Case Western Reserve University Threatens Protestors With Criminal Violations as Encamped Grow More Defiant

A certain stillness pervaded the new denizens of the Kelvin Smith Library Oval on Tuesday afternoon.

The site of 60 or so green Ozark Trail tents, the green space has morphed into a site more resemblant of a close-knit community than a temporary pop-up rally against Israel's conflict with Palestine.

Crates of oranges and tortillas sit under tins of samosas in a food tent. Another's been turned into a pop-up library. And, adjacent to a fully-stocked First Aid station, with umbrellas and tampons, is what seems to be a lecture tent, where an Irish activist was speaking on the similarities between this war and the Great Famine.

But today's stillness seems only short-lived for the dozens of protesting students that have refused, despite a quick detainment from campus police, to vacate their protestor village on the oval.
On Tuesday, Case Western President Eric Kaler doubled down on his two stances on the Palestine supporters: that such an encampment is against university policy; and Case Western will not, despite protestor demands, share or remove university assets from companies tied to Israel.

"Divestment—a key component of the protestors' demands—is," he said in a letter, "and remains something the university will not do."

As has occurred at Columbia University in New York, or Brown in Providence, R.I., mounting conflict between university admins and pro-Palestine protestors has kept the two parties at consistent loggerheads since April. At Case, where its Students for Justice for Palestine chapter remains banned from campus, such conflict has resulted in a kind of stalemate: the greater Kaler's denouncing, the meatier the resistance on the oval.

Even when reprimanding could grow severe. On Tuesday morning, Kaler wrote a followup to his Monday letter, responding to an instance where protestors were spray-painted over in white by contracts hired to remove "intimidating" language. (Protestors told Scene the graffiti said, "COME TOGETHER IN PEACE.") Another message Kaler ascribed to protestors—"YOU CAN'T HIDE"—was scrubbed from the advocacy wall on Elder Hall.

Speaking affirmatiely, Kaler reminded protestors that their painted messages, and their tent village, could veer beyond a mere slap on the wrist.

"The actions of all participants, whether within or outside the CWRU community," he wrote, "may also be in violation of criminal or civil law."

"I urge the student protestors," he added, "to remove the encampment and begin the student conduct process."

On the oval Tuesday, as sun beat down on a spattering of students knitting or listening to lectures, Kaler's threat was taken with more of an apathetic shrug than a reaction drenched in anxiety.

"He only cares about appearance, not students or anything like that," a second-year student in a black facemask said while knitting in a lawn chair.

"I mean, what's the point of taking the camp down if he's not going to divest?" another, a 20-year-old in a keffiyeh and Led Zeppelin T-shirt, added.

And Kaler hasn't engaged with them. On Monday, he noted he met over the weekend with “elected undergraduate student leaders,” but that included none of the protestors.

“It’s honestly just really annoying that he chose to consult a group of students that really have little to no actual investment or understanding of what is going on [at the encampment],” Jad Kamhawi Oglesby, vice president of Students for Justice in Palestine, told Signal Cleveland.
Among the dozen of protestors Scene spoke to Tuesday, many seemed more intimidated and watchful of counterprotestors than the growing ire from the university. (Represented by signs stuck in the ground that morning, those that read, "NO ENCAMPMENTS ALLOWED. PRIVATE PROPERTY.")

One student, that guy in the Led Zeppelin shirt, described, like others corroborated, a series of verbal threats from counterprotestors attached to Zionism, a fear that's grown since a driver possessing bear mace threatened to ram his Honda Civic into protestors in Oregon. "They haven't gotten physical," he said. "But a good deal of what we're seeing is harassment: Calling for our deaths. 'Death to the Jew Haters!'"

This tension shuffled between protestor and their antagonizer has amplified a volley of accusations that have led sour tastes in the mouths of those defending Palestine and those offering Israeli sympathy.

And maybe just a bit more of the former. In a survey of 763 college students, Intelligent.com found that 65 percent are "very supportive" of protestors. And 10 percent of these claim, according to the study, that Israel does not "have the right to exist."

Such perceived backlash has led university leaders and national leaders, from President Minouche Shafik at Columbia to President Biden, to verbalize support for Jewish college students who aim to avoid the protests—and the ire contained in them—altogether.

“We’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world," Biden said Tuesday, at a Holocaust Remembrance speech in Washington, D.C. "Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to keep their kippahs under their baseball hats. Jewish stars tucked into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students attacked or harassed walking to class."

"We know hate never go away, it only hides," he said. "Given a little oxygen it comes out from under the rocks.”

At the oval, six pro-Palestine supporters sitting in a lawn chair circle rejected any association with anti-semitism.

"This isn't anti-semitism," a student named Theo told Scene. "But more so anti-Zionist."

"Consistently, we've had more Jews on our encampment, probably four to five for every counterprotestor," the guy in the Zeppelin tee said. "We've even hosted prayer during shabbat—I'm not Jewish, so I'm not sure."

But as far as willing to be detained again? To risk violating civil law? To maintain preparation for a possible tent village sweep at night?

The guy in the Zeppelin shirt balked. After all, the protestors are aware of the risks; they even have a tiered response system—based on race and gender, of affiliation with the university, of proneness to injury and trauma—if the encampment is tromped on.

"Everyone here," he said, "is calculating the risk they're willing to take."

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