Columbia Not Supporting Pro-Palestine Students Attacked by Chemical Weapon on Campus (original) (raw)
The Jan. 19 Divest from Israeli Apartheid demonstration began like many of the other protests Catherine helped organize in the past: a rally on Columbia’s “Low steps” with a few speeches from students and faculty followed by a march along paths of the Morningside campus’s main quad.
The demonstration was met with wet snowfall, a small group of disruptive counter-protestors and the presence of university representatives distributing fliers that threatened disciplinary action if students failed to disperse from theunsanctioned event**.** It didn’t dampen the pro-Palestine protesters’ energy; the mood was determined and defiant.
As the student protesters — organized by a coalition of pro-Palestine student organizations — began marching across the main quad towards the Butler Library, they noticed a strong, foul odor. Catherine, a graduate student, checked the soles of her shoes for dog feces. She wondered if maintenance spread fertilizer on the grass earlier.
When Catherine got back to her apartment that night, she noticed the offensive stench had clung to her.
“That’s when it clicked.”
She and the fellow student protestors in the vicinity had been targeted with Skunk spray — an Israeli-manufactured military-grade chemical weapon only available to Israeli military personnel and their clients, including several U.S. police departments. Civilian use is illegal in the United States.
Two individuals disguised in _keffiyeh_s sprayed the Skunk surreptitiously. They also harassed protestors, including Jewish students carrying a “CU Jews for Ceasefire” banner, calling them “traitors” and “self-hating Jews,” according to eyewitness accounts.
This was not Catherine’s first encounter with the nefarious chemical that was developed in 2004 for the Israeli Defense Forces as a weapon that harms Palestinian protesters without open fire. She had witnessed, and smelled, its use in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where she lived for four years before enrolling at Columbia. The violence had followed her to New York.
However, this time was different. She had never been the direct target of the spray.
Catherine was hospitalized on Jan. 22, three days after the action, with difficulty breathing, fatigue and migraines — symptoms consistent with toxic chemical inhalation. She was readmitted to the hospital a week later with even more severe symptoms of nausea, vomiting and dehydration.
Catherine’s worst symptoms took nearly two weeks to subside. At least 10 other student protestors have been hospitalized in the wake of the attack. Dozens of other attendees have reported debilitating symptoms, from burning eyes to rashes and skin irritation.
Free Speech?
The Jan 19. attack came after months of internal repression and demoralizing rhetoric from senior administrators that have contributed to a hostile campus climate for supporters of Palestinian rights.
Despite the university’s stated commitment to free speech, the administration has deliberately banned Palestine-related activities from taking place on campus since Oct. 7, citing safety concerns. It even canceled faculty-organized events including a talk by Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, and a panel on the legacies of Edward Said.
Two individuals disguised in _keffiyeh_s sprayed the Skunk surreptitiously. They also harassed protestors, calling some “self-hating Jews.”
Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, as well as Pro-Palestine student allies, have been the targets of discrimination, racism, verbal and online harassment and physical assault — including death threats, a doxing campaign, getting spat on, and being labeled “terrorists” and “murderers” — since the war on Gaza began.
Amid these escalating reports, students’ concerns have been dismissed or minimized, according to Catherine. The university has “patently ignored these reports for months now,” she says.
“The administration intends to spin [Jan. 19] as just two students and just one incident of violence that they condemn, they deplore and they reject,” says Catherine. “But we [had] warned them that we weren’t safe, that these threats were happening and they chose not to act.”
“As someone who is Palestinian, it makes me feel like I am not safe anywhere,” Columbia graduate student Layla told Prism Reports. A victim of the Jan. 19 attack, Layla was called a “terrorist” for wearing her hijab on campus last semester. “Our safety is an afterthought for Columbia University.”
In October, pro-Palestine student groups, including Students for Jusice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), created their own internal form to report harassment and discrimination amid mounting frustration with the university’s failure to take students’ concerns seriously.
Tensions climaxed in November when the Columbia administration suspended the campus-based chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace for hosting “unauthorized events” and use of “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” according to the university. (Since Oct. 7, Columbia had labeled pro-Palestine events on campus as “unsanctioned” or “unauthorized” disturbances and even distributed notices to students warning them against such actions.)
Catherine is an active member of the student-led Palestine Working Group (PWG) at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). PWG at SIPA is one of the nearly 100 student organizations that form the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition established in the wake of the university’s unprecedented suspension.
A Task Force on Doxing and Student Safety was established only after students at SIPA, who were the targets of the doxing truck campaign, mobilized to demand institutional support. Yet the long-overdue resource groups came on the heels of the university’s suspension of SJP and JVP, sparking considerable criticism within the community as a violation of students’ right to free speech and academic expression.
Columbia Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Rashid Khalidi, situates the University’s repression within a broader, alarming “effort, both in Israel and abroad, to stifle speech that is critical of Israel’s actions or supportive of Palestinians.”
The Aftermath
In the wake of the attack, protest organizers and attendees compiled evidence, reviewing photos, footage and eyewitness testimony. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition identified the attackers as current students and former Israeli soldiers.
The Columbia administration’s initial response to the Skunk allegations struck an accusatory tone against the pro-Palestine student activists. A university spokesperson asserted that the “unsanctioned event violated university policies and procedures in place to ensure there is adequate personnel on the ground to keep our community safe” in a comment to The Intercept.
Following the initial comments, Provost Dennis Mitchell announced an investigation with local and federal law enforcement into “what appear to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes” in a campus-wide email to the community sent on Jan. 22. According to the statement, “the alleged perpetrators identified to the University were immediately banned from campus while the law enforcement investigation proceeds.” (Columbia has not further clarified what the “ban” stipulates.)
While Columbia Public Safety and NYPD officers were present at the Jan. 19 protest, “they did not notice” the attack, according to Catherine.
“They were solely focused on us [Pro-Palestine protestors] because they have always seen us as the threat,” she said.
Even while university officials and Public Safety were quickly alerted of an incident involving chemical weapons, witnesses and victims shouldered the burden of investigating the attack in the critical days that followed.
Meanwhile, Catherine and other impacted students have been forced to navigate the repercussions of the attack without institutional, financial or psychological support from the university. While the Dean’s office at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) contacted Catherine the week after the incident, no one from the Columbia University administration has reached out.
When Catherine first sought medical care at Columbia Health, none of the medical staff or doctors had been notified about the incident or potential chemical exposure.
In November, Columbia University suspended local chapters of SJP and JVP, sparking criticism within the community as a violation of students’ right to free speech and academic expression.
“The doctor was trying to be as supportive as possible, but she was having to Google what Skunk spray is on her phone to treat me.”
Given the lack of publicly available information on the weapon’s ingredients, Columbia Health and Mount Sinai’s doctors have struggled to provide clear guidance on the possible long-term repercussions of exposure. Consequently, Catherine has sought advice from her friends in Palestine directly familiar with Skunk’s effects.
Columbia’s Stance
Since the war on Gaza began, Columbia’s senior officials have released a deluge of carefully-crafted PR statements.
For many Palestinian students, activists and allies, these periodic statements have been insincere and deeply one-sided — emphasizing the need for “productive conversations” and “meaningful dialogue” while failing to recognize the mounting death toll in Gaza and minimizing the pain felt by the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students.
For example, in a statement released in late October, Barnard’s President Rosenbury condemned the “appalling” spread of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism throughout Barnard and Columbia, conflating anti-Zionism as a form of hate speech rather than a legitimate political critique.
In several community announcements and in a New York Times op-ed, SIPA Dean Yarhi-Milo has characterized the chant “From the river to the sea” as a “call for the elimination of Jews.”
In late December, the deans of 17 faculties and schools including SIPA signed an open letter that again labeled pro-Palestine chants of “By any means necessary,” “From the river to the sea,” or “Intifada” as “hurtful and anti-Semitic” and hindering “meaningful conversation and learning.”
For pro-Palestine activists, “From the river to the sea” represents an aspirational call for equality and the liberation from occupation for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
To Catherine, this mischaracterization of pro-Palestine student advocacy is not only false — ignoring the participation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups like JVP — but dangerous.
“Painting us as violent anti-Semites not only motivates but inspires violence against us,” she said.
To Professor Khalidi, the sweeping statements in the letter are “characteristic of a university that picks a task force nearly devoid of expertise on antisemitism and Palestine/Israel but packed with outspoken advocates for Israel.”
In his open letter, Khalidi calls the statement and its blatant policing of language the “latest instance of Columbia’s discrimination against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and other students who support Palestinian rights for protesting …the heaviest [death] toll in Palestinian history.”
Recovery
As she recovers, Catherine’s commitment to the Palestinian cause has only strengthened. “It has only made it clearer: [the liberation of] Palestine is the path to liberation for all peoples.”
On the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 2, the NYPD arrested at least one Columbia student and twenty other protestors at a pro-Palestine protest outside Columbia University’s campus gates. The protest was organized by Within Our Lifetime (WOL) and Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition in solidarity with the victims of the Jan. 19 attack.
Video evidence and witness testimony reveal the NYPD’s use of excessive force against nonviolent demonstrators that left at least one person hospitalized. At the protest, Catherine suffered bruised ribs from the NYPD’s use of excessive force.
No arrests have been made in connection to the Jan. 19 attack, despite the perpetrators having been identified by student protesters and Skunk being an illegal weapon.