re: Things are getting crazy at several universities right now

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This is not anything grassroots, this is being planned and financed by one person or organization.

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Wtf are they protesting?

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\This is an excuse to get out of their micro-apartments and meet up with friends, drink a latte or a hard seltzer, and let out some suppressed adolecent rage from pent up frustration over the fact they were picked on their entire childhood

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Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording video. One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out.

The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and a hundred protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”

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Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked me not to identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

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as for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags are embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza and planted in the grass.

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“We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said.

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Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.

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Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam Avenue as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“frick you!”

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The overwhelming majority of Jews, even the secular Reform ones, support Israel.

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Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country, is a subject of special concern to many Jews in the United States. Caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to 45% of U.S. Jewish adults, and an additional 37% say it is “important, but not essential,” according to a new Pew Research Center survey that was fielded from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020 – well before the latest surge of violence in the region. Just 16% of U.S. Jewish adults say that caring about Israel is “not important” to their Jewish identity.

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