At NYU, pro-Palestinian efforts are in the crosshairs 

Students across New York University’s (NYU) Washington Square Park campus were preparing for the end of classes as the Fall semester quickly came to a close. However, those looking to enter the Bobst Library on the morning of December 12 were confronted with a reminder that their day-to-day academic existence at the largest private university in the world remained intertwined and impacted by the ongoing violence occurring across the globe in Palestine.

A line of students formed a human barrier in front of a red-stone, postmodern structure to reiterate demands that the university divest from Israeli companies and institutions that support the oppression of, and violence against, Palestinian people. By the early afternoon, the New York Police Department (NYPD) had deployed multiple vehicles and dozens of officers. A number of protesters were seen being arrested and placed in the back of a police van, as a crowd of students and supporters continued chants for divestment. White zip ties hung in clusters from uniformed officers’ belts. A drone hung in the air overhead. Protestors carried signs decrying NYU President Linda Mills and waved Palestinian flags.

The university itself was on “high alert”. Multiple emails were sent out campus-wide about the disruption at the library. According to a later note, the police presence at the university was purportedly to “help ensure the safety of community members and maintain order.” Eight protestors were arrested, according to NYU.

In a separate email Fountain Walker, NYU’s Vice President for Global Campus Safety, claimed that campus security found “targeted threatening graffiti” in the library that “triggered an investigation by law enforcement.”

“Violence and threats of violence directed against members of our community will not be tolerated and they are illegal. As the person responsible for the safety of this community, I view this matter with the utmost seriousness,” Walker wrote. “I certainly hope that I speak for everyone in condemning any threats of violence.”

In a related press release, NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) claimed that at least two faculty members were among those arrested by the NYPD, which came after the arrested faculty and a colleague discovered they had been declared personae non grata by the university. This status, according to NYU FSJP, deactivates their ID cards and makes them ineligible to enter any NYU buildings, including those that contain their offices, laboratories, and classrooms. The faculty claim that the order came directly from the university’s provost, Georgina Dopico.

The Palestinian solidarity group also challenged the narrative of threatening graffiti within Bobst.

“There was no threatening language at the protests. There were no threatening signs. There were no threatening chants,” Professor Paula Chakravartty, NYU chapter vice president of the American Association of University Professors, was quoted saying in the release. “Was this graffiti scribbled in a bathroom? We have not been told.”

The response from the university to a relatively small, peaceful protest reflects the escalated antagonism towards pro-Palestinian activists within academic spaces, at NYU and elsewhere. Early in December news broke that police had raided George Mason University students’ homes in Virginia, following an FBI-led investigation into campus graffiti. The students are connected to Students for Justice in Palestine–the same national umbrella group associated with the December 12 action at NYU.

These kinds of tactics have become a global phenomenon, waged in the streets, on campuses, and in the news media, while the death count and destruction in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon mounts by the day. The incoming Trump administration has made it clear it will be open season on organizations opposing the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Institutions like NYU have laid a heavy foundation of repression aimed at faculty and students that seems all but certain to be built upon over the next four years.

These repressive foundations have been long in the making, but today’s conditions began after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 which led to Israel’s genocidal war in response. Beginning at Columbia University, campus encampment protests spread across the United States and elsewhere in the Spring of 2024, in response to the ongoing violence and destruction in Gaza. Students at New York University were quick to follow suit. Being a fully urban campus, NYU doesn’t contain a wide lawn at its center like Columbia or other traditionally laid-out schools. Students utilized the largest on-campus spaces they could, the open area in front of the business school known as Gould Plaza.

Brandon, a junior at NYU, was involved in the initial encampment. He was there after dozens of students converged on the plaza in the early morning hours of April 22. He said the university was quick to bring the NYPD to the scene, but that the situation initially remained peaceful and settled into a sense of protest normalcy.

“We didn’t anticipate getting swept by police on the first day,” he said, noting that Columbia and other protest sites had gone days without a direct confrontation with police. “We did not go in with the expectation, though obviously we knew it could potentially happen.”

As elsewhere, the students at NYU made a series of demands as part of their action, including divestment and an end to “fear tactics generating manufactured consent in academic spheres.” Negotiations continued with the school throughout the day, Brandon said, but it was clear there was no legitimate engagement on the part of the administration.

“They weren’t interested in negotiating anything,” he said.By the late afternoon, the protestors, who had been restricted to members of the NYU community with identification cards, became aware of a heightened police presence. Phalanxes of police in riot gear and zip ties were said to be amassing nearby. Brandon said he himself saw Department of Correction buses arrive, a telltale indicator of impending mass arrests.“We figured it was about to happen, we just didn’t know when,” he said.

