On Jan. 19, 2024, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) led a protest of around 100 people on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library. They demanded the university divest from and disclose its financial ties to Israel and companies that do business with Israel and reform campus policing. Pro-Israel students held a counterprotest.
The counterprotesters were being “very belligerent this time around. That stood out to me,” said Zainab Khan, one of the students who participated in the CUAD protest.
“All of us started to notice this horrible stench while we were marching around,” said Catherine Curran-Groome, another student protester. “I remember thinking, ‘Did they just put down manure? What is going on?’ It wasn’t until we all got home later that evening and a bunch of us were like, ‘Wait, it still reeks,’” that the students began to wonder if the odor was something nefarious.
Protesters say the smell clung on to their bodies, clothes and even the sheets they slept in after multiple washes. “I tried vinegar, bleach, Dawn dish soap, plain laundry detergent, and I just could not get rid of the smell,” said Layla Saliba, another student who was at the protest.
I was in the shower just scrubbing myself for hours and could not get rid of it.
In April, video footage of the protest appeared in a short Al Jazeera documentary showing two students, both former Israeli soldiers disguised in kuffiyehs, spraying a substance out of a small bottle among the pro-Palestine protesters.
The events that followed, including the sacking of a tenured law school professor who denounced the spray attack and a legal settlement that awarded nearly $400,000 to one of the attack’s perpetrators, embody the transformation of Columbia into a space that increasingly resembles the apartheid state in Israel that pro-Palestine students have been challenging.
“You’ve already created two classes of citizens in Israel, and now you’re creating two classes on college campuses,” says Stephen Rohde, retired civil rights and liberties lawyer specializing in the First Amendment and a member of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice.
Catherine Curran-Groome outside the Columbia campus, which she is no longer allowed to enter.
(Photo: Ash Marinaccio)
Layla Saliba is pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Columbia.
(Photo: Ash Marinaccio)
At least ten of the protesters ended up seeking medical care, with symptoms such as burning eyes, breathing problems, nausea, extreme fatigue and long-term vaginal bleeding.
Curran-Groome was admitted to the hospital twice within one week of the protest, first for breathing problems and then seven hours of vomiting. Curran-Groome’s diagnosis from Mount Sinai was “chemical exposure,” as shown in her medical records.
Both times, the doctors were a little skeptical of my story, and they ran all sorts of tests thinking it was the flu or COVID, or this, or that, and both times all the tests came out negative. So it was sort of by a process of elimination that they started to believe me.
For months after the incident, Curran-Groome, Khan and two other women experienced long-term bleeding. “I went to urgent care because I was bleeding for two weeks nonstop after the skunking. I got my period two weeks earlier than I was supposed to, and then kept bleeding–really bad, cramps, really heavy,” said Khan. “This is the first time it ever happened where something threw it out of whack,” she continued, saying the doctors told her it was either chemical exposure or stress. “Never once before was my period disregulated because of stress,” said Khan, who ended up “bleeding for long periods” until April.
Khan’s City MD diagnosis paperwork states “exposure to potentially hazardous chemical” and “irregular periods.” In the Al Jazeera video, a Jewish participant of the CUAD action shares her medical paperwork from Mount Sinai. “I went in for severe eye pain, and the cause was chemical inhalation,” she tells Al Jazeera.
Saliba’s City MD medical records also indicate “exposure to potentially hazardous chemical,” “nausea,” “fatigue,” “headache” and eye “irritation.” She said, “The chronic pain that I dealt with with my endometriosis was really, really bad.” Saliba was diagnosed with PTSD after the incident:
I was scared to go on campus for a really long time. Still when I’m at the spot where we got sprayed with chemicals, it gives me anxiety. I had nightmares; I couldn’t sleep properly.
The students thought they may have been sprayed with Skunk, a chemical weapon used by the Israeli Defense Forces predominantly to disperse crowds of Palestinian protesters.
