October 17, 2023 18:10:33 IST

Pro-Israel demonstrators gather at Columbia University in New York. AP

At the best of times, college campuses in the United States are places where spirited debates take place – or are supposed to at least – over the topics of the day.

Now, with Israel and Hamas at war, students on both sides of the religious divide have dug in.

Let’s take a closer look at how US campuses are in an uproar over the Israel-Hamas war:

Related Articles

Many Jewish students and their allies, some with family and friends in Israel, have demanded bold reckonings and strong condemnation after the attacks by Hamas militants, who stormed from the blockaded Gaza Strip into nearby Israeli towns, killing and abducting civilians and soldiers.

Meanwhile, some Muslim students have joined with allies to call for a recognition of decades of suffering by Palestinians in Gaza, plus condemnation of the response by Israel.

Prominent alumni lambasted a joint student group statement calling Israel “entirely responsible” for the war.

The statement was cosigned by a few dozen other student organizations.

The university president later clarified that the groups did not represent the school’s position.

On Tuesday, the names and personal information of students allegedly involved were posted online and on Wednesday a billboard truck displaying that information was driven around campus, the Harvard Crimson newspaper reported.

Accuracy in Media, a conservative group, arranged for the billboard truck to drive around campus showing the faces of students associated with the groups.

It called the students “Harvard’s leading anti-Semites.”

Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who is Jewish, was critical of university leadership for appearing “at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.”

“In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” Summers said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

At least one student had a job offer rescinded as a result of the statement.

A day later Harvard president Claudine Gay condemned “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and said that while students have the right to speak out, “no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

Summers joined the university’s Hillel student group later in the week in opposing efforts to “vilify,” as he put it, signers of the anti-Israel statement.

“Such intimidation is counterproductive to the education that needs to take place on our campus at this difficult time,” Harvard Hillel said.

Some critics of the pro-Palestinian letter responded by denouncing the intimidation of students, the newspaper said.

Another notable example is Columbia University which last week saw two groups of hundreds of students face off in duelling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

University officials had to block public access to the New York City campus as a safety measure.

Supporters of Palestinians, many of whom wore face masks to hide their identities, held signs in a grassy area near a library that read “Free Palestine” and “To Exist is to Resist.”

Palestinian supporter Darializa Avila Chevalier told The Guardian, “It’s about standing with the people of Gaza, and reminding the world that these are humans who deserve to live in dignity, to deserve to live free from occupation, free from colonial brutality, free from the violence that Israel constantly is constantly throwing at them.”

“Since Saturday, a little over 1,500 people have already died in Gaza, and a third of them are children. And yet that level of violence against Palestinians is very rarely discussed. Entire families have been killed.”

“No one wants violence, right? What people who are engaging in these protests are trying to get across is that this violence didn’t start five days ago, this violence started with Israeli occupation of Palestine,” she added.

Some students were angry that a statement from the university president did not go far enough to acknowledge Palestinian deaths.

“Clearly we’re all against violence, but we’re just asking for the lives of Palestinians to be acknowledged as well,” said Nadia Ali, who demonstrated alongside hundreds of peers.

Many were dressed in the green, red and black of the Palestinian flag and wearing medical face masks.

Across the Manhattan campus’ main lawn, demonstrators draped themselves in the blue-and-white Israeli flag and held prayer and song circles.

A Jewish student who gave his name as Yoni told The Guardian, “They want to kill us all. The pictures you see here of the dead are only a beginning. They do not believe we have the right to live otherwise why do they not come and mourn our dead with us?”

One demonstrator, Yola Ashkenazie, said some Jewish students feel unsafe: “The rise in anti-Semitism on our campus has been abhorrent.”

“Jewish students are afraid,” added David Hidary, a 20-year-old physics major, who attended the Columbia protest with an Israeli flag draped over his shoulders.

A day earlier, a 19-year-old woman was charged with assaulting a student in a dispute over posters bearing the names and images of hostages being held by Hamas.

In a sign of the tensions, some counter-protesters at Columbia shouted angrily at the pro-Palestinian group. During a moment of silence for Palestinian victims, an opposing protester yelled out that they should be honouring children murdered by Hamas.

Several masked speakers at the pro-Palestine rally declined to reveal their full names, with one saying they did not feel safe enough on campus to disclose their identity. Many faulted the university for not expressing more support for Palestinian students and the people of Gaza.

A public health student at Columbia told The Guardian, “The multiple emails from every single president of every single college, being in support of Israel and not even acknowledging lives lost of Palestinians – this is why I’m here”

“Especially in [the school of] public health, you would think because they work with human rights and they work for the public, they would be supportive of people losing lives across the world.”

Radhika Sainath, a staff attorney at US-based advocacy group Palestine Legal, told NPR, “People are just really, really scared right now at universities and across the country, especially students and professors are really worried about what they are able to say.”

Tensions sparked anew at campuses on Thursday as the national group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) declared a “day of resistance,” with demonstrations by its 200 chapters at colleges across North America.

The national group, which advocates for an independent Palestine and says on its website that it promotes “an agenda grounded in freedom, solidarity, equality, safety and historical justice,” called the 7 October attack by Hamas “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organisation fighting antisemitism, wrote a letter to college presidents warning that Students for Justice in Palestine was “condoning terrorism by Hamas by repackaging it as justified acts of ‘resistance’” with its planned day of action.

The University of Arizona, Tucson chapter of SJP canceled a protest on Thursday, citing safety concerns after the school’s president said the national group’s statement “endorsing the actions of Hamas” was “antithetical to our university’s values.”

