On Thursday, November 9, at 12:00 p.m., Princeton’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hosted a “Walkout for Palestine” on Princeton’s campus. The protest was coordinated as part of a nationwide campus walkout, with demonstrations also occurring at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere. At the event, Tory reporters were obstructed from filming by protestors as the crowd repeated calls such as “globalize the Intifada.” The Anti-Defamation League has called out SJP for celebrating Hamas’ terroristic actions and contributing to a documented surge in antisemitism.
This episode marks the second anti-Israel protest organized on Princeton’s campus since Hamas’ terror attack on October 7. At the first walkout, held on October 25, Tory reporters were able to film the event without obstruction. At another demonstration held adjacent to campus on October 28, local police intervened when pro-Israel students were surrounded by anti-Israel demonstrators.
The November 9 demonstration began near the south lawn of Frist Campus Center with call-and-response chants of “Free, free, free Palestine,” “From Gaza to Mexico, all these walls have got to go,” and “Louder, louder, say it louder, not a conflict, not a war.” Throughout the demonstration, pro-Israel counter-protestors stood at a distance with large signs displaying the names and faces of the hundreds of Israelis kidnapped on October 7 who are still being held by Hamas. Anti-Israel demonstrators made no mention of the nearly 200 Israeli civilians held hostage by Hamas throughout the event.
The protest grew to approximately 40 students within minutes. The protest was initially advertised as in favor of “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza,” “an end to US military aid to Israel,” and that “Princeton divest from weapons manufacturers,” but subsequent chants were more combative, such as “Resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “There is no peace on stolen land.”
At various points, demonstrators chanted “From Princeton to Gaza, globalize the Intifada” and “There is only one solution: Intifada, revolution.” The Intifada refers to a series of violent riots in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel that resulted in the deaths of over one thousand Israelis from the 1980s to the early 2000s (of whom 78 percent were civilians) and thousands of Palestinian militants and civilians. The second Intifada, which occurred from 2000 to 2005, included suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and sniper fire targeting Israeli civilians.
Around 12:45 p.m., the demonstration had grown to approximately 200 students, and protest organizers led the crowd towards Robertson Hall, where the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) is housed. There, SJP demonstrators demanded that Ronen Shoval, a Lecturer in the Department of Politics, be banned from teaching courses because of his pro-Israel views. Throughout the event, demonstrators accused SPIA of “supporting genocide.” Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs is Princeton’s second most popular major and one of Princeton’s largest departments.
During the protest, protestors used flags, cardboard signs, and keffiyehs to block Tory student journalists from recording. Several protestors approached and confronted Tory Publisher Darius Gross ’24 in an attempt to obstruct his camera, then falsely claimed that recording the event was illegal. New Jersey allows recording in public when there is no reasonable expectation of privacy; moreover, the entirety of the protest occurred either on public property or property of Princeton University, which protects free expression and freedom of the press. Additionally, the University has policies forbidding harassment and intimidation.
Around 1:00 p.m., protest organizers steered the crowd toward Nassau Hall. There, protestors attempted to physically block Tory Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Orbuch ’25 from recording the demonstration. Footage posted on X by Orbuch shows one protestor actively obstructing her camera. For several minutes, Orbuch tries distance herself from the protestor, but the protestor continues following her and standing in front of her while treading on her feet.
The Instagram account of Princeton’s SJP chapter later posted a statement claiming, without evidence, that Orbuch “ran into him and began accusing him of physical assault,” that demonstrators “kept a respectful distance,” and that her allegations were “baseless.” The statement further claimed that “The fact she chose to single him out plays into racist tropes of non-white men aggressing against white women.”
Additionally, the SJP statement baselessly claimed that Tory reporters were present in an effort to “single out, doxx and slander pro-Palestinian activists, especially Arabs and Muslims.” It also alleged that reporters, who kept their cameras fixed on the center of the demonstration, were “putting their cameras right in protesters’ faces” and committing “intimidation” by recording the public walkout.
At Nassau Hall, in addition to chants of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” demonstrators added chants of “We don’t want a two-state, we want ’48.” Asked by the Tory, two protestors declined to comment on whether this referred to the UN-approved two-state solution that was supported by Israel but rejected by every Arab-majority nation. It may also refer to the Arab attempt to destroy Israel in the 1948 War of Independence, during which Israel successfully repelled the invading armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
Another SJP chant in Arabic, “Min al-mayye il al-mayye, falastin ‘arabiyye,” translates to “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.”
In front of Nassau Hall, undergraduate student Jennifer Chavez-Veyna ’25 gave a speech stating that “this did not begin on October 7th; this began the second Israeli colonial feet stepped on indigenous Palestinian land and claimed it as their own.” The Jewish people are indigenous to Israel but have been forcibly displaced over the past 3,000 years. Today, about 45 percent of Israel’s population consists of Mizrahi Jews who have long lived in the Middle East but fled to Israel in the 20th century after facing exile, state-sanctioned discrimination, persecution, and pogroms in their Muslim-majority home countries.
One Jewish student who stood with the silent counter-protestors during the event, Peter Brown ’24, said that he chose not to engage directly with the anti-Israel attendees. “Their violent chants and slogans made it clear that talking to them would be unproductive,” he told the Tory. Students’ calls for a new Intifada meant that “they want more October 7’s” – referring to the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians that left over 1,200 dead.
Another Jewish student, a woman in the class of ’26 who requested anonymity out of fear of future harassment, recalled attempting to document the demonstration. “When they put a sign in front of my face, I moved to a different part of the protest and they followed me. When I moved again, they pushed me and stepped on my foot.” She expressed disappointment that administrators allowed protestors to tail reporters so closely and worried that the University might tolerate greater misconduct. “I don’t think this University has my back, I don’t think it has Jewish students’ backs,” she added.
Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Orbuch ’25 recused herself from this story.
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