Dozens of protesters gathered to demand the reinstatement of two students expelled for disrupting a class on Israel. Several dozen anti-war student protesters gathered outside Columbia University and Barnard College in New York on Thursday to protest against the expulsion of two students who interrupted a class on Israel last month.
Wearing keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians, students chanted a series of anti-war slogans amid a heavy New York police department (NYPD) presence outside the sister schools, where only students and faculty with ID cards are allowed in. “Free, free Palestine!” they yelled as some held up handwritten signs that read: “No more Zionist occupation” and “Reinstate our students now!” Others yelled: “Don’t cross the picket line! We must honor Palestine! Students, students, you will rise! Gaza is by your side!”.
Thursday’s protest came after a sit-in by anti-war students at a Barnard College building on Wednesday evening to protest against the two students’ expulsion. Tensions across Columbia and Barnard have been simmering – and periodically erupting – since last spring’s anti-war campus protests when students demanded American universities divest from Israel.
Columbia became a focal point of nationwide protests after Hamas’s 7 October attacks that killed almost 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 200 others hostage. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 48,000 Palestinians while forcibly displacing nearly 2 million survivors amid severe shortages in food, fuel and medical supplies due to Israeli aid restrictions.
Tensions across the two New York institutions were recently revived following Barnard’s decision to expel two students after they interrupted a class on 21 January. The class, a “History of Modern Israel”, was taught by Professor Avi Shilon, a lecturer with Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
As of Thursday afternoon, more than 116,600 people had signed a letter urging Barnard College to reinstate the expelled students. Outside the gates of Barnard College, one student held up a handwritten sign that said, “There are no universities left in Gaza.” Over the last 16 months, Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza, in addition to killing at least 5,800 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors, according to an April 2024 report from the UN, which has condemned Israel’s actions as “scholasticide”.
About 10 student counter-protesters gathered across from the Columbia and Barnard students protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza. One student, with a shirt bearing the slogan “Fuck Hamas, I stand with Israel” started playing Israeli music with others waving an Israeli and an IDF flag. Another student wore a white hoodie with the words: “Columbia University students supporting Israel.”.
One man who appeared unaffiliated with the students approached the anti-war student protesters holding what looked like a pager, saying, “Who wants a fucking pager?” an apparent reference to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks across Lebanon last September which killed at least 20 people and injured nearly 3,000 others. The Lebanese government and Hezbollah have blamed Israel for the attacks.
Attending the anti-war protest in solidarity with Columbia and Barnard students was Raymond Lotta, a spokesperson for Revolutionary Books in Harlem. “We are here specifically today because we are standing in solidarity with the students here at Barnard and Columbia who are being punished severely for standing in support of the Palestinian people and calling out this university for being complicit in war crimes, and now two students have been expelled … they must be reinstated,” Lotta said.
In addition to reinstating the students, the protesters seek “amnesty” for all students punished for pro-Palestinian actions, a meeting with campus leaders, and the “abolition of the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process”. At the end of their demonstration, the students marched to join up with a separate protest against the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who on Wednesday, ordered the publicly funded City University of New York (Cuny) to immediately remove a job posting advertising a Palestinian studies professor role at the state university system’s Hunter College.
