Almost fifty percent 0f college protestors chanting the pro-Hamas slogan “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” don’t even know to which ‘river’ or ‘sea’ they are referring. Polling by University of California, Berkeley professor Ron Hassner found only 47 percent of students were able to correctly identify the Jordan River as the geographic feature being referenced. When asked if they supported the slogan, 32.8-percent said they supported it enthusiastically while 53.2-percent viewed it some-what approvingly.
College campuses across the United States have seen large demonstrations against the Israeli military response to Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack against the Jewish state on October 7th. The domestic increase in socio-political tensions over the conflict have resulted in several violent attacks has resulted in several violent attacks against Jewish students on campuses. In late October, aggressive pro-Hamas protestors on the Cooper Union campus by-passed security at the school’s library, approaching a group of Jewish students and forcing them to barricade themselves in part of the building for their own safety.
The increasingly anti-semitic protests are likely bolstered, in part, by unprecedented dissent against support for Israel within President Joe Biden’s own government and within the Democrat Party. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) led a protest at the U.S. Capitol which saw demonstrators storm the Cannon House Office Building. Several were arrested after assaulting U.S Capitol Police.
Several university presidents whose campuses have witnessed recent incidents of anti-semitism were called to testify on Capitol Hill last week. Members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce pressed the university leaders on how their institutions were responding to increasingly violent rhetoric – including the “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” chant which some argue is a call for genocide. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, said while the slogan “…is at odds with the value of Harvard, but … we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”
