In a video shared widely online, a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement at Columbia University stands near the center of a lawn on the campus and calls out, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”
Dozens of protesters, who have created a tent village called the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” repeat his words back to him: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”
“Walk and take a step forward,” the leader says, as the students continue to repeat his every utterance, “so that we can start to push them out of the camp.”
The protesters link arms and march in formation toward three Jewish students who have come inside the encampment.
“It was really scary because we had like 75 people quickly gathered around, encircling us, doing exactly what he said to do,” Avi Weinberg, one of the Jewish students, said in an interview. He and his friends had gone to see the encampment, not intending to provoke, he said. When it began to feel tense, one of the students started to record the encounter. They are not sure precisely how the protest leader determined they were supportive of Israel.
“Suddenly we are being called ‘the Zionists’ in their encampment,” Mr. Weinberg said. “He put a target on our back.”
On Thursday, the incident took on new significance when a video from January resurfaced on social media showing the same protest leader, Khymani James, saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
The next day, Columbia officials announced they had barred Mr. James from campus.
Columbia has been ground zero in a national student movement against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, with protesters setting up encampments on campuses across the country. Hundreds of demonstrators — at Columbia, Yale, Emerson College, the University of Southern California and beyond — have been arrested.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the country say Israel is committing what they see as genocide against the Palestinian people, and they aim to keep a spotlight on the suffering. But some Jewish students who support Israel and what they see as its right to defend itself against Hamas say the protests have made them afraid to walk freely on campus. They hear denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising as an attack on Jews themselves.
The tension goes to the heart of a question that has touched off debate among observers and critics of the protests: At what point does pro-Palestinian political speech in a time of war cross the line into the type of antisemitism colleges have vowed to combat?
If this is a matter that has vexed political leaders, university administrators and some Jewish college students, inside the encampments the very notion of antisemitism is barely discussed, in part because the demonstrators do not believe the label applies to their activism. Protest leaders point to the involvement of Jewish student activists and challenge the idea that the comfort of Israel’s supporters should be a concern.
And they draw a distinction between anti-Zionism, which describes opposition to the Jewish state of Israel, and hatred toward Jewish people in general. It is an argument many Jews see as a fig leaf for bigotry.
In a letter to Columbia students last week, university officials made clear the challenge they are facing. “We know that many of you feel threatened by the atmosphere and the language being used and have had to leave campus,” they wrote. “That is unacceptable.”
They continued, “Chants, signs, taunts and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable.”
The protests beyond New York City have been inspired by the Columbia students, but they are largely diffuse, spreading via social media much like other recent movements, including Black Lives Matter and the Arab Spring.
At Columbia, the demonstration is led by a group known as CUAD — Columbia University Apartheid Divest — a coalition representing more than 100 Columbia student organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Leadership is amorphous. The organizers communicate on the Telegram messaging app and provide media training to the activists they make available to speak to the press.
It is unclear what financial support the group receives, and from whom. When asked, one student leader declined to comment.
But supporters from across New York have responded to the group’s Instagram pleas for water, blankets, gloves and cigarettes. Last week, Palestine Legal, an advocacy group, filed a federal civil rights complaint on behalf of the protesters, arguing that they have been subjected to anti-Palestinian and anti-Islamic harassment on campus.
Student demonstrators are specifically calling for their universities to make transparent all financial holdings and divest from companies and funds they say are profiting from or supporting Israel and its government’s policies. They also want “amnesty” for students and faculty who have been disciplined by the university as a result of their protest.
At Columbia, students are also calling on the university to end its five-year-old dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University. Some also object to the presence on the university board of Jeh Johnson, who served as homeland security secretary during the Obama administration and sits on the board of Lockheed Martin, a supplier of fighter jets to the Israel Defense Force.
Mr. Johnson declined to comment.
At encampments around the country, signs also point to the broader politics of many of the protesters. They support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which predates the war in Gaza. The students invoke historical issues of colonialism and apartheid.
Student activists who are not themselves Palestinian say that they have joined the movement for a wide variety of reasons: anguish over a humanitarian crisis in Gaza; a rebuke of university and police response to protests; a commitment to intersectional justice where any group’s fight should be everyone’s fight; the idealistic desire to be a part of a community effort; and a sense that the fight for Palestinians is a continuation of the work started on behalf of oppressed people during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Many Jewish students taking part in the current protests say they are doing so as an expression of their Jewish values that emphasize social justice and equality. Encampments have hosted Shabbat dinners and Passover seders. At Columbia, one student said that donors have supplied kosher meals.
Samuel Law, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin who is Jewish and involved in the protests, was inspired by the encampments popping up around the country. “I strongly believe that the university should be there for us to care about what we care about,” he said.
‘They don’t feel safe’
Outside the pro-Palestinian encampments, the movement has drawn accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry and harassment — from political leaders as well as from some students, Jewish and not.
