“Shame, Shame, Shame,” hundreds of Columbia University students and alumni, some donning their blue gowns and caps, scream, their faces covered with masks and keffiyehs, as they march down Broadway, beating drums and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” and “Columbia you can’t hide; you support genocide!” 

The rally on Monday night was organized by Columbia University Alumni Action for Palestine, a group that seems to have sprung up five days ago to demand that Columbia University reverse the suspension of the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.  

They requested students and alumni of the university show up with their caps and gowns for a “denouncement ceremony,” where after marching around campus, they removed their gowns and caps and hung them on the college gates, to visibly reject their alma mater.  Some painted red hand prints or Palestinian flags on their caps.  

Since October 7, university campuses have become proxy battlegrounds across the country, pedagogical hotbeds of antisemitism where the players and their roles have been flipped upside down.  In this perverse equation, Israelis are genocidal Nazi-esque colonialist oppressors, their women and children deserving of rape, beheading, and torture.

Meanwhile, in this upside down world, the Palestinians are the innocent, oppressed victims, and Hamas their beloved freedom fighters.  Over the last few weeks, what was already smoldering on college campuses for decades has erupted into a forest fire.

It is evident now that Hamas, a terrorist organization funded by Iran and other dictatorial, fundamentalist regimes, have found strange and unlikely bedfellows in the wokest of American youth — Gen Z.

Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were temporarily suspended by Columbia on November 10, for “repeatedly violat[ing] University policies related to campus events,” according to the statement released by the university.  Gerald Rosenberg, senior executive vice president of the university, added that they were employing “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”  

This action has fanned the flames, as more than 40 other student groups have since jumped in expressing solidarity with the two suspended groups and officially organizing on their behalf. Additionally, professors are adding fuel to the fire, speaking out on behalf of the students, with hundreds signing a petition defending students who justified the events of October 7.

Professors also are publishing articles in support of a ceasefire and calling for “the end of the 75 year long occupation of Palestine, the true root to the violence unfolding today,” as written in a Public Health for Palestine open letter signed by dozens of students and faculty members at Columbia. 

An op-ed published Tuesday by the chairman of Columbia’s Literature and Humanities Department, Joseph Howley, claims that there is no evidence of Students for Justice in Palestine using any threatening rhetoric or intimidating students and demands the university apologize to these groups and immediately reinstate their status. 

At a solidarity rally organized by the supporters of the two groups last week, two Jewish students were attacked.  One woman who was wearing a Jewish-identifying necklace, had someone come into her space and rip off her necklace, and another Jewish man wearing a yamaka was spit on, according to another student who witnessed the events. 

These attacks were not one-off incidents.  Since October 7, an Israeli student has been physically attacked on campus for putting up posters of the hostages, swastikas have been found around campus, Jewish students were forced to stay behind locked doors of the Hillel for their safety, and pro-Palestinian groups have taken over the Law School with megaphones, disrupting classes and intimidating Jewish students and faculty.

Huge banners have been placed around the school calling for divestment and a ceasefire, the alma mater statue has been dressed up in a keffiyeh, and gory apartheid art has been put up all over the steps of Low Library .    

Last Friday it was announced that Columbia was amongst seven schools which the United States Department of Education has launched investigations of after receiving complaints about alleged incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia.   
As reported by CNN, the education secretary, Miguel Cardonas, said, “We need to match it with a level of response that meets the moment. We need to be listening to our students; we need to let them know that they will be safe in our schools — that we’re not going to tolerate hate or threats on campus.”