Dozens of students from the University of California Los Angeles chapter of SJP held a march for Palestine on Thursday, despite the group’s report that its student members had been harassed and assaulted over the last several days, including while counter-protesting a pro-Israel rally.

At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the SJP chapter chose to host a vigil on Thursday night but declined to allow media access “due to increased harassment and threats of violence against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and anti-Zionist students across the country.”

At Yale University, “Free Palestine” messages were written in chalk around campus one night. The following night, some students put up posters of Israelis taken hostage with the word “Kidnapped.”

There was also controversy over social media posts by a professor of American studies, Zareena Grewal, who wrote after the Hamas attack:

A petition circulated demanding her removal – Grewal has not responded to a request for comment.

In a statement, the university said it “is committed to freedom of expression” and Grewal’s comments on personal accounts “represent her own views.”

Eytan Israel, a 21-year-old sophomore, said that response fell short.

“Just seeing that, and Yale not doing anything, does feel like a betrayal, even if the statements they’ve been making have been supportive,” said Israel, who is Jewish.

Worse, the campus climate may only become more tense in coming days.

Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas in retribution for the deadliest attack by Palestinian militants in Israeli history.

Meanwhile, college administrators are grappling with how to keep campuses secure and denounce the violence in West Asia  without wading too deeply into a supercharged political and historical dispute that affects Jewish and Palestinian students personally.

However, despite being on opposing sides, the students agree on one matter – that their colleges, which are increasingly staking out positions of neutrality, have not done enough to support them.

College officials, already under pressure to allow conservative opinions on campus, have been trying to preserve free speech and open debate. But the conflict has presented an excruciating challenge.

“This is an incredibly difficult free speech moment on campuses, where both sides have deeply passionate, entrenched, intractable views,” said Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is recommending that colleges try to remain institutionally neutral.

“We want to create an ideal climate for debate and discussion on campus, and the only way we can do that is if we step out of the debate,” Morey said.

 Yet staying neutral is not always easy. Students for whom the conflict is intensely personal want their administrations to recognize how they are affected by traumatic events and use their stature to denounce what they see as moral wrongs.

On Monday, officials at the California school said they were “deeply saddened and horrified by the death and human suffering” in Israel and Gaza and hoped for “thoughtful opportunities for sharing knowledge” on campus.

In response, dozens of faculty signed a letter demanding “unambiguous condemnation” of the Hamas attacks.

On Wednesday, Stanford sent an “update” explaining its position on neutrality.

Faculty and students “should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future,” college officials said.

The letter from interim president Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez did note an incident in which a lecturer reportedly singled out Jewish students in an undergraduate class, asked them to stand in a corner and told the room that was what Israel does to the Palestinians.

The lecturer also reportedly called an Israeli student a colonizer.

The incident is under investigation and the lecturer has been removed, Saller and Martinez said. “Academic freedom,” they said, “does not permit identity-based targeting of students.”

Radhika Sainath, a staff attorney at US-based advocacy group Palestine Legal, told NPR, “People are just really, really scared right now at universities and across the country, especially students and professors are really worried about what they are able to say.”

What do experts say?

That there are myriad reasons for such a divide.

As Zachary Lockman, a professor at New York University, told the BBC, “There is a growing gulf, but I think that gulf represents what’s going on in Israel and Palestine.”

Lockman, who offers a course on the history and politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, said he has seen numerous such debates for years.

He blames “deepening polarisation, and very little common ground” for the split. He also blamed the social media ‘either with us or against us’ mentality.

Lockman also pointed to trends like left-wing groups embracing the Palestinian cause – which they equate to America’s own quest for racial and social justice – and against Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Lockman said Israeli government sceptics likely view Israel and its settlements through the prism of colonialism. Meanwhile, younger people are also likelier to take a grimmer view of Israel compared to the elder folk.

The divide extends to politics as well with Democrats and Republicans more likely to emphathise with the Palestinian and Israeli causes, Lockman told BBC.

Amy Spitalnick, leader of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, agrees.

However, this time it feels more volatile and polarizing, Spitalnick, the president of the Hillel student group at Tufts University, where she graduated in 2008.

She says when she was a student, “there was real disagreement but it was done constructively.”

Today, much like US politics, the Israel-Hamas war has become a divisive, “us-versus-them” issue, she added.

“It shouldn’t be hard to support Palestinian rights and dignity … while still condemning what Hamas did to Israeli civilians,” Spitalnick said.

“The fact that there are some who refuse to do that has been a heartbreaking, mask-off moment for many in the Jewish community who expected more.”

Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at civil liberties nonprofit FIRE, told NPR that universities are in a tough spot.

Morey recommended that they say something on the lines of: “We are a university that plays host to these debates of issues that are of incredible importance. We are not going to put our thumb on the scale as the university one way or another because that will chill the environment for free expression, for scholarly inquiry.”

Morey added that university leaders can also help students in other ways.

“The best thing they can do when these divisive issues come up is do their university thing,” she added.

“That’s what they do best: Host these debates, have students come together in a way that is constructive and in a way that students feel like they have a place to be heard and that the debate can go on in a scholarly, civil way.”

But Hussam Ayloush, CEO of the California branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, takes a different tack.

Ayloush said that talking politics is inevitably sensitive on campuses with diverse populations.

“Don’t be selective about which lives are more valued than others. Every innocent life is important. Do it accurately, so we’re not just commenting on actions but we’re also commenting on … the root causes of the actions,” he said, pointing to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during decades of conflict.

With inputs from agencies