With signs on protesters’ tents and kaffiyehs around their necks, the pro-Palestinian encampment movement sweeping college campuses nationwide arrived Thursday in the nation’s capital.
The demonstration, organized by the DMV coalition of Students for Justice in Palestine, brought together students, faculty and advocates from across the region to a lawn at George Washington University. It started with tents in the wee hours, and by the afternoon it had swelled to include drums, bullhorns and hundreds of people. Some called for schools to cut ties with Israel and protect the free speech of pro-Palestinian student organizers. Some chanted for the end of the state of Israel.
The demonstration on GWU’s law campus remained mostly peaceful through the afternoon; students near the 30 or so tents read and typed on their laptops. But anticipation was building. University officials asked demonstrators to relocate to a different park and said the protest could last only until 7 p.m., according to an email and a note posted online from the school. As of 5:30 p.m., the demonstrators showed no sign of leaving.
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“We’re here to stay,” said Mahmoud Beydoun, 20, a junior at GWU who is Palestinian. “We have certain demands, and we want them to be heard and met.”
GWU President Ellen M. Granberg, in emails to the school Thursday, said she had requested the assistance of D.C. police officers after “multiple instructions made by GWPD to relocate to an alternative demonstration site on campus went unheeded by encampment participants.”
“We will not allow students from other local colleges or unaffiliated individuals to trespass on our campus,” she said in the statement. “We can and will enforce the time, place, and manner restrictions that continue to govern activities on our campus.”
By 4:45 p.m., dozens of police officers were stationed near campus. They were located blocks away from the protest, where demonstrators were relaxing on the grass, chatting and eating pizza.
Meanwhile on Thursday, police confronted protesters at college campuses across the country — deploying a stun gun at Emory University in Atlanta and arresting more than 100 people at Emerson College in Boston. The student movement has taken off in the week since Columbia University deployed New York police officers to arrest protesters occupying its lawn. Students and faculty protesting in D.C. on Thursday cited the activists at Columbia as inspiration.
At GWU, a campus located in the heart of downtown Washington, student outrage over the war in Gaza had been building since the Oct. 7 attack. In October, Students for Justice in Palestine projected images on a library saying “End the siege on Gaza” and “GW the blood of Palestine is on your hands.” The university suspended the student group in November, the school newspaper, the GW Hatchet, reported, a move many students saw as unfair treatment of those who criticize Israel.
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Beydoun, who is studying international relations, said student organizers at GWU had been following videos of death and destruction in Gaza for months, wrestling with feelings of despair and a desire to make change. Many of them were Palestinian, he said, and had family or friends in Gaza.
Since the war began, at least 34,305 people have been killed and 77,293 injured in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
The GWU students ultimately formed a coalition with regional Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, and together they organized marches and sit-ins. Then, they watched as Columbia University students launched an encampment and brought even more attention to Gaza. Beydoun said they knew they needed to do the same. And they knew that if they could pull it off in the nation’s capital, they’d show just how united they were in their demands.
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“We’ve been very mentally strained and we found a way to do it,” he said. “It was the networking power. It was the student power.”
Grace Chinowsky, 20, the incoming editor in chief of the Hatchet, woke up at 6:30 Thursday morning to a call from one of her reporters.
“It’s happening,” the reporter told her.
“Let’s go,” she replied.
She ripped off a piece of blue tape, wrote “PRESS,” fastened it to her jacket, and arrived to find tents erected on University Lawn, a field in the middle of her school’s law school campus.
By 9:30 a.m., she was parked with her laptop on a nearby bench, chronicling the demonstration with a team of student journalists. They watched as a group of about a dozen people banged drums and led chants from the H Street sidewalk. Through bullhorns, the demonstrators called for a cease-fire, an end to all aid to Israel, and the restoration of Palestinian borders to what they were in 1948, before the state of Israel was established.
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“We don’t want two states,” a demonstrator said. “We’re taking back ’48.”
About a dozen people echoed the chant, holding signs that said “End the occupation now.”
A few feet away, two George Washington University police officers watched the demonstration. One had an AirPod in and sipped his coffee.
“Among many, many students on campus, especially those here today, there is a strong feeling of injustice,” Chinowsky said. “Both about the violence happening abroad in Gaza, and also how university officials have chosen to respond to it.”
She stressed that there is a long tradition on campus of students advocating in support of Palestine, even before the Oct. 7 attack. She said that she recognized classmates and professors in attendance Thursday but speculated that at least some people demonstrating on the sidewalk — which is located just outside of GWU’s property — may not be enrolled at the school.
About 10 a.m., a man who said he was a university student walked into the crowd holding an Israeli flag above his head. A school police officer stepped into the crowd, apparently trying to separate the pro-Israel demonstrator from the swarm of people around him, who chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Police then seemed to want the man to leave the area — to which he responded by holding up his flag, shaking his head and saying to police, “This is my campus.” Police momentarily stepped back, before the man appeared to push or make contact with a pro-Palestinian demonstrator in front of him.
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At that point, the officers forced the man away from the demonstration and into a university building, with his hands behind his back.
Around the same time about two miles away, a group of protesters gathered on the steps of Healy Hall at Georgetown University. They chanted “Free, free Palestine” and cautioned those gathered not to speak with police or the media.
Around 11:30, the protesters wound their way through the neighborhood’s cobblestone streets, headed to meet up with fellow protesters at GW. Briefly blocking traffic on M Street, they chanted “Israel is a terror state” and “Down, down, Genocide Joe” as passing cars honked in support.
Just before 12:15 p.m., the group arrived on the GWU campus to cheers from people around the tents. The two groups chanted in unison, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
At the encampment a few hours later, Fida Adely, an associate professor of anthropology at Georgetown, linked hands with other faculty and staff from area universities. They formed a human chain around the tents.
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“We may not be the ones holding encampments, but we need to be here to support our students who are really willing to kind of suspend their studies, suspend their academic lives, and be out here to fight against the genocide,” Adely said, dressed in a light blue regalia gown from her alma mater, Columbia. “This is a turning point in our history.”
As the university’s deadline for clearing the yard approached, three counterprotesters holding Israeli flags stood about 20 yards from the encampment.
Dylan Lyman, a GWU senior from Long Island who was holding one of the flags, said he showed up to demonstrate against some of the chants he heard.
“We’re Zionists,” he said. “We think Israel should exist.”
Lyman said he recognized classmates on the other side of the yard and hoped the division over the war would not end friendships.
Clarence Williams contributed to this report.
