The camps remain strong and Jewish students are upset, even after Colombian authorities twice lifted deadlines for pro-Palestinian student protesters to leave school “liberated areas.”
Columbia University junior Jess Schwalb told the Post that the school’s president, Minoush Shafik,’s words “literally mean nothing at this point.”
Hundreds of pro-Israel demonstrators marched outside the school gates Friday morning, demanding that administrators remove the campers.
This comes after schools passed Friday’s deadline to remove student protesters. The deadline had already been extended from administrators’ previous request for campers on the lawn to pack up by midnight Wednesday.
“It’s like the Woodstock of anti-Semites,” Schwalb said of the camp. “It’s disgusting.”
Ms. Schwalb was one of five Jewish-Colombian students who entered the camp to “see for themselves” on Sunday, April 21, when she and other students were trapped in human chains. He said he was physically forced out.
“Excuse me, everyone, the Zionists have entered the camp,” a student leader shouted at them. “We’re going to create a human chain where I stand to make sure they don’t ignore this and try to violate our privacy and disrupt our community. ”
A video shot by Schwalb shows her and other Jewish students being chased out of the camp by a crowd marching toward them.
“I felt 100% physically unsafe…and worried that I would be trampled,” said Schwalb, whose small group was not wearing anything that indicated they were Jewish. He wasn’t, but added that he might have been sniffed out because he wasn’t sporting a keffiyeh or KN – 95 masks, like the majority of demonstrators.
“Basically, I’m not scared of Columbia University students. They can be verbally aggressive, but they’re not going to touch you. But it was a mob of 200 people.” said Schwalb, a human rights major from upstate. But “if something like this happened to other minority groups, the whole world would shut down.”
Ben, a 25-year-old New Yorker who asked that his last name be withheld for privacy reasons, agreed.
“It’s like we were kicked out just for the fact that A, we were Jewish and B, we didn’t sympathize with their cause,” he told the Post. . “We were called out and chased off the lawn, which was not an encampment before. It was just a lawn that we all had access to.”
Inside the camp, he says, “It was like what I had imagined a refugee camp to be like.”
“It stinks. It’s unsanitary. I’m worried about their health,” he said.
He found trays of what appeared to be catered food (some reports included pizza and prêt-a-mange sandwiches) and a tobacco table where students were ordering Newports and Marlboros.
Campers can be seen lining up for restrooms across campus, and many return to their dorms to take a shower and freshen up, as evidenced by wet hair in the encampments. There is.
“It’s mostly a bunch of wealthy Ivy League students cosplaying as refugees,” said Ben, who graduated last semester with a sociology degree but still has a valid student ID. To tell. “There’s something weird going on in psychology there. I think anyone who spends days camping outside and immersed in this environment would become a little uncool.”
Benn and Schwalb say they went to the school’s public safety officials “immediately” after being locked out, but to no avail.
“They don’t seem to want to get involved,” she said. “They seem to know that if they do something, it’s going to be on the front page of the next day’s paper.”
This was not the first time either student had experienced harassment on campus.
Last semester, Ben said, a girl yelled “fuck Jews” at Ben and a friend who was holding a sign that said, “Columbia doesn’t care about Jewish students.”
On another occasion, a student on the Quad told him he “smelled like a Zionist.”
But now that protests have erupted on campus, both students say non-Colombian outsiders protesting at the gates are the most aggressive.
“The most vile and vicious anti-Semitism I have ever faced was right outside this campus,” Ben said.
Because of this experience, Schwalb wants to graduate and leave campus as soon as possible.
“Security risks are factored into my decision to graduate early.”