Curran-Groome lived in the West Bank for five years before coming to Columbia for grad school to study Palestine in the fall of 2023. She experienced Skunk as an English teacher in a refugee camp in the West Bank a few years ago.
It was used on homes there. People would just have to throw out all of their furniture, because no amount of washing would be able to get the stench out of it, and it even seeps into the walls.
Saliba, who is Palestinian American and lost 15 family members in the Gaza genocide, learned from speaking with Palestinians in the West Bank after the incident that Skunk is “designed to stick to any soft or porous surface, and it doesn’t take very much. You only need a few tiny particles of it.”
The affected students claim the university did very little to help them. They filed a public safety complaint and went to faculty seeking support. They visited Columbia Health, where Curran-Groome says the doctors took the aftermath of the chemical attack “very seriously” and that her doctor “was absolutely shocked that Columbia administration had not notified Columbia Health that this had happened.”
“I am a member of an institution that has a duty of care and responsibility towards its students. The university reneged on that responsibility. They knew who [the affected] students were, because the students would go to various offices on campus and complain about this and want help and seek medical attention, and nothing came of it,” Dr. X, a Barnard professor who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal told The Indypendent.
According to the students who were sprayed, Columbia did not communicate with them or release any statement regarding the event until, they point out, the day after an Intercept investigation was published on Jan. 22, 2024. The only recourse the university ever provided them, say the students, was to notify some of them after the attack occurred that there was a rack of clothing they could peruse for free, but by that time, they had already replaced their belongings that reeked after the protest.
The university did, however, suspend the two students who sprayed the chemical in May. But in October, it was announced that one of the students reached a settlement with the university for $395,000 for wrongful suspension. The lawsuit the student filed against Columbia in April claimed his act was “a harmless expression of his speech.” A Republican staff report by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce claimed, without providing supporting evidence, that it was not in fact military-grade Skunk spray but a “fart spray” purchased on Amazon that the students used on the crowd.
Curran-Groome says none of students who experienced side effects were ever contacted by the House investigators. “I’m not sure what kind of investigation only talks to people on one side,” she said.
The Indy contacted Columbia’s press office for comment on its investigation of the chemical attack, and a university spokesperson referred us to a Columbia Public Safety update, which states, “We are writing to provide an update regarding a January 19, 2024, incident on campus: The ‘foul-smelling substance’ sprayed during a demonstration was not any bio-chemical weapon, illicit substance or personal protective spray. Rather, the substance sprayed was a non-toxic, legal, novelty item that can be purchased online and in stores throughout the country.” It does not provide any information about how that conclusion was reached.
According to Dr. X and another professor who provided an anonymous tip to The Indy, some faculty who inquired were “expressly told that samples were collected and those chemicals were being tested. Some will say it’s NYPD; some will say that there were independent samples also taken,” Dr. X said.
Why not make public the findings of what the chemicals were?
Regardless, the professor says,
It no longer serves any purpose for us to call it Skunk spray, as it hasn’t been proven. Even if it is fart spray, it is demonstrably not harmless. You could buy a lot of things on Amazon, and if you use those things to do harm to your fellow students, then that is demonstrable harm.
‘We’re Fighting Our Own Administration’
Curran-Groome was suspended in the spring for two years and had her over $120,000 scholarship revoked for organizing Gaza solidarity actions at Columbia–what she calls an “effective expulsion.” She, along with two other students, filed a Feb. 3 lawsuit against Columbia’s administration for wrongful suspensions repressing speech on campus. The students argue that they were targeted for their pro-Palestine views, that the university violated its disciplinary policies and that it also violated New York’s tenant laws when it evicted them from student housing.
