Students from George Washington and a number of other universities across the D.C. area set up tents on the University Yard early Thursday to protest the Israel-Hamas war and the university’s financial ties to Israel. The protest swelled into the hundreds as the day progressed and more students, faculty, and community activists arrived, along with fewer than a dozen counterprotesters, as the demonstration stretched into its second day.
Metropolitan Police Department and GWPD officers have been patrolling the area and setting up barricades. Despite a warning from GW administrators that protesters must clear the area by 7 p.m. Thursday, no arrests have been made as of Friday afternoon.
GW told students and other protesters Friday afternoon that they could face suspension and be “administratively barred” from campus if they remained on the Yard. “Their presence and conduct in University Yard have been and continue to be in violation of several university policies and are considered trespassing,” the statement says.
The demonstration comes as students across the country, including at Columbia, Yale, and New York Universities, have set up similar encampments. Some students have been arrested during those demonstrations as they protest their own universities’ financial stake in the conflict and aim to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Protesters at the GW encampment are demanding the university divest from companies sending technology and weapons to Israel, sever academic ties with the country, and drop the administrative charges against students with the group Students for Justice in Palestine. The demand list also includes increased financial transparency, according to a statement posted by one of the groups organizing the protest, DMV Students for Justice in Palestine. Larger goals include a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
The post also cites the recent discovery of mass graves in Gaza as a catalyst for the protest.
“The encampment is an unauthorized use of university space and violates several university policies,” GW’s director of media relations Kathleen Fackelmann wrote in an email Thursday. “The university and MPD are continuing to work in coordination to determine how to best address the situation and ensure student compliance with those policies.”
Tensions between protesters and the university administration and police began to rise Friday morning, as GW police set up barricades separating students in the encampment and all other protesters, media who weren’t already in the encampment, and passersby.
As MPD and GW officers walked in and out of the encampment, protesters often directed chants toward them, including “We want justice, you say how? Cops off our campus now” and “We know you’re Israeli trained”—a reference to the fact that some MPD officers have received training from the Israeli military.
Ben Zinevich, 27, who joined the protest Thursday as part of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, says that arrests on other campuses have failed to deter students and have even galvanized the movement.
“I think we’ve seen across the country that arrests and further interaction with the police has only emboldened young people at this moment,” he says.
Laila N, a Palestinian American woman who attended the protest to show support for the protesters and the people of Gaza, believes that putting pressure on the U.S. is key to ending the violence.
“I think the only thing standing between the safety of Palestinians right now and harm is the U.S. government,” says Laila, who declined to share her full name. “We keep sending 2,000-pound dumb bombs to drop on one of the most densely populated regions in the world. It’s just a very, very cruel cycle of violence.”
A small number of counterprotesters gathered near the larger rally and held a flag that appeared to be half Israeli and half American.
Although the protest was peaceful, tensions began to rise from interactions between opposing groups, as well as different interpretations of the meaning behind various chants.
Richard Li, one of a handful of students holding the flag, believes that chants calling for intifada and those saying, “We don’t want no two states, we want ’48,” were fundamentally antisemitic.
“They don’t even want to recognize [that] the Jewish people have a right to live in their homeland,” he says.
Li is not Jewish himself, but he empathizes with the plight of the Jewish people because of his own life experiences.
“I am a Christian who fled from communist China when I was 12,” Li says. “I’ve felt what it’s like to be … forced to flee from a country. Whereas my Jewish friends, they’ve fled from so many countries, and they’ve been so persecuted in the last 2,000 years.”
Erica Caines and Bree Hemphill, activists with the organization Black Alliance for Peace who attended the protest in solidarity with students, see the slogan differently.
Caines says that the “’48” was a reference to the year 1948, which is when the Nakba happened, which refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“They are speaking to a time when this land belonged to them, when they were not forcefully removed and unable to return,” Caines says. “This is a question of land, this is a question of colonization, not a question of antisemitism.”
Avery, a Jewish GW student participating in the encampment who declined to give her last name, says that she did not feel the chants were antisemitic or feel threatened. She notes that one of the several speakers throughout the demonstration asked students to raise their hands if they were Jewish, asked if they felt safe, and thanked them for their participation.
“It feels very empowering to have a Jewish community in this setting,” Avery says.
“If people are worried about making students feel unsafe, Jewish students feeling unsafe, they should consider the rates at which Jewish students have been arrested at Columbia and elsewhere,” Zinevich says, adding that there is “a new generation of Jewish students who are not Zionist, but are consistently written out of the narrative.”
Many protesters say they saw the fight for Palestinian liberation as connected with other conflicts around the globe, including in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and Haiti.
Caines says that the Black Alliance for Peace was also there in part for their day of action for Haiti.
“And we showed up here not only in support of Palestine but to make those connections between what’s happening in Haiti and what’s happening in Palestine,” she says. “It’s all a question of land, sovereignty, self-determination.”
Julia Keane, 28, a D.C.-area resident who has photographed similar demonstrations, says that the solidarity and community support these protests have elicited are heartwarming.
“It was really beautiful to be able to see that within a matter of hours, we were able to support everybody with enough food,” Keane says. “It just shows that like when this community sends out the call, like, people answer it.”