EVANSTON, Ill. (CN) — Students and staff at Northwestern University launched a campus protest in solidarity with Palestine on Thursday, joining a nationwide student movement that began last week at New York City’s Columbia University.
As at Columbia and numerous other universities, the Northwestern protestors opposed the United States’ ongoing material and political support of Israel despite mounting accusations that Israeli forces in Gaza have committed war crimes.
The protestors began occupying Northwestern’s Deering Meadow green space around 7 a.m. Thursday morning, even as University President Michael Schill publicly accused them of violating a brand new campus prohibition on “tent encampments.”
The university only alerted the community to the tent ban around 9:20 a.m. — more than two hours after they had already begun to set up in Deering Meadow and faced conflict with campus police. In response, some faculty joined their students, forming human chains and successfully resisting the police’s attempts to remove them.
Police abandoned their efforts to clear the space around 12:30 p.m., with several of the protestors’ tents still standing. Legal watchers from the National Lawyers Guild said no one was arrested. One speaker at the center of the encampment called for the attendees to stay in the park at least into Friday.
“Stay here overnight, bring your tents,” they said. “Make sure they know, this is not going away.”
By mid-afternoon, the atmosphere had become more relaxed. Attendees sat on blankets and discussed politics, beat drums, flew kites, hung protest signs and listened as organizers intermittently gave speeches and led chants. On the road abutting Deering Meadow, cars honked in support as they drove by.
Around 3 p.m., the protestors celebrated that Northwestern’s Associated Student Government had passed the “Northwestern People’s Resolution” in a 20-2 vote on Wednesday evening, which calls for the university to cut ties with any companies or institutions that the authors say support apartheid in Israel. The resolution gathered over 2,200 signatures before going to the student government.
Anti-Zionist Jewish students had a prominent place in the protest, with several individuals wearing shirts emblazoned with shirts that read “Jews against genocide” and “Jews for Palestine.”
“As Jews, many of us still feel the legacy of the Holocaust … and now Israel is doing the same thing in Palestine,” one such speaker said while addressing the crowd. “We reject that our identity, our religion has been used to support a settler-colonialist state.”
The Northwest Hillel Jewish student association on campus, however, issued a statement condemning the protest on social media. It argued it reflected “a disturbing and quickly escalating trend of antisemitic rhetoric and actions both nationally and on our own campus.”
A smaller number of Israel supporters also stood on the outskirts of the protest. The camps largely left each other alone until shortly after 6 p.m., when a physical fight briefly broke out.
Press gathered outside the quad’s fence, though multiple students declined to speak with Courthouse News. Some cited fear of retaliation by the university.
One protest attendee who was not a student but nevertheless had deep ties to Northwestern University did speak with Courthouse News, saying Israel’s actions over the last six months had forced her to reevaluate her view of the conflict.
“I once thought this was a conflict where the Israelis had their case and the Palestinians had theirs,” said Diane Thodos, an Evanston resident whose father George Thodos once taught chemical engineering at Northwestern. “But since… Netanyahu came in, it’s been so extreme that I’ve had to rethink my stance on Israel and what it stands for.”
She also compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Ottoman genocide of Greeks and Armenians during and after World War I, which said had impacted her family.
“When you see the images of children being slaughtered, or the fact that a child could be the only survivor of a family of 14 or more … It’s like a culture-cide and a genocide at the same time,” she said.
This past week Palestinian civil authorities announced they had uncovered mass grave of nearly 400 people including children, some possibly tortured, near the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza. Another Israeli attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah reportedly killed 22 people, including 18 children, over the weekend. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed a bill approving an additional $26 billion in aid for Israel.