In April 1968, hundreds of Columbia students took over several campus buildings to protest the university’s ties to the military amid the Vietnam War. Many of those protesters were beaten and arrested by the NYPD. In the 1980s, students engaged in civil disobedience to demand the university divest from companies with ties to apartheid South Africa, winning that struggle. Over time, Columbia would come to celebrate its activist history and promote itself to prospective students as a university that welcomed dissent. It began to betray that identity after Hamas’ bloody incursion into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Oct. 9, 2023, after Israel had begun its nonstop bombardment of Gaza, around 20 student groups at Columbia released a statement extending condolences to Israelis and Palestinians who had experienced loss. It also called for an end to Israeli apartheid and condemned discrimination against Palestinians, urging Columbia to “stand against such discrimination.”
In April, Palestine Legal filed a Title VI discrimination complaint against the university on behalf of four students who have been the target of “extreme harassment” since Oct. 9, 2023, “including receiving multiple death threats.” It states that shortly after the publication of the student statement, Palestinian, pro-Palestine, Arab and Muslim students “began to get doxed by off-campus groups and fellow students.” In one instance, a doxing truck–paid for by the right-wing, anti-Palestinian group Accuracy in Media–circled Columbia’s campus with the photos and names of students alleged to be members of groups that released the statement.
Some faculty expressed concern to the administration about this smearing of students as antisemites. One of those professors, who we’ll call Dr. Y, spoke with The Indypendent, asking to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “When we went to Columbia… they said, ‘We can’t do anything,’” the professor told The Indypendent.
And that’s exactly when we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re not just fighting some random guy outside with money. We’re fighting our own administration, which 100% regulates what’s happening on a public street all of the time.’
Columbia also formed the Task Force on Antisemitism in November 2023 amid growing political pressure regarding criticism of Israel on campus. It is made up of three pro-Israel Jewish faculty members–Ester R. Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann and David M. Schizer–to the exclusion of the many Jewish faculty members that are critical of Israel. The task force has come out with two reports, “Columbia University’s Rules on Demonstrations” and “Columbia University Student Experiences of Antisemitism and Recomendations for Promoting Shared Values and Inclusion.” Its forthcoming report will be a curriculum review.
On Sept. 5, dozens of Jewish faculty members at Columbia University and Barnard College delivered a 10-page letter to Columbia’s administration in response to the task force’s second report. It states, “The Task Force equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.” The letter-signers also criticized the report for “neglectful omissions of context and climate,” a research method “that conflates feelings with facts,” the use of “conveniently slippery definitions,” and sometimes “outright factual misrepresentations” of incidents or speech.
Joseph Howley, a professor of classics at Columbia who is Jewish and has spoken out against the university’s repression of pro-Palestine activism, says the creation of the Task Force on Antisemitism and “the way [the university] constituted the group seems to me to be very much in line with what the [Anti-Defamation League] had been demanding from universities and colleges across the country. And that’s before we even get to the way the rightwing MAGA folks, elected politicians who had systematically been targeting public universities for years, really figured out that this protest movement could be a viable wedge to help them expand their assault on private institutions of higher learning. So there’s a kind of unholy marriage that took place last year.”
“The kind of extreme pro-Israel, no-criticism-shall-be-tolerated movement in this country was very ready to try to shut down” pro-Palestine rhetoric at Columbia, says Howley.
They were very ready to exploit the trauma and the fear and the pain that a lot of American Jews felt after October 7th in ways that struck me as very cynical.
Howley points out that the Israeli government has been transparent about its targeting of U.S. universities “for years.” In fact, in November 2023, Israel put together a task force to “carry out covert campaigns at U.S. universities,” Truthout reported in March.
Also in November 2023, Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist student groups–Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)–and some of their members after they held an “unauthorized” walkout following other on-campus actions the university had not sanctioned. They have not yet been reinstated. “Banning” says Rohde,
is the ultimate form of censorship. To remove a group which otherwise would be holding teach-ins, rallies, protests, seminars and, where appropriate, classroom debates, etc. removes the information and the debate right away.
