Student leaders said Monday they’re planning to stay indefinitely at George Washington University’s encampment protesting the Israel-Hamas war — even if it costs them good grades in school and job opportunities off campus.
Close to 100 tents were scattered across University Yard as campers studied, napped and socialized while onlooking students passed through on their way to class.
The peaceful midday mood came after a raucous scene roughly 12 hours earlier when demonstrators retook the commons by breaking through metal barriers erected on the downtown D.C. campus — a short walk from State Department headquarters in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
The remains of the barrier were piled into the middle of the open courtyard that faces H Street Northwest, with a traffic cone used to hold up a Palestinian flag near the top of the heap.
GWU’s encampment, now nearly a week old, is similar to camps sprouting up at other higher learning institutions, including the high-profile protest at Columbia University in New York City.
As with those camps, organizers in the District said they aren’t leaving anytime soon, including after the semester ends next week.
“We are in this for the long haul. I am feeling that this is really powerful,” said Miriam, who acts as a camp spokesperson but declined to give her last name.
“Point blank: We’re gonna have our demands met, no matter what it takes,” said the Georgetown University sophomore.
Like Miriam, many of the protesters who have converged on the GWU commons are from nearby District, Maryland and Virginia universities.
The protesters’ demands include dropping minor criminal charges and school disciplinary measures taken against a handful of students last week, as well as cutting business ties with Israeli academic institutions and with companies selling weapons to the Jewish state.
Miriam said organizers have been talking with university leaders behind the scenes on how those demands could be met.
But another leader, GWU postgraduate student Moataz Salim who has family in Gaza, said the reaction from school officials has not been a “positive response at all so far.”
Mr. Salim said he voted for President Biden in 2020 but says he won’t do it again.
Capitol Hill lawmakers on Monday ratcheted up pressure on District Mayor Muriel Bowser after weekend reports that the mayor told Metropolitan Police to stay out of the standoff between the school and the protesters.
“Whether it is due to incompetence or sympathy for the cause of these Hamas supporters, you are failing to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens by letting a terrorist-supporting mob take over a large area of a university,” Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, wrote in a letter to the mayor. “Your actions are a good reminder of why Washington, D.C., must never become a state.”
Clashes between authorities and demonstrators on college campuses across the country have intensified in recent days, but GWU on Monday afternoon remained relatively calm — so much so that Jewish students opposed to the war are playing key roles in the protest.
Miriam, the spokesperson, said she has “never felt as safe as a Jew than I have felt in this encampment.”
Mr. Salim, the postgrad student, said the camp has avoided antisemitism by being specifically against Israel, and not Jewish people as a whole.
Still, some Jewish students in the camp acknowledged they were reluctant to share their support for the protest with their families.
A first-year GWU student told The Washington Times that she’s keeping her residence in the camp a secret from her mother, at least until she heads home in a few weeks.
“I started off pretty pro-Israel, like, my family’s very Jewish,” the student said, who asked not to be named. “And just as things kept coming out in the news, and after Rafah got bombed, that’s kind of when I realized it was maybe less about the safety of Jews in Israel and more just about leveling Gaza to take back the land.”
Miriam said she and other protesters are willing to risk grades and careers, if that’s what it takes. The cause of peace, she said, is “so much bigger than any grade, any diploma that any of us could receive.”