From Campus to the Courts, the “Palestine Exception” Rules University Crackdowns

LAST WEEK, police at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland arrested four students on felony vandalism charges in relation to protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The students were transferred to the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, jail, a detention facility subject to calls for closure over inhumane conditions, abuse by jail staff, and the use of solitary confinement. All four students were released from jail over the weekend.

The arrests are part of the long arm of the crackdowns on campus protests that started in the spring and kept pace this fall. School officials had described the spray paint as “antisemitic.”

A local news clip shows a wall spray-painted with the names of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and Haiti. A building entrance was also splashed with red paint, including handprints, with posted signs that say, “Your school funds genocide.”

The protest and its aftermath came as Case Western was facing a federal civil rights complaint alleging bias against protesters and Palestinian students. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation at Case Western.

The latest arrests were part of an expansive crackdown: The school spent more than $250,000 on public safety staffing, equipment, and remediation after tearing down protest encampments, including removing signs and painting over murals on a campus “spirit wall,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.  (The school said it could not comment on the criminal investigation.)

Case Western issued notices of interim suspension or other warnings to students after protests in the spring and barred some graduating students from campus. Only one student, however, was suspended for the fall semester: Yousef Khalaf, president of the school’s undergraduate chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Among seven violations referenced in the notices, Khalaf faces school disciplinary allegations for engaging in intimidating behavior, including using the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” He is barred from campus until the spring of 2026.

Khalaf said he was treated differently than other protesters. His was the only case for which the school hired an outside firm, BakerHostetler, he said. He said SJP students have been contacted by school administrators for posting flyers or attending group events. (BakerHostetler and Case Western did not respond to a request for comment.)

“They don’t treat any other club this way,” Khalaf said. “We see very clearly the ‘Palestine exception’ being applied here.”

With Israel’s war on Gaza entering its second year, Khalaf is among thousands of students and faculty members still being targeted in universities’ battles over harsh protest crackdowns, free speech, academic independence, and discrimination.

The fights are playing out online, in campus quads, internal disciplinary proceedings, and in the courts. Organizers among the students and faculty say universities are retaliating against them for their activism and restricting their civil liberties and freedom of expression while claiming to uphold both.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again.”

As campus protests reached their height in May, Dahlia Saba, a second-year Palestinian American graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote an op-ed supporting the demonstrators’ demands. She called on the school to address calls to divest from industries that profit from Israel’s war. She and her co-author Vignesh Ramachandran, another graduate student, were met with student nonacademic disciplinary investigations that relied solely on the op-ed for evidence.

“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again,” Saba said. “They’re low-level sanctions to begin with, but the university is pursuing sanctions against many people on very little evidence.”

The issue is not so much the severity of the sanctions, Saba said, but using punishments to chill students’ speech. The disciplinary actions become a tool, she said, to help universities keep track of people involved in protests for Palestine.

“They are basically trying to get any sort of sanction on people’s records,” Saba said, “so that if they speak up again, if they do anything that criticizes the university’s investment policy, or if they in any way speak out in support of Palestine or in solidarity with Palestine, that students could be scared that the university could bring further charges against them that could then enact harsher consequences.”

Last month, 13 police officers stormed the home of student organizers at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a raid on suspicion of a month-old incident of vandalism in connection to Gaza protests. Pomona College unilaterally suspended 10 students for the remainder of the academic year for allegedly participating in protests for divestment.

Schools across the country spent this summer preparing to preempt pro-Palestinian activism come fall. At a campus safety conference, more than 450 people working on the issue discussed, among other topics, “preparing for, responding to, and recovering from on-campus protests.”  

That preparation was evident as schools readied themselves last month for protests planned around the October 7 anniversary. Ahead of planned walkouts and protests across New York City, administrators at Columbia University warned the community to prepare for potential violence. The night before the walkout, Columbia University Law School told professors to call campus police on protesters.

Meanwhile, students and advocacy groups are pushing back on university administrators for their responses to protests and battling new policies governing protests and freedom of expression that they say show an anti-Palestinian bias.