Despite the groups being barred, large numbers of students and faculty continued to protest the war on Gaza. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups that formed in 2016, became active again in October 2023 and moreso in November after the suspensions of JVP and SJP. In 2020, the group had passed a Columbia-College-wide referendum calling for the university to divest from Israel that was overturned by then-University President Lee Bollinger. (Things have since changed. In October, groups began to disafilliate from CUAD and established the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition. Some of them published an op-ed in Columbia Daily Spectator that read, “We regret that CUAD has shifted from a horizontally structured coalition founded on Palestinian liberation to a nebulous organization that is not led by the affinity group of Palestinian student organizers.”)
“I think pro-Israel faculty and organizations were shocked at the number of pro-Palestine students, shocked at the diversity of that group and the numbers and how overwhelming those numbers were in comparison to the Zionist numbers,” Dr. Z, a professor at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus who wished to remain anonymous told The Indy.
In response to the flurry of pro-Palestine action and speech on campus, on April 17, the Republican House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the same committee that investigated the Jan. 19, 2024, chemical attack, held a congressional hearing during which Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who has since resigned, and three other university officials were probed by lawmakers about what they deemed antisemitic behavior and thought on campus. Three professors were intensely scrutinized–Katherine Franke; Joseph Mossad, who is of Palestinian descent; and visiting professor from Cornell University and the American University of Cairo, Mohamed Abdou, who had been holding class at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment–which formed in protest of the congressional hearings.
“The reason the encampments became very dangerous is because they opened up the possibility of dreaming different worlds,” Abdou told The Indy.
Part of a Facebook post by Abdou was read aloud by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), where she quoted the first half of a sentence: “Yes, I’m with the muqawamah (the resistance) be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad,” but left out the rest:
but up to a point—given ultimate differences over our ethical political commitments; that’s the difference between a strategy and tactic too.
Shafik then stated at the hearing that Abdou would be fired. (His contract, which up until then was set to be renewed, was allowed to expire.) The professor began to face a slew of harassment. Abdou, who is now back in Egypt without a job, told The Indy he was “being doxed not only for being pro-Palestinian,” but because his research argues “there is no freeing and no land back in Palestine without land back on Turtle Island. This is the reason that Elon Musk called me a traitor; Elise Stefanik; Shai Davidai; Tommy Robinson, you name it. And [they were saying], ‘He not only wants to destroy Israel, he wants to destroy America.’” Abdou went on to detail what the months, which included receiving multiple death threats, following the hearings were like for him:
Zionist faculty, students, and right-wingers like the Proud Boys were videotaping and taking photos of me, unbeknown, in my own office, at the encampment… I had people spitting in my direction as I was walking… Once I had two Zionist students walk behind me: ‘Hamas Professor, how do you feel that my friend over here–he’s a former IOF solider–how do you feel about the fact that he killed Palestinians? Does that enrage you?’… I was walking towards my home with a fellow colleague on a Saturday morning, and on my street, a Zionist who’s having breakfast looks at me and says, “Professor Abdou, F you.”… I was also recognized after I went to give a talk at Wesleyan University. I’m riding the train on my way back. I’m very exhausted, and so I got some shut eye, and I woke up to a woman videotaping me saying, “Yes, this is Mohammed Abdou, the Hamas professor.”
The School of General Studies
Columbia’s School of General Studies, an undergraduate college for non-traditional students, started a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University in 2019 (most Palestinians, denied the right to return to Israel, cannot participate in this program). In addition to providing mentoring services to U.S. veterans, General Studies does so for Israeli veterans. The college’s current student body president, Maya Platek, was a spokesperson for the IDF prior to enrolling at Columbia.
At the General Studies gala in the spring, eight students say they were harassed for wearing kuffiyehs. One Arab student reported being called sharmouta, which means “bitch” in Hebrew and Arabic, by an Israeli student. In a video viewed by The Indy, a student rips the kuffieyeh out of the hands of a pro-Palestine student and then pushes her. In a document that was sent to the administration and viewed by The Indy, the eight students outlined the forms of harassment they faced from Israeli students, which also included one of them being punched and kicked. To their knowledge, nothing ever came of the discrimination complaintsthey filed, in which they also requested the university review the venue’s surveillance footage from that night, as only one of the incidents was caught on video.
