On Wednesday, October 25, at 12:00 p.m., a group of Princeton graduate students organized a “Walkout in Solidarity with Palestine” to call for a ceasefire and “free Palestine” during the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Gemma Sahwell and Aditi Rao, Princeton graduate students, guided the crowd of about 300 people in chants that ranged from accusing Israel of “slaughter” and “apartheid” to blaming the US for “committing genocide.” The demonstration was coordinated as part of a nationwide campus walkout organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a “diverse network of students” whose purpose is the “fight for Palestinian liberation.” According to some public officials, SJP backs Hamas.
The demonstration comes on the heels of Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack in which the organization’s militants flooded into Israel from the Gaza Strip, massacring families in their homes, raping women, and abducting civilians – many of whom still remain in captivity in Gaza. Israel has responded by striking at Hamas targets within Gaza and preparing for a ground invasion of the Strip.
Princeton’s SJP chapter, formerly known as the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP), has previously been embroiled in antisemitic controversy. Last week, the group organized a “vigil” during which speakers for the group accused Israel of “colonization, genocide, [and] apartheid” and compared “Israeli politicians” to “Hitler.” They told the audience, “We are reading the words of Israeli politicians using the same language that Hitler did.”
The October 25 demonstration was advertised by SJP to all residential college listservs and promoted on the organization’s social media. The demonstration opened with an unidentified student organizer leading call-and-response chants. Chants included “One, two, three four, occupation no more. Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terror state,” “Free, free, free Palestine,” and “What do we want? Ceasefire. When do we want it? Now.”
Many of the slogans used at the walkout called for the erasure of Israel or elimination of Jewish presence in the region. Organizers led a chant of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” a phrase identified as antisemitic by the American Jewish Committee because it calls for a unified Palestinian state in place of Israel. The demonstrators also called on Princeton to “divest” from Israel, chanting “not another penny for Israel’s crimes,” and demanded an end to “the US war machine.”
At the demonstration, Sahwell read a prepared statement declaring that the demonstrators “condemn the ethnic cleansing, collective and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.” She then led the audience in a call for an Intifada. Intifada, or “uprising” in Arabic, refers to periods of violence against Jews in Israel in the late 1980s and early 2000s during which over 1,000 Jews were killed. “Hearing a group of students on my campus chant about Intifada is deeply disturbing and a reminder of the terrorism that Israeli society has and continues to face on a daily basis,” Rebecca Roth ’24 told the Tory.
During the demonstration in front of Nassau Hall, Israeli postdoctoral student Ilai Guendelman stood silently on the Nassau steps wrapped in an Israeli flag. A few minutes later, Jordan Berman, a Jewish local business owner, joined him on the steps, where they remained until the end of the event. A call by Guendelman “to support Israel and Jews” was answered with chants of “Free free Palestine!” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!”
Anti- and pro-Israel student demonstrators were separated by a barricade on Frist Campus Center’s North lawn.
A group of about 50 pro-Israel counter-demonstrators stood silently behind a barrier erected by Public Safety, separating them from the anti-Israel demonstrators. Signs included the images and names of murder victims and current hostages trapped in Gaza as well as messages such as “No excuse for rape” and “The Jewish nation lives on” in Hebrew.
The pro-Israel counter-demonstration was a student-led initiative organized by Rebecca Roth ’24 and Danielle Shapiro ’25. “Our efforts today were primarily focused on bringing attention to the fact that there are still over 200 Israelis, many of whom are civilians, that are being held by Hamas in Gaza,” Roth wrote in a statement to the Tory.
Pro-Israel students held a silent counter-protest during the demonstration.
Throughout the day, pro-Israel students had arranged tables to engage students in “dialogue and conversation.” At one table, students recited Psalms for the wellbeing of the current hostages in Gaza for twelve hours straight, and one table was “dedicated to asking people to do good deeds in hopes of bringing more light into the world,” according to Roth. “In the Jewish tradition, we respond to tragedy and crisis with prayer and good deeds,” Roth emphasized.
The anti-Israel demonstration organizers declined to comment for this story.
Roth and Shapiro are editors for the Tory. They recused themselves from this story.
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