The crackdown on student protests has led to a raft of court cases and federal complaints. Students at the University of California, Irvine sued the school chancellor and regents in July, saying the school had suspended protesters without due process. The school is arguing that an upcoming December court date is unnecessary because the suspensions have ended, said attorney Thomas Harvey, who is representing students. 

“The university and the state are using whatever tools they have to stop people from protesting war crimes and genocide paid for by tax dollars and invested in by their university,” Harvey said. “Their argument is effectively about the required decorum while protesting mass death and human suffering.”

Last month, prosecutors charged at least 49 people, including Irvine students and faculty, with misdemeanors for failing to vacate encampments this spring. Arraignments will continue through mid-December, and cases that go to trial won’t do so until January or February.

The San Diego City Attorney’s Office dismissed all charges against student protesters at University of California, San Diego earlier this month. Prosecutors in Irvine, however, have shown no indication that they’ll dismiss their charges, even amid pleas from Irvine Mayor Farrah N. Khan.

Harvey, the students’ attorney, said the school is fearful of losing donors.

“It’s to their benefit financially to publicly show that they are, in quotes, cracking down,” he said. Students and faculty are facing criminal charges and disciplinary conduct hearings from the school, including suspensions and probation, he said. “It’s just a climate of real crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices.” 

Similar complaints alleging discrimination against protesters and Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students were filed against Case Western and Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is under a federal civil rights investigation. (I co-teach a class at Rutgers’s New Brunswick campus.)

In September, the University of Maryland moved to cancel a protest organized by SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace after receiving complaints about the event. The group Palestine Legal and the Council on American-Islamic Relations then filed suit over the protest cancellation. (The school declined to comment and pointed to a statement from the university president.)

Last month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to allow the demonstration to go ahead. The suit, which claims that the university violated students’ First Amendment rights by canceling the protest, is still pending in court.

Shatha Shahin, a third-year law student at Case Western and the president of the law school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said the university tried to make an example of Khalaf, the undergraduate SJP president.

“There is definitely a hostility in the way they’ve treated and used Yousef as this mastermind for everything that went on behind the scenes for all the Palestine advocacy,” Shahin said.

In August, Case Western began enforcing new rules governing speech and protest activity. Administrators prohibited encampments and the use of projected images, microphones, or bullhorns. Protests larger than 20 people now require approval from a committee.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel, but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

“It’s very deliberate, and it’s very calculated,” said Maryam Assar, an Ohio attorney working with student protesters who is herself an alumnus of the School of Law at Case Western. “That’s why it’s really problematic that they’re going through all of these steps to silence them.”

Assar said the contrast between the treatment of pro-Palestinian organizers and other groups was stark.

“They speak with Hillel, they talk to Hillel,” she said, referring to the avowedly pro-Israel campus Jewish organization, “but they won’t even talk to these kids.”

While some student protesters face retaliation from administrators, others say they’ve also faced discrimination on campus. A New Jersey man was charged in April with vandalizing the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University–New Brunswick on Eid al-Fitr. That same month, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the New Jersey chapter of CAIR filed a federal Title VI complaint against Rutgers alleging that the school had demonstrated a pattern of bias against Muslim and Arab students.

In a statement to The Intercept, Megan Schumann, the head of public relations at Rutgers, said the school was fully cooperating with the civil rights investigation and that the university takes seriously every claim of bias.

At the school’s protest encampment in May, a counterprotester was filmed hitting a pro-Palestine student. Schumann said Rutgers University Police Department charged the man with bias intimidation, harassment, and simple assault and that the case was pending in court.

The school negotiated with students to disband campus encampments later that month. In December 2023, Rutgers–New Brunswick had suspended its chapter of SJP for a year. The club was reinstated in January, but in August, the school slapped SJP with another suspension that is expected to last until July 2025.

“The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space.”

Rutgers students have also filed dozens of complaints of bias toward Arab and Muslim students from professors and other faculty. In November, student protesters disrupted a Rutgers event with Bruce Hoffman, a self-described Zionist who works as a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. A group of four Muslim students wearing hijabs who were not part of the disruption said that, after they left the event, a professor approached them. According to the student and her friends, who confirmed the story, the professor filmed them, telling them to “smile” for the camera, and accused them of ruining the event.

