The College of William & Mary’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — which was placed on probation through the end of the spring semester for aggressive protest tactics — recently made its first public appearance for the fall 2024 semester.
The group held a walk-out protest Sept. 12 as part of a Virginia SJP statewide “Keffiyeh Day,” held one day after the United States commemorated the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Members of the group, some of whom in the past have called for peace, could be heard Thursday calling for “intifada revolution” and chanted “we don’t want two states, take us back to ‘48,” which many view as a call for the destruction of Israel.
The group is also promoting the national Students for Justice in Palestine’s plans for a “week of rage” that is scheduled to take place Oct. 7 through Oct. 11, the same time as the anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel’s civilians.
During the Keffiyeh Day walkout, two members of SJP approached a College Fix reporter and demanded their faces be blurred in pictures. Informed they are on a public campus, the two continued to insist and added: “We don’t want to talk to journalists.”
Officers of William & Mary’s police department at the protest affirmed the reporter’s right to take photographs on a public campus.
In an advertisement for the event on Instagram, the William & Mary chapter encouraged participants to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID despite no college mandate to do so. The group also asked attendees to blur the faces of students in any photos they took.
The protest drew about 50 students at its height, noticeably smaller than demonstrations at previous pro-Gaza events on William & Mary’s campus during the spring semester.
Last school year, the William & Mary SPJ chapter was put on probation through end of the spring 2024 semester for “engaging in conduct that infringes on the rights of others, failure to comply with written instructions, (and) endangering health & safety,” according to a report on organizational conduct history at the college.
“Members of the group prevented vehicular traffic from moving freely and placed themselves in danger,” the report states. “This was the organization’s second violation this academic year. The first violation occurred on October 25, 2023 and resulted in a warning.”
The anti-Israel movement was also at the forefront of William & Mary’s student government elections in the spring semester, seeing incumbent candidates ousted over their support for a “Boycott, Divest, & Sanction” referendum that passed, but was ultimately overruled by the college’s President Katherine Rowe.
Nationally, SJP has received backlash over its rhetoric and violent trends, with the group largely shut down on Florida campuses last fall. Aggressive pro-Gaza protests at several elite institutions have also garnered Congressional investigations over the last year.
During the last school year, William & Mary was rocked by pro-Gaza protests.
In October 2023, a brick with a note attached to it was thrown through a window of the president’s house.
The college has yet to confirm the content of the note, but many students speculate that this was the incident that warranted the group receiving a warning from the school.
In December 2023, a pro-Gaza message reading “your tuition funds genocide, free Palestine” was spray-painted on the doors of the Sadler Center, W&M’s central building on campus housing the college’s largest dining hall and many campus resources and Student Affairs offices.
In April, a secret society known as “The Seven Society” at William & Mary was implicated in the creation and hanging of at least one pro-Gaza banner that was displayed without the college’s permission on “Day for Admitted Students,” a campus source told The College Fix.
Some students said they are disturbed by both the past year’s activism and last week’s protest.
“The rhetoric that was heard at last Thursday’s protest was nothing short of disgusting,” Gabriel Stein, vice president of Tribe for Israel, told The College Fix. “… The last time we had an Intifada, Israelis and Jews died.”
A spokeswoman for the College of William & Mary has yet to respond to a request for comment.
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IMAGE: Edwin Carlson / For The College Fix
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