The university responded with a much greater sense of urgency after another incident last spring at an alumni mixer for General Studies students. In this case, the accused was an Arab student who tried to approach Lisa Rosen-Metch, the dean of General Studies, twice at the mixer but was thwarted by other students who said Rosen-Metch didn’t want to speak with them. The student, who spoke to The Indypendent on the condition of anonymity, said they were hit with a harassment complaint that resulted in a warning. The student filed a discrimination report the day after the incident. They told The Indypendent they felt dumbfounded and “overwhelmingly discriminated against.”
Meanwhile, Saliba has received several conduct reports since last fall. She says in the spring semester, a lawyer from Debevoise and Plimpton, a law firm that has represented the Sackler family, interrogated her during one of her disciplinary hearings and that the university misrepresented the lawyer as a Columbia employee. She has been told by the university she cannot involve her own lawyer in disciplinary processes.
In the most recent conduct report she received, Saliba says she was found guilty by association, because she didn’t author the Columbia Spectator article or Instagram posts of concern in the report. One of the Instagram posts has a slide titled “The Right to Resist and Return” and another outlines Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition’s divestment demands. Saliba also says pro-Israel Professor Shai Davidai continues to harass her online while he is being investigated after she filed a harassment complaint against him for doing just that.
“What the school has done is created a two-tier system of justice,” says Saliba.
If you are a Zionist, you can get away with pretty much anything. But if you are a Palestinian or you support Palestine, you are held under a microscope. Anything you say or do, you can get in trouble for.
A Silenced Campus
While the fall 2023 and spring 2024 semesters at Columbia were marked by protest and debate, the campus has since become much quieter. Students and faculty speak out less, and when they do, they often face disciplinary action. An anonymous General Studies student says,
I definitely feel like less people are speaking out because… now you’ve seen what the consequences look like when you engage in pro-Palestine speech… so it discourages people from fucking around and finding out.
Katherine Franke, a well-known Columbia Law School professor who has been vocal about her support for Palestinian rights, was forced to resign in January. A pressure campaign against her was launched after she criticized the behavior of the Israeli students who sprayed the chemical on protesters last year and questioned the university’s student exchange program with Israel in an interview on Democracy Now!. Franke wrote an open letter after making the decision to step down, stating, “Upon reflection, it became clear to me that Columbia had become such a hostile environment, that I could no longer serve as an active member of the faculty.” She detailed various forms of harassment:
Over the last year I have had several people posing as students come to my office to seek my advice about student protests while they were secretly videotaping me and then edited versions of those recordings were published on right-wing social media sites… I received several death threats at my home. I regularly receive emails that express the hope that I am raped, murdered, and otherwise assaulted on account of my support of Palestinian rights. I have had law school colleagues follow me from the subway to my office in the law school, yelling at me in front of students that I am a Hamas-supporter and accusing me of supporting violence against Israeli women and children. Colleagues in the law school have videotaped me without my consent and then shared it with right-wing organizations outside the law school. And I have had students enroll in my classes with the primary purpose of creating situations in which they can provoke discussions that they can record, post online, and then use to file complaints against me with the university.
“There’s a whole ecosystem of law firms, alums, current professors, trustees and the antisemitism task force that seem to all be working hand-in-hand in some way to fundamentally reshape the university,” says Dr. Z.
Over 200 students, some of whom are Jewish, will soon receive the results of recent disciplinary hearings for their participation in the three Gaza solidarity encampments at the university in the spring; at least five staff members have been fired since the spring semester; half a dozen cases are currently churning against faculty, says a source familiar with the subject; 116th Street, a public street that runs through campus, has been closed off to all but Columbia ID holders; facial recognition is being used to target pro-Palestine students; professors are updating their syllabi to state they can’t be filmed in class; and students are facing disciplinary action as a result of complaints filed against them for pro-Palestine social media posts.
