Police kept the peace and did not allow the demonstrators into the venue where the former Israeli prime minister spoke.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Some 200 anti-Israel activists protested outside an event held with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett at Columbia University in New York Tuesday.
The school’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC) co-organized the demonstration, which was held on the street outside the school’s gates.
They advertised it only to their followers on Instagram while telling them to “minimize discussing this event with others,” according to the university’s newspaper, which said it had obtained a copy of the email.
“It is our duty to ensure that war criminals and genociders [sic] never feel welcomed on our campus, despite invitations from groups such as Hillel,” the social media post said.
Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs’ (SIPA) Institute of Global Politics, Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life and Columbia/Barnard Hillel had co-hosted the event, in which SIPA’s dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, interviewed Bennett.
Dozens of police separated the pro-Palestinian group, many of whom covered their faces with masks or keffiyehs to avoid identification, from a smaller, pro-Israel counter-demonstration.
They did not allow any protestors into the venue where Bennett appeared and no violence was reported from the scene, although at one point a protestor “lunged at a counterprotester carrying a banner that read ‘Unapologetic Zionist,’” the Columbia Spectator reported, before backing away.
The demonstrators, who gathered outside different schools belonging to Columbia at various points of the two-hour protest, hung a banner near its law school calling Bennett a “war criminal” that was quickly removed, and chanted slogans to divest from Israel and “Free Palestine.”
One held a placard calling Zionists “the evil of the world” who “are not Jews and not humans.”
It was unclear how many in the crowd actually attended Columbia institutions.
A few members of Neturei Karta, a virulently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox group who were certainly not students, joined the group with signs saying “Judaism Condemns the State of ‘Israel’ and its atrocities.”
The administration told the school paper that it had been prepared to keep the campus safe and to immediately enforce “policies to prevent discrimination or the targeting of our community members in any form.”
Columbia University has been excoriated over the last year for failing to protect its Jewish students from virulently anti-Israel protestors who assaulted them both physically and verbally, both in class and on campus, as well as from antisemitic teachers and other staff.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened a Title VI investigation due to the accusations of blatant and illegal discrimination against Jewish students, and on Monday, the Trump administration said it was considering stopping more than $50 million in federal contracts with the university over its “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.”
