Except for the flickering police vans idling around Columbia University on a recent evening, the campus was almost the picture of an Ivy League idyll, with students striding past classical architecture in their autumnal best, clasping coffee cups.
Yet the conspicuously beefed-up security presence was one sign that all is not well at Columbia. Since the Israel-Hamas war began last month, fierce debates about the conflict and the US’s response have riven the university, with students clashing in dueling statements, rallies, and occasional physical confrontations. Hundreds of faculty members have also gotten involved.
The situation is acrimonious and shows no signs of abating: a rightwing, pro-Israel group has deployed a truck near campus with an electronic billboard exposing the identities of students that the group deems “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites”; a 19-year-old was charged with a hate crime after allegedly beating with a stick a student putting up a poster of an Israeli hostage held by Hamas; a swastika was found drawn in a bathroom; students wearing keffiyehs or hijabs have reportedly been harassed; and an unnamed Columbia administrative officer told a campus radio reporter, during a rally, that he hoped pro-Palestinian protesters would “die”.
The latest “war of words”, in the phrasing of one open letter, began not long after the bloody 7 October rampage in which Hamas and other armed groups killed 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and took about 240 hostage. After officials at Columbia and its affiliated women’s college, Barnard, emailed students messages of concern that some students regarded as ignoring Palestinian suffering, groups of students and faculty began publishing a flurry of competing statements.
Both sides believe that the university administration is not taking their point of view – or concerns for their physical safety – seriously. Pro-Palestinian students walked out of a class taught by Hillary Clinton to protest what they view as the university’s pro-Israel bias; in contrast, some Jewish alumni, who have accused the university of being insufficiently sensitive to antisemitism, have begun posting pictures online of their diplomas flipped upside-down.
Similar controversies have divided universities across the country, but the discourse at Columbia has been so vociferous that it has even reached Israel. The comedy show Eretz Nehederet (“A Wonderful Country”), Israel’s answer to Saturday Night Live, did a recent sketch mocking an American college called Columbia Untisemity. In the somewhat strained segment, two naive, radical-chic US students with blue and pink hair brag about their support for LGBTQH rights (“H?” “Hamas”), then interview a Hamas guerrilla in an underground tunnel, whose hatred the students keep mistaking for mutual admiration: invited to visit America, he responds: “Yes, it will be a blast.”
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On 9 October, the deans of different Columbia colleges and departments began issuing statements about the crisis in Israel-Palestine. Columbia’s undergraduate liberal arts college lamented “the horrific acts of violence and loss of life” in both Israel and Gaza. Palestinian officials report that Israel’s counter-attack has so far killed as many as 10,000 Palestinians, many of them children.
But messages sent by the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of General Studies did not mention Palestinians at all, and when the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, tried to salve the situation, she fanned the flames further. “I am appalled and saddened to see antisemitism and anti-Zionism spreading throughout Barnard and Columbia,” she wrote, in an email which some students accused of equating legitimate protest with hatred of Jews.
The day after a pro-Palestinian activist allegedly assaulted a student hanging a poster, hundreds of students participated in simultaneous, dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies. A nervous Columbia University administration closed the campus to the public.
Around this time more than 20 student groups at Columbia endorsed a statement, “Oppression Breeds Resistance”, which acknowledged “tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but declared that “there can be no future of safety and freedom for all Israelis and Palestinians without holding the Israeli occupation accountable for its actions and putting an end to the untenable status quo of Israel’s apartheid and colonial system”.
The statement’s signatories were subjected to what they describe as harassment and retaliation. Students “have had to get lawyers, they have been afraid to go to class, and they have faced physical and verbal attacks”, one undergraduate student who wished to remain anonymous said, adding that the reprisals had backfired: “[W]e are seeing pro-Palestinian activism and education spreading throughout campus on its own to an unprecedented degree.”
The temperature on campus continued to rise. On 21 October, the president of LionLez, a campus club for lesbian and nonbinary students, became embroiled in controversy after she advertised an event with the message “It’s FREE PALESTINE over here. Zionists aren’t invited”, and then, in a leaked email defending her earlier message, wrote, “white Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” “WHEN I SAY THE HOLOCAUST WASN’T SPECIAL, I MEAN THAT,” and “Israelites are the Nazis”.
Days later, a number of left-leaning and pro-Palestinian faculty members, concerned at the treatment of pro-Palestinian students who signed the earlier joint statement, published an open letter “in Defense of Robust Debate About the History and Meaning of the War in Israel/Gaza”.
“We write now to express grave concerns about how some of our students are being viciously targeted with doxing, public shaming, surveillance by members of our community, including other students, and reprisals from employers,” the professors wrote. These “efforts to chill otherwise protected speech on campus are unacceptable”.
