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Police in riot gear. Occupied buildings. Thousands of arrests. Distrupted classrooms. An atmosphere of fear and campuses crisscrossed with encampments.
In the year since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, universities across the globe were riven with protests, vigilante mobs, and antisemitism and Islamophobia investigations. Now, college officials are cracking down and trying to avoid similar scenes as the conflict approaches its one-year anniversary. Universities are announcing measures they say will keep campus safe and uninterrupted this year, after last year’s Israel-Palestine turmoil.
But activists say new restrictions on protest rights only further their resolve.
Last week, the national organization of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the main groups leading Palestine solidarity protests and encampments across US universities over the last year, called for a “Week of Rage” this year between October 7 and October 11.
“We will rise to end our universities’ complicity in this genocide, to fight for the end of the colonization of Palestine, and to fight for the complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea,” the group wrote in a post on Instagram.
In July, a coalition of prominent US Jewish groups warned that universities should “anticipate and mitigate disruptions on the one-year mark of the Hamas attack on Israel.”
A month later, Hillel International and Secure Community Network launched “Operation SecureOurCampuses” to send safety resources to over 50 colleges and universities, including dedicated intelligence analysts. Canadian officials in Quebec, meanwhile, have summoned the heads of provincial universities to discuss security plans amid “the climate of tension on some campuses,” particularly “in the run-up to Oct. 7.”
Schools such as the University of Maryland, UCLA and a host of others have introduced new rules for campus protests in the last year and ahead of the anniversary in 2024. Some have limited times and places of protests. Others have banned encampments.
Schools say the measures are being taken to protect the learning environment and avoid repeats of police in riot gear.
“As classes have resumed this fall, so, too, have protests and demonstrations. This isn’t surprising, and our USM presidents have long been preparing for these events, working closely with their executive teams, with student groups, and with their campus communities as a whole,” a statement from the University of Maryland read.
“Our universities are doing everything within their power and within the law to protect students’ right to free expression while also protecting their safety—their right to access an education free from harassment, threats, and violence. It’s a difficult balance, but a vitally important one.”
Campus groups plan to mark the anniversary with a variety of different events, from vigils to protests to artistic performances.
UCLA saw a large encampment, vigilante attacks and a violent police response to protests last school year. On October 7, UCLA’s Hillel will host the West Coast debut of October 7, a play drawn from interviews with survivors of the Hamas attack. Daniel Gold, executive director of Hillel at UCLA, told The Independent the show “allows us to honor the victims and remember the tragedies of that day in an honest and purposeful way.”
He added that security will be a top priority around the event.
“As Jewish communities often must do, we are taking serious security precautions to ensure the safety of our community and students,” he said. “These measures will allow us to grieve and come together in peace for this important and expressive memorial."
As the new semester begins, protests and police arrests of students have certainly continued, though not at the scale and intensity of last year. That’s thanks in no small part to a host of new restrictions student protesters face, from controversial facemask bans to rules outlawing activist encampments and requiring protests to be pre-approved.
Some campuses have come to resemble fortresses, with schools such as the University of Southern California implementing new security checkpoints with gates and ID checks.
“They gave us one big task: Keep the protesters out,” a gate guard told the Los Angeles Times last month. “That’s our main job.”
Student groups argue these restrictions have crossed the line from normal safety rules into repression of free speech.
After a wave of outside pressure comparing student activists to terrorists, the University of Maryland pulled permission for its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace to hold an interfaith vigil remembering those killed since October 7.
The decision then grew into a ban on non-university sponsored “expressive events” on October 7 across the entire Maryland system, despite university officials acknowledging they hadn’t received any active threats to the main campus.
Abel Amene, a member of Maryland’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, told The Independent the worst part of the decision to cancel the event was “the inherent discrimination that it represents.” The mere presence of the group’s name on the events calendar, with little more than the date and time of their planned event, was enough to be treated like a terror threat, he said.
“This assumption comes from this age-old trope of treating people from Arab backgrounds, which most of our members are, even I though myself am African, but this assumption that we are all terrorists, that we all support terrorism and that we are dangerous and that there’s something inherently dangerous about our mere existence, our mere holding of an event,” he said. “In reality, the few things that we have released about what the event was intended to be have always been describing it as a vigil.”
Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have sued the public university, arguing the decision amounts to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination against the system’s roughly 150,000 students who might want to mark the October 7 anniversary somehow, regardless of their stance on Israel and Palestine.
The move marks “a prior restraint so sweeping only a cataclysm could justify it,” according to the suit.
Regardless of the court’s decision, Amene said they’re planning to “mark the day in some form on or near campus, on or near October 7.”
When contacted for comment by The Independent, Maryland officials pointed to a September 1 letter from President Darryll J. Pines. The message said the events were canceled “out of an abundance of caution,” with a goal of events that “promote reflection on this day.” The letter noted that a university police assessment of planned events for October 7 found “no immediate or active threat.”
Across the country, student activists are still dealing with the fallout of participating in last semester’s protests.
At the University of Georgia, nine student activists were arrested in April during an encampment protest on accusations of criminal trespass. The school accused them of causing “serious and immediate danger” to campus, even though students say they were holding a peaceful demonstration that had only lasted about an hour until police arrived.
The students were first ordered to relocate to a campus “free speech zone,” a seeming violation of Georgia’s free speech FORUM law, then violently arrested when they refused. Students were given only a few minutes warning then suspended through the end of the summer, locked out of campus housing and employment and professors were warned to call 911 if they were seen at the university.
The affair prompted the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to withdraw as a campus group, and to this day, four students among the arrested haven’t been able to re-enroll for the new semester.
The Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has asked the US Department of Education to investigate the school, arguing the university carries out “extreme differential treatment” of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students.
The complaint cited the arrests, Georgia’s yearly “IsraelFest” event, and comments from the Georgia president suggesting pro-Palestine demonstrations are “hateful.” It also said campus officials ignored tweets from Georgia congressman Mike Collins, whose district covers the university, that seemed designed to intimidate against protesters.
The Independent has contacted Rep. Collins’s office for comment.
Azka Mahmood, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Georgia, said there was now a stifling atmosphere on campus.
“All of the things combined to create this extremely oppressive environment that really punishes anyone for expressing any criticism of the state of Israel, any support of Palestine,” she told The Independent.
Greg Trevor, a spokesperson for the University of Georgia, told The Independent via email that Georgia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter “held a clearly prohibited encampment on our historic North Campus Quad in willful violation of university policy, declined to accept alternatives by the university to conduct their protest in accordance with university policies, and refused repeated warnings to either comply with these policies or disperse.”
“UGA supports and facilitates freedom of expression, but such activities must comply with applicable laws and policies,” he added.
Mahmood is confident that all the changes on campus won’t stop students from expressing their thoughts this year.
“Students remain determined as ever,” she said. “It’s very difficult to silence young people who are passionate about causes. They will always find ways to express their opinions and stand up for what they think is right. That’s just the way of the world.”
