After Columbia officials backed down twice on a deadline for pro-Palestine student protesters to leave the school’s “liberation zone,” the encampment is still going strong — and Jewish students are shaken.
School president Minouche Shafik’s word “means literally nothing at this point,” Jess Schwalb, a Columbia University junior, told The Post.
Hundreds of pro-Israel protesters marched outside the school gates Friday morning, demanding administrators evict the campers.
This comes after the school let a Friday deadline lapse for student protesters to clear out. The deadline had already been extended from administrators’ previous demand that campers on the lawn pack up by midnight Wednesday.
“It’s like Woodstock for anti-Semites,” Schwalb said of the camp. “It’s disgusting.”
One of five Jewish Columbia students who entered the encampment on Sunday, April 21, to “see it for ourselves,” Schwalb said she and the others were physically forced out by a human chain.
“Excuse me, everybody, we have Zionists who have entered the camp,” a student leader shouted at them. “We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy and try to disrupt our community.”
In a video taken by Schwalb, she and other Jewish students are seen being squeezed out of the camp by a crowd marching toward them.
“I 100% felt physically unsafe … and I worried we were gonna get trampled,” said Schwalb, adding that her small group didn’t wear anything identifying themselves as Jewish — but may have been sniffed out because weren’t sporting keffiyeh or KN-95 masks like the majority of the demonstrators.
“Generally, I’m not scared of Columbia students. They might be verbally aggressive, but they’re not going to touch you. But it was a mob of 200,” said Schwalb, a human rights major from upstate. But “if this sort of thing was happening to any other minority group, the whole world would shut down.”
Ben, a 25-year-old native New Yorker who asked to withhold his last name for privacy reasons, agreed.
“It seems that we were pushed out solely for the facts that A, we were Jewish and B we didn’t identify with their cause,” he told The Post. “We were accosted and forced out of the lawn, which before this was not an encampment. It was just a lawn that we all had access to.”
He says the inside of the encampment was what he “would imagine a refugee camp looks like.
“It smells bad. It’s unhygienic. I worry for their health,” he said.
He spotted trays of seemingly catered food — there are reports of pizza and Pret A Manger sandwiches — and a cigarette table where students were ordering Newports and Marlboros.
Campers can be seen queuing up for bathrooms all around campus, and many of them are returning to their dorms to shower and freshen up, as evidenced by those in the encampment with wet hair.
“It’s mostly just a bunch of wealthy Ivy League students cosplaying as refugees,” said Ben, who graduated with a sociology degree last semester but still has an active student ID. “There’s something weird happening with the psychology there. I think anybody who spends days camped outside, immersed in this environment, would go a little bit cuckoo.”
Both Ben and Schwalb say they went to the school’s public safety officers “immediately” after being squeezed out — but to no avail.
“They don’t seem to want to get involved,” she said. “It seems like they know that, if they do anything, they’ll be on the front page of the newspaper the next day.”
This wasn’t either student’s first experience with harassment on campus.
Last semester a girl, Ben said, allegedly screamed “f–k you Jews” at him and his friend, who was holding a “Columbia doesn’t care about its Jewish students” sign.
Another time, he said, a student in the quad told him he “smelled like a Zionist.”
But, now that protests have erupted on campus, both students say that the non-Columbia outsiders protesting by the gates are the most aggressive.
“The most vile, virulent anti-Semitism I’ve faced has been right outside this campus,” Ben said.
These sorts of experiences have Schwalb eager to graduate and get off campus as soon as possible:
“Thee security risk is factoring into my decision to graduate early.”