Although the letter noted that “armed resistance by an occupied people must conform to the laws of war, which include a prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians”, it did not mention Hamas by name, or its tactics, and described Hamas’s attack as a “military action”. It characterized “the events of October 7 … [as] a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years”, and as “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies”.
One signatory, the sociology professor Joseph Massad, had published a piece in the online publication the Electronic Intifada the day after the attack, asking if it marked “the start of the Palestinian War of Liberation or yet another battle in the interminable struggle between the colonizer and the colonized”. The article described the massacre as an “awesome” spectacle and referred to Israelis killed, many of them leftwing kibbutzniks, as “settler-colonists”. He also referred to a “horrifying human toll on all sides”. Students upset with his language organized a petition calling for Massad’s firing that has more than 70,000 signatures.
Next, another group of faculty members published a counter-letter on “the Campus Conversation About Hamas’s Atrocities and the War in Israel and Gaza”.
“We feel sorrow for all civilians who are killed or suffering in this war, including so many in Gaza,” the signatories wrote. “Yet whatever one thinks of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or of Israeli policies, Hamas’s genocidal massacre was an act of terror and cannot be justified, or its true purpose obscured with euphemisms and oblique references. We ask the entire University community to condemn the Hamas attack unambiguously.”
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies and noted advocate for Palestinian rights, was one of the signatories of the earlier, pro-Palestinian letter. He told me that the letter should be understood as existing in an atmosphere, at Columbia and in the US more largely, that is overwhelmingly hostile to critiques of Israel. He also feels that the second faculty letter mischaracterized the first as a defense of killing civilians.
“Could it have been worded differently? Yes,” Khalidi said. “Should it have been worded differently? Perhaps.” But the letter was a joint effort “drafted hastily” to defend the students, and “anybody who sees it as a reasoned political manifesto is entirely missing the point”.
In an emailed statement, Jack Halberstam, a gender studies professor who also signed the pro-Palestinian letter, told me: “I signed the letter in solidarity with the call for protected speech for students on campus and to resist the idea that all critiques of Israel are antisemitic. The letter was clear in its condemnation of the killing and torture of civilians by Hamas but it also drew attention to the larger context out of which this violence emerges.”
Halberstam added: “I have received some very ugly emails since signing the faculty letter and I am appalled by the vitriol that generates such emails. These emails label me a ‘self-hating Jew’ and tell me that Hamas would not hesitate to kill me given that I am transgender. The tenor of these emails is appalling.”
Matthew Waxman, a law professor who signed the pro-Israel counter-letter, told me that it was motivated by a sense that antisemitism wasn’t taken seriously: “This is not to distract from other terrible types of campus discrimination that of course must be combatted, but many Jewish and Israeli members of the university community face palpable antisemitism and rhetoric that would not be tolerated if directed at other groups.”
The sociologist Jonathan Rieder, who also signed the counter-letter, told me that what really troubled him was a seeming refusal to acknowledge the reality of Hamas and its actions.
“As a person of the liberal left and an academic, I am puzzled by the appalling silence of quote-unquote progressives in the face of the worst genocidal antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. It doesn’t matter if you’re left or right. It applies to all of us who would like to see an end to the occupation. As a practical matter, that silence will hurt the movement to end the occupation and forge a broad democratic movement. It undercuts what a humanistic left should be doing to end suffering on all sides.”
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A number of American universities have recently been the sites of acrimonious debate and ugly viral episodes related to the Gaza war. A Muslim student at Stanford was hospitalized following a hit-and-run, which is being investigated as a possible hate crime. At New York University, students were filmed ripping down posters of Israeli hostages and an NYU law student had a job offer rescinded after posting a statement blaming Israel for the 7 October attacks. Jewish students at Cooper Union released a film that they said showed them locked in a library for their own safety as pro-Palestinian protesters banged on doors and windows. A student at Cornell was arrested last week for threatening a shooting and rape spree against Jewish students.
Columbia, however, has had a particularly long history as a fulcrum of debate about Israel and Palestine. Edward Said, one of the world’s most famous Palestinian scholars and activists, taught there for many years, and Rashid Khalidi holds a professorship named for Said. Many students and faculty have called on Columbia in recent years to divest from Israel and cease curricular programs there, though the university has resisted.
Last week, Columbia’s president announced the creation of a taskforce to investigate antisemitism on campus. A similar announcement at Barnard also cited Islamophobia; Columbia did not, though it announced the creation of a “doxing resource group” to help students who had been harassed for their pro-Palestinian views.
Columbia has also canceled its annual “Giving Day” fundraising event. A spokesperson said that the university had decided “this is not the appropriate time to move forward”.
