Student Organizers Must Learn From The Nightmare At Columbia

This week, as Jews worldwide gather around the Seder table to celebrate the first nights of Passover, college campuses are closing their gates and moving their classes online in response to — and in anticipation of — vitriol and violence toward Jewish students during pro-Palestine demonstrations.

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

WOL’s membership isn’t exactly full of social-justice-oriented peaceniks. Their stances are openly pro-violence, and their protests have been consistently attended by several “activists” who pleaded guilty to violent antisemitic hate crimes. Saadah Masoud, a prominent WOL protester and repeat antisemitic hate-crime offender, upon being arrested for assaulting a Jewish man at a rally, said to detectives, “All this for one Jew?”

I’m sure he’s “just an anti-Zionist,” though.

With people like this organizing on and around campus and actively collaborating with my classmates, I would not feel safe to wear my Star of David, much less to openly share my views, regardless of their content.

The situation on Columbia’s campus is far more severe than the antisemitic incidents we have seen thus far at Harvard, but I worry that similar circumstances could soon make their way to Cambridge. Such a threat warrants urgent reflection from our campus’ organizers.

Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

Here, two truths can exist at once. The decision to arrest students in the encampment by Columbia’s president was an overreach of police power and did no good for campus tensions. Still, many student organizers, including at Columbia, have lost their way and are damaging their movement.

If organizers on Harvard’s campus want to be an effective force for a just future for Palestinians, they must take careful note.

As the war continues, too many students are succumbing to vitriol, disdain, and manichaean ideologies. At best, these organizing approaches fail to move past loose theoretical language about settler-colonialism and liberation. At worst, they come across as condoning mass violence and calling for the elimination of Jews from the region.

The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

On our campuses, we have the unique privilege of astoundingly diverse and intelligent student bodies. Our goals are best served when we treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.

Pro-Palestine student organizers must commit to these values. Otherwise, they risk repeats of the failures at Columbia, undermining their movement and making their Jewish peers unsafe in the process.

Matthew E. Nekritz ’25, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Cabot House.