“She was pointing her finger in my face,” said the student, who, like her friends, asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation by the school. At least two of the students filed bias reports against the professor; a copy of one was provided to The Intercept. “The professor clearly targeted students who were evidently Muslim and violated our personal space while instigating this incident outside of the classroom which we had already left from,” she wrote. (Schumann, the Rutgers spokesperson, declined to comment on questions about specific allegations against faculty or staff.)

“This is a falsified account of the events that occurred and printing these comments about me would not only be considered defamation, but also likely rise to the level of slander,” the professor said in a statement to The Intercept. They declined to comment further.

The professor also filed a bias complaint against the students. While none of the students were found guilty of conduct violations as a result of the complaint, one was told that they were no longer eligible for a resident assistant position because of an outstanding complaint against them.

Universities have demonstrated a willingness to cave to the demands of donors to try to control free speech among students. At Case Western, Assar, the Ohio attorney, suggested such pressure was brought to bear.

“They’re really freaked out because donors are upset that this is happening,” Assar said of school administrators, “and they imagine that they can control these kids.”

When pro-Palestine students at the University of Maryland began planning their October 7 anniversary protest, the school president and other administrators initially said they would protect the group’s right to hold the protest, said Abel Amene, a fourth-year student and a board member of the school’s SJP chapter who helped organize the protest. (He is also a member of the University of Maryland student government and an elected volunteer member of D.C’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, but did not speak in either capacity.)

“Then they began indicating that they were getting pressure through emails, through various Zionist organizations on campus and off campus, pressuring them to cancel our event,” he said.

Shortly after expressing their support for free speech, administrators proceeded to cancel the event. They said there had been “overwhelming outreach” about the protest, even while acknowledging that it posed no threat.

After the federal court order forced the school to allow the protest to proceed, Abel said, the school still took actions that restricted the demonstration. The grounds were staffed with police and non-police security, metal detectors installed, and a drone deployed over the event all day. Fencing put up by the university virtually cut the protest space in half. (In response to questions about the protest, Hafsa Siddiqi, the media relations manager for the university, pointed to an October 1 statement from school President Darryll Pines after the court ruled to let the protest proceed.)

The debacle over the protest showed the school’s bias against activists for Palestine, Abel said, and for pro-war forces, noting that University of Maryland touts its strategic partnerships with weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

“This is just part of a pattern we’ve seen,” he said, “where we are treated as threats and presumed to be a danger to students and a danger to the university.”

The repression of pro-Palestine activism on campus started well before October 7, Assar pointed out — including at her own alma mater. When Assar was a law student in 2022, Case Western President Eric Kaler denounced a student government vote to divest from companies that harm Palestinians as “naive” and antisemitic.

“He really created this atmosphere,” Assar said, “where speaking up in support of Palestinians and their right to be free from occupation or not have their homes stolen — he made that basically into, ‘You’re a problem if you speak up.’”

Years earlier, in 2017, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison condemned a vote by the student government to pass legislation calling on the school to divest from corporations involved in human rights violations, including in Israel.

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way.”

“We have seen the universities respond to these demands for more democratic institutions by reacting in exactly the opposite way,” said Saba, the Madison graduate student, “by restricting the rights that students have on campus and by increasing how much they can punish students.”

Saba said she’s felt alienated on campus as a Palestinian American student. The school used her membership in the school’s SJP chapter as a piece of evidence in the charges against her.

“There’s been a sense on this campus for a long time that Palestinian voices are not supposed to be heard,” Saba said. “These disciplinary investigations, by punishing or penalizing students for having any affiliation with student groups that speak in solidarity with Palestinians, they’re essentially telling Palestinian students that they can’t find community on this campus.”

“Because when the environment is so oppressive, when our institutions are invested in genocide, and when our taxpayer dollars are invested in genocide, the only rational response would be to try to organize against that. But these schools are criminalizing that organizing.”

The post From Campus to the Courts, the “Palestine Exception” Rules University Crackdowns appeared first on The Intercept.