Police soon violently swept the plaza area, arresting approximately 130 protesters. Later in the evening, Mayor Eric Adams posted on X a letter from an undisclosed high-ranking member of the NYU administration directly asking the city for police to deal with the protestors “interfering with the safety and security of our community.”

“Rest assured, in NYC the NYPD stands ready to address these prohibited and subsequently illegal actions whenever we are called upon,” Adams stated.

Following the Gould Plaza and other actions, dynamics on the NYU campus became visibly more restrictive. Private security is stationed at areas in and around communal spaces, in addition to regular campus security. NYPD officers have been spotted entering NYU buildings repeatedly. The perimeter of Gould Plaza is now closed off by a plywood wall painted in NYU purple. Access through revolving metal gates is only available after showing identification. Painted in white whimsical lettering along the West 4th Street barrier: “Our Future Taking Shape.”

NYU community members faced repercussions for their actions and public statements. In April, Darren King, a postdoctoral instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, was fired for taking down posters around campus displaying images of people taken hostage during the October 7 attacks. An undergraduate student was suspended for the same conduct around the same time. Earlier in the year four students faced disciplinary hearings after administrators shut down a reading of Palestinian poetry in Bobst.

During the summer break between semesters, the NYU administration announced changes to its nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy (NDAH) that explicitly conflated Zionism with Jewishness, and therefore language that was expressly anti-Zionist could now be considered anti-Semitic.

“For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the school stated in its updated policy. “Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.”

The NYU chapter of Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP), which remained closely aligned with pro-Palestinian student activities since the April crackdown, called the school’s decision “deeply disturbing” in a press release at the time.

“[T]he recent shifts in NYU’s NDAH policy are clearly of a piece with the University’s previous repressive and anti-intellectual actions, as well as with several other new measures the University has taken to stifle pro-Palestinian protest and restrict speech criticizing Israeli state violence,” the group said.

As the leading pro-Palestinian faculty and staff organization on campus, FSJP has been tracking the evolution of repressive tactics at NYU. On a rainy night in November, more than 50 members of the NYU community (because of university restrictions, no one without an NYU-issued ID was allowed to participate) gathered in a small movie theater in the Cantor Film Center for a teach-in entitled “Palestine and the Global University: Mapping Academic Repression, Scholasticide, and Resistance.”

The panel included current NYU professors, all of whom were connected with FSJP; Hesen Jabr, a former nurse at NYU Langone who mentioned the genocide in Gaza during an acceptance speech for an award for compassion and was subsequently fired; and Ellis Garey, a former NYU student now doing post-doctoral work at Brown University, who said the school’s response to pro-Palestian activism on-campus–even then openly hostile–had “changed dramatically over the past decade, and even in the past year,” largely because of the growth of student activism and of the stakes confronting the university.

A dark picture of what pro-Palestinian voices face in academic spaces emerged. Two panelists said they’d lost jobs at institutions because of their activities. Others spoke to the longer trajectory, at NYU and elsewhere, of increasingly closer ties with the Israeli state that led to policies and practices that brought the schools’ interests in line with the Israeli state.

A particularly concerning development was presented by Meira Gold. As a researcher with the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, Gold has been working on a project to map “networks of anti-Palestinian campus repression.” The work, she said, grew out of her own frustration trying to understand who was behind the proliferation of new pro-Israel campus groups that have appeared over the past year.

Behind her a slide showed an array of slick logos for organizations (“This covers a sliver of what’s out there,” she noted) that are all actively pursuing various parts of a pro-Israel agenda, from the Hillel campus organization to the public-doxxing Accuracy in Media, many of which have direct ties to the Israeli government. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism refers to these and groups like them as “astroturf antisemitism watch dogs,” Gold said. “They give the illusion of wide-spread support, and in reality, most of them are funded by a select handful of donors or mega-donors.”

Within academia, Gold said one group has become her focus in the spring, after discovering they were on nearly every campus looking to work behind the scenes with school administrators to change language and influence policy. This group, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), states publicly that its mission is to “mobilize networks of university faculty and administrators to counter antisemitism [and] oppose the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities[.]” Gold said she discovered the AEN to be a creature created entirely by the group Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), and funded by a small number of private foundations that have a history of writing big checks to Zionist organizations, as well as “dark money” in the form of donor-advised funds, which are able to pool donations and then provide that money to organizations. ICC, according to Gold, is essentially itself a donor-advised fund, allowing it to operate as an umbrella organization to fund other groups.