Jimmy Hayward, a Columbia freshman who is not Jewish, said that he has many friends studying at the Columbia-affiliated Jewish Theological Seminary who are unnerved. “I have friends in JTS that need to be walked to campus,” he said. “They want me to walk them because they don’t feel safe walking alone.”
Signs in and around the Columbia encampment include inspirational quotes, including “The world belongs to the people, and the future belongs to us,” attributed to Jiang Qing, a Chinese communist revolutionary. But there are also celebrations of violence, like “Whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite and not one of us.”
At the University of Michigan, some Jewish students said they felt rattled as they walked to class passing by protesters chanting, “Long live the intifada,” using the word for “uprising” in Arabic, which has been used to describe periods of often violent protests by Palestinians against Israelis.
Tessa Veksler, a Jewish student at the University of California Santa Barbara was alarmed to see, at the school’s multicultural center, a sign on the door to a student lounge that said, “Zionist Not Allowed.”
Campus protesters dispute the notion that their movement has made pro-Israel students unsafe.
Nas Issa, a Columbia graduate who is supporting and advising protest organizers, sees a difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling that you are in danger — “especially if you feel that your identity is tied to the practices of a particular state or to a political ideology.”
“That can be personally affecting and I think that’s understandable,” said Ms. Issa, who is Palestinian. “But I think the conflation between that and safety — it can be a bit misleading.”
When pressed, the protesters say they are anti-Zionist but not antisemitic.
It is not a distinction everyone buys.
“Let’s take any other ethnic or religious minority,” said Eden Yadegar, a junior at Columbia. “Would you only accept them if they were willing to denounce an integral part of their religious or ethnic identity? The answer is absolutely not. So how come it’s OK to say, you know, we accept Jews, but only if you denounce your religious and social and ethnic connection to your homeland? It’s ridiculous.”
Last Tuesday afternoon, Isidore Karten, an Israeli Jew, hopped a fence and entered the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia.
“I think it’s super important to go and show our side also,” said Mr. Karten, a 2022 Columbia graduate. “We should be allowed to be there as much as anyone else.”
Once inside, he unfurled an Israeli flag. A friend who had come with him toted a poster showing the faces and names of Israelis who were kidnapped into Gaza by Hamas on Oct. 7.
As they did, they were trailed by pro-Palestinian protesters holding a large black sheet to keep journalists from seeing them and the flag.
A few students, Mr. Karten said, chanted, “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”
And as he tried to talk with the demonstrators, he said, his efforts were blocked by protest leaders.
One of them was Khymani James, the student who was later barred from campus for his incendiary video. “We don’t engage with Zionists,” he said, according to Mr. Karten.
‘A wake-up call’
Mr. James’s video, which was publicized by a right-wing outlet on Thursday, drew wide attention, including from President Biden, whose spokesman issued a statement saying, “These dangerous, appalling statements turn the stomach and should serve as a wake-up call.”
Others cautioned not to use the words of one activist to define a much larger group.
The Rev. Michael McBride, a founder of Black Church PAC, who has pressed for a cease-fire in Gaza, said Mr. James’s comments were not representative of the antiwar movement.
“You can go to a protest and find anything you’re looking for,” said the Rev. McBride, who leads a church in Berkeley, Calif. “If you’re looking for that, then you’ll find it.”
At Columbia, the CUAD student protest organization on Friday posted a statement on Instagram that said, “Khymani’s words in January do not reflect his view, our values, nor the encampment’s community agreements.” The statement added, “In the same way some of us were once Zionists and are now anti-Zionists, we believe unlearning is always possible.”
But for university administrators, Mr. James’s case has presented a serious challenge.
He made some of his comments about killing Zionists — including that “taking someone’s life in certain case scenarios is necessary and better for the overall world” — during a college disciplinary hearing in January.
But he was not barred from campus until the January video began to spread last week. A notification sent to Mr. James by the university and shared with The New York Times by one of his friends described it as an “interim suspension.” Mr. James, who said in a statement last week that his words were “wrong,” could not be reached for comment.
“When leadership learned of the video, it took immediate steps to ban James from campus,” a Columbia spokesman said this weekend. “We initiated disciplinary proceedings which encompass this and additional potential violations of university policies.”
It is not clear whether the Columbia administrator conducting the disciplinary hearing alerted a superior or public safety official to Mr. James’s remarks at the time — or whether Columbia policy dictated that the administrator should have.
A spokesman for the university declined to comment further.
The episode left Avi Weinberg, the pro-Israel student who was surrounded by Mr. James and other protesters at the encampment, distressed. “The university was aware that this is his mind-set, and the university put their students in danger,” he said. “That is very present on my mind.”
Eryn Davis, Neelam Bohra, Katie Glueck, Stephanie Saul, Olivia Bensimon and Karla Marie Sanford contributed reporting.
