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 stood on the outskirts of the protest throughout the day. The camps largely left each other alone until shortly after 6 p.m., when a physical fight briefly broke out.
Press were gathered outside the quad's fence much of the day, though multiple students declined to speak with Courthouse News. Some cited fear of retaliation by the university.
One student organizer who did offer comment near sunset, going by Sully, said they were impressed by how the protest had grown over the past several hours. They reiterated that the students planned to maintain the Deering Meadow encampment until Northwestern agreed to the demands for divestment outlined in the People's Resolution.
"Those demands have been developed over many weeks by multiple groups ... By no means are we just a couple of scrubs here," they said.
Sully also said they were not surprised at the new restrictions imposed by the university that morning.
"The specific restrictions are absolutely targeted at our encampment," they said. "All I can really say is that it doesn't shock me."
One protest attendee who was not a student but nevertheless had deep ties to Northwestern University also spoke 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's not alone. According to a CBS / YouGov survey conducted earlier this month, Americans' approval of Israel, the country's actions in Gaza, and the Biden administration's handling of the conflict have all fallen since last October.
Though 77% of Americans still sympathize at least somewhat with Israel, according to the poll, that figure is down from 84% in October. And the percentage of Americans who said they support Israel "a lot" has dropped from 51% in October to 38% now. Only 32% of Democrats still support the U.S. sending Israel weapons, compared to 47% in October, and across party lines, approval of Biden's handling of the situation has dropped from 44% to 33%.
Thodos put a point on it by comparing Israel's actions in Gaza to the Ottoman genocide of Greeks and Armenians during and after World War I, which she 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 graves of nearly 400 people near the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza. They said they found children among the dead and that some of the bodies showed signs of torture, though many details remain unclear and the Israeli Defense Force has denied any suggestion of burying Palestinian bodies in mass graves. An Israeli attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah which the IDF did not dispute reportedly killed 22 people, including 18 children, over the weekend.
On Wednesday President Joe Biden signed a bill approving an additional $26 billion in Israel-related spending, with roughly $17 billion meant to support Israel militarily and the remaining $9 billion earmarked for humanitarian aid in Gaza and elsewhere.
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