ICC is currently “one of the biggest organizations operating, in terms of repression right now,” Gold said, noting that ICC president and CEO Jacob Baime described the group’s purpose as “psychological warfare” in a video obtained for an al-Jazeera documentary. The group’s surveillance work against pro-Palestinian groups is used as part of an online weaponization strategy to intimidate and harass individuals and organizations. He also confirmed that ICC shares the information it gathers with the Israeli government.

“There is a direct line of communication there,” Gold said

A number of these groups were operating on NYU campuses and in coordination with NYU leadership, including AEN, which Gold said she and others believe was directly involved in the university’s decision to make Zionism a protected class in the summer.

As troublesome as conditions are at present, the current dynamics have been long in the making, according to Prof. Rebecca Karl. A history professor at NYU for more than two decades, Karl is also the president of NYU’s American Association of University Professors and a member of FSJP. Having been involved with prior efforts to resist NYU’s opening of a Tel Aviv campus and research that bolsters the defense industry, she sees the roads that have led to this moment.

“All of these nefarious and horrible trends now combine into what’s happening in Palestine and NYU’s complicit role,” Karl said.

The stepped-up pushback from the school’s administration to pro-Palestinian organizing and resistance efforts has led to the deterioration of NYU’s expressed commitment to academic freedom and education in a broad and open sense.

“NYU’s motto is ‘a private university in the public interest,’ and we got no public interest,” Karl said. “With the walling off the campuses and the walling off the spaces we have become, in fact, very exclusive, to the detriment of all of our endeavors.”

Broadly, Karl sees the current dynamics between university officials and pro-Palestinian activists as “cat and mouse.”

“The university has, I’m sure, congratulated itself on being able to shut down some of the more spectacular demonstrations of solidarity,” she added.

Since the removal of the encampments in the spring and the restrictions on the use of what university-owned space is available, student actions have been forced to increasingly utilize Washington Square Park or other technically off-campus places, where the presence of armed NYPD officers, as well as antagonistic pro-Israeli groups, brings a heightened level of threat to any protest activity.

“We’re in a confrontational stalemate, let’s put it that way. The preponderance of legal and spatial power is in the hands of the university,” Karl said. Even so, she credited the creativity and ingenuity of students to find new ways of challenging the university and ensuring pro-Palestinian resistance remains seen and heard.

The coming Trump administration’s targeting of just such campus resistance, among both students and faculty, has added a new layer of concern about the future. The university’s cozy relationship with law enforcement and the steps taken to muzzle dissent means that, however unlikely, nothing can be taken for granted now.

“Given the degree to which NYU has been willing to bend over backward in a blue state, under a Democratic [presidential] regime, how preemptively will it bend over, and how willing will it be to bend over, for a much more violent assault on our domestic freedoms,” she said. “[NYU’s] calculation is about institutional liability and institutional risk. It’s not about the safety or safeguarding of us as faculty or as students or as staff.”

The conditions at NYU are surely echoed, in varying degrees and practices, across higher education. Our collective efforts to overcome these challenges is likely to make colleges and universities central to the broader fight: both to defend basic democratic rights and to build an anti-imperialist movement best equipped to fight for Palestinian liberation. Karl was explicit about the need to keep focused.

“Ultimately the movement is not about us. The movement has to be about trying to support some kind of end to the mass violence and the genocidal assaults on Palestinian people and on Palestine as an idea and as a pursuit,” she said.

Out of the struggles at places like NYU have come a new generation politicized and mobilized by the genocide being conducted by Israel, including a critical demographic that Karl sees as a point of hope–something that is generating “so much panic” among the pro-Israeli set.

“These are young students and people in the Jewish diaspora who are not finding common cause with the Israeli state, not being happy with having their Judaism or their Jewishness being associated with that genocide,” she said. “It’s a natural coalition between Jews who understand the idealisms of being Jewish and who understand those idealisms are not housed in Israel right now–or ever.”The continued efforts of students like Brandon and others—to work in coalition and find ways to challenge the bounds of what university officials, well-funded astroturf organizations, or powerful nation-states draw for them—builds upon a long line of resistance with a deep history of its own.“That’s what panics people in power,” Karl said. “I think that panic is a good thing. I think having them panic is a good thing.”

Featured Image credit: BC Hamilton; modified by Tempest.
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