NEW YORK (AP) — As Columbia University resumes classes Tuesday, students and faculty are planning, and bracing, for a resumption of the pro-Palestinian protests that convulsed the Manhattan campus at the tail end of the spring semester and touched off a wave of college demonstrations nationwide.
In recent weeks, the university’s new leadership has embarked on listening sessions aimed at cooling tensions, released a report on campus antisemitism and circulated new protest guidelines meant to limit disruption. But student organizers are undeterred, promising to ramp up their actions — including possible encampments — until the university agrees to cut ties with companies linked to Israel.
“As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who represented campus protesters in negotiations with the university. “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”
The start to the school year comes less than a month after the resignation of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, who brought police onto campus twice last spring to clear out protest encampments. When a small group of students occupied a university building, hundreds of police officers surged onto campus, making arrests and plunging the university into lockdown.
On Tuesday morning, dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside one the school's entrances, some beating drums, while a long line of students and staff made their way through a security checkpoint. Other entrances had shorter lines, while some were shuttered with bike locks.
Since Shafik’s resignation, the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, has met with students on both sides of the issue, promising to balance students’ rights to free expression and a safe learning environment. While the message has inspired cautious optimism among some faculty, others see the prospect of major disruptions as all but inevitable.
“We are hoping for the best, but we are all wagering how long before we go into total lockdown again,” said Rebecca Korbin, a history professor who served on Columbia’s antisemitism task force. “There haven’t been any monumental changes, so I don’t know why the experience in the fall would look much different than what it did in the spring.”
In a report released Friday, the task force, made up of Columbia faculty, accused the university of allowing “pervasive” antisemitism to fester on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The report recommended that the university revamp its disciplinary process and require additional sensitivity training for students and staff.
Demonstrations against the war have already started bubbling up on college campuses this semester, including one at the University of Michigan resulting in multiple arrests. While the handful of recent protests near Columbia have been minor, signs of last spring’s tumult are apparent.
The university’s tall iron gates, long open to the public, are now guarded, requiring students to present identification to enter campus. Inside, private security guards stand on the edge of the grassy lawns that students had seized for their encampment. A new plaque on a nearby fence notes that “camping” is prohibited.
Layla Hussein, a junior at Columbia who helped to lead orientation programming, described the added security measures as an unwelcome and hostile distraction.
“We’re trying to cultivate a welcoming environment. It doesn’t help when you look outside and it’s a bunch of security guards and barricades,” Hussein said.
Others have accused the university of treating the student protesters too leniently, arguing that a lack of clear guidelines would result in further turmoil this semester. Though some of those disciplinary cases remain ongoing, prosecutors have dropped charges against many of the students arrested last semester and the university has allowed them to return to campus.
“They violated every rule in the book and they openly state they’ll continue to do so,” said Elisha Baker, a junior at Columbia who leads an Israeli engagement group, adding: “We need to have a serious reckoning with the disciplinary process to make sure students have a safe learning environment.”
After Jewish students sued Columbia, accusing them of creating a dangerous environment on campus, the university agreed in June provide a “safe passage liaison” to those concerned with protest activity. In July, Columbia removed three administrators who exchanged private text messages disparaging certain speakers during a discussion about Jewish life in a manner Shafik said touched on “ancient antisemitic tropes.” One of the administrators had suggested in a text that a campus rabbi was going to turn concerns about antisemitism into a fundraising opportunity.
A spokesperson for Columbia said the university had since bolstered its guidelines around protests and developed new training for incoming students on antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The revised protest regulations require organizers to inform the university of any scheduled protests, barring demonstrations that “substantially inhibit the primary purposes of a given university space.”
“The University may restrict expression that constitutes a genuine threat of harassment, that unjustifiably invades an individual’s privacy, or that defames a specific individual,” the guidelines note.
Like many universities, Columbia is also in the midst of a contentious debate about the definition of antisemitism, and whether anti-Zionist speech — common at the student protests — should be seen as a form of discrimination.
At New York University, which also saw large-scale protests and an encampment last spring, an updated code of conduct now warns students that speech critical of Zionism could run afoul of its anti-discrimination policy. The move has drawn praise from major Jewish groups, as well as backlash from student groups and some faculty.
The Columbia task force report defines antisemitism as “prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis,” “double standards applied to Israel” and exclusion or discrimination based on “real or perceived ties to Israel.”
Eduardo Vergara, a graduate student at Columbia who teaches literature in the Spanish department, said many instructors were going into the semester uncertain about what they could and couldn’t say in the classroom. He said he fully expected to spend much of the semester discussing the war in Gaza and the reaction on campus.
“It feels like everything is calm now,” he added. “I don’t think that’s going to last long.”
Associated Press writer Cedar Attanasio contributed to this repot.