The university can bring charges of violations of rules of conduct against students, faculty and staff. Also, various types of complaints can be filed against faculty and students. While those against faculty can originate from inside or outside of the university, some types against students–but not those claiming discrimination–can only be filed by people within the university. The pro-Palestine people who are targeted by these complaints also often face harassment and doxing from external sites, such as Canary Mission, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus and Jew Hate Database, to name a few.
“There is a huge online mechanism of doxing, highlighting and complaining against [students and faculty],” says Dr. X. “We don’t know if they’re originating outside or they’re being amplified outside, but there’s certainly many, many external websites. Some of them claim to be affiliated. They claim to be alumni. Some of them just generally claim to be watchdogs.” The professor went on to explain that when U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Fancesca Albanese came to speak at Columbia in the fall, there were “complaints that originated from people in the room, so ostensibly students who either record or say things online that then get picked up. There’s certainly a lot of footage and photographs that are used in both student and faculty doxing, which have to be generated by people in the community.” The people who are recording, says the professor,
are tagging a network of people, including Ritchie Torres, including Elise Stefanik.
“It’s pretty clear that there are people who are still upset about Palestine solidarity protests last year and still want to see some consequences or punishment for stuff they didn’t like,” says Professor Howley.
And it’s pretty clear there are politicians who are still eager for any way to apply pressure or do damage to universities and are happy to use the idea of rampant rule breaking or insufficient discipline as a blunt instrument. This kind of alliance was a toxic mix a year ago, and it’s going to remain a dangerous climate for higher education for the foreseeable future.
The Indypendent asked the university to respond to allegations of a repressive campus climate, and it declined to comment.
Defining Antisemitism
Columbia University has taken many steps to suppress criticism of Israel and make pro-Israel Jewish students feel more comfortable since the fall of 2023. Among those, it set up the antisemitism task force; cracked down on events and demonstrations critical of Israel; changed its protest and event policies; and on several occasions changed its means of interrogating and disciplining students, later backpedaling somewhat under pressure from the university senate. Columbia has not, however, taken such action to support pro-Palestine, Arab and Muslim students who face harassment.
Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism did not define antisemitism after releasing its first report, but in the second report, it defined it as “prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.”
Professor Howley says he doesn’t see a prevailing climate of antisemitism on campus, but that he is aware of instances of anti-Jewish harassment, and that antisemitism is made more common by the fact that Israel says its oppression of Palestinians is carried out “in the name of Jewish safety” and that “Israeli soldiers are wrapped in our holiest symbols.”
“If you are pro-Israel, if you are trying to defend the Netanyahu government and its policies, and you are confronted with objective facts like the number of innocent Palestinians who’ve been killed, the devastation of college and schools, the devastation and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and the litany could go on–what do you say to defend Israel?” says Rohde.
One of the answers is, you demean, undermine and delegitimize the critics of Israel. And when you do that, the easiest weapon at hand is to call them antisemites.
The false equivalence that has been created between criticism of the state of Israel and antisemitism has created an atmosphere of self-censorship at Columbia and other universities that have been similarly targeted, says Dr. Y.
“The easiest way to think about what has happened since November [2023] is that Columbia has been on a lockdown on speech, movement, protests. We are swiping in to our individual buildings, swiping in to the campus. Normal things like access to library for alumni, for visiting scholars, for people who live in the city, were shut down,” said the professor.
The culture on campus is sort of like a post-traumatic zone where people are speaking in whispers. I taught a class that I was teaching in the fall of 2023 again this past fall, and it’s remarkable how quiet the students have become as a result of whatever has happened on campus–quiet in the sense they aren’t able to express themselves, talk about texts in the right way, fully, without fear of surveillance.