FILE - Student protesters gather inside their encampment on the Columbia University campus, on April 29, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File)
JERUSALEM (AP) — A missile fired by Yemen's Iran-backed rebels landed in an open area in central Israel early Sunday and triggered air raid sirens at its international airport, in the latest reverberation from the nearly yearlong war in Gaza. Israel hinted that it would respond militarily.
There were no reports of casualties or major damage, but Israeli media aired footage showing people racing to shelters in Ben Gurion International Airport. The airport authority said it resumed normal operations shortly thereafter.
A fire could be seen in a rural area of central Israel, and local media showed images of what appeared to be a fragment from an interceptor that landed on an escalator in a train station in the central town of Modiin.
The Israeli military said it made several attempts to intercept the missile using its multitiered air defenses but had not yet determined whether any had been successful. It said the missile appeared to have fragmented midair, and that the incident is still under review. The military said the sound of explosions in the area came from interceptors.
The Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, have repeatedly fired drones and missiles toward Israel since the start of the war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, but nearly all of them have been intercepted over the Red Sea.
In July, an Iranian-made drone launched by the Houthis struck Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding 10 others. Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes on Houthi-held areas of Yemen, including the port city of Hodeidah, a Houthi stronghold.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at a similar response in remarks at a Cabinet meeting after Sunday's attack.
“The Houthis should have known by now that we exact a heavy price for any attempt to harm us," he said. “Anyone who needs a reminder is invited to visit the port of Hodeidah.”
Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, a military spokesman for the rebels, said they fired a ballistic missile targeting “a military target” in the area of Tel Aviv.
The Houthis have also repeatedly attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea, in what the rebels portray as a blockade on Israel in support of the Palestinians. Most of the targeted ships have no connection to Israel.
On Sunday, a European Union naval mission operating in the Red Sea said salvagers had begun towing a tanker that had been on fire for weeks after a Houthi attack. Operations Aspides said the Greek-flagged Sounion was being taken to a “safe location.”
The war in Gaza, which began with Hamas' Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel, has rippled across the region, with Iran and allied militant groups attacking Israeli and U.S. targets and drawing retaliatory strikes from Israel and its Western allies. On several occasions, the strikes and counterstrikes have threatened to trigger a wider conflict.
International carriers have canceled flights into and out of Israel on a number of occasions since the start of the war, adding to the war's economic toll on the country.
Iran supports militant groups across the region, including Hamas, the Houthis and Lebanon's Hezbollah, its most powerful ally, which has traded fire with Israel on a near-daily basis since the war in Gaza began. Iran and its allies say they are acting in solidarity with the Palestinians.
The military said around 40 projectiles were fired from Lebanon early Sunday, with most intercepted or falling in open areas.
In a separate incident, Israeli forces dropped leaflets over the Lebanese border town of al-Wazzani calling on residents to evacuate. The military later said there were no such evacuation orders, and that a local commander had acted without the approval of his superiors. It said the incident was under investigation.
It was not clear if anyone had evacuated the town, or if any message had been conveyed to residents that the leaflets were dropped in error.
The strikes along the Israel-Lebanon border have displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides. Israel has repeatedly threatened to launch a wider military operation against Hezbollah to ensure its citizens can return to their homes.
“The status quo will not continue,” Netanyahu said at the Cabinet meeting. “This requires a change in the balance of power on our northern border. We will do everything necessary to return our residents safely to their homes.”
Hezbollah has said it would halt its attacks if there is a cease-fire in Gaza. The United States and Arab mediators Egypt and Qatar have spent much of this year trying to broker a truce and the release of scores of hostages held by Hamas, but the talks have repeatedly bogged down.
In recent weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on lasting Israeli control over the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, which Israeli forces captured in May. He has said Hamas used a network of tunnels beneath the border to import arms, allegations denied by Egypt, which along with Hamas is opposed to any lasting Israeli presence there.
An Israeli military official said late Saturday that of the dozens of tunnels discovered along the border, only nine entered Egypt, and all were found to have been sealed off. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said it was not clear when the tunnels were sealed.
The discovery appeared to weaken Netanyahu’s argument that Israel needs to keep open-ended control of the corridor to prevent cross-border smuggling.
Egypt has said it sealed off the tunnels on its side of the border years ago, in part by creating its own military buffer zone along the frontier.
Melzer reported from Nahariya, Israel. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
A crater is seen after the military fired interceptors at what the Israeli army says is a missile launched from Yemen that landed in central Israel on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
A police officer inspects the area around a fire after the military said it fired interceptors at a missile launched from Yemen that landed in central Israel on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
A police officer inspects the area around a fire after the military said it fired interceptors at a missile launched from Yemen that landed in central Israel on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
A firefighter works in the area around a fire after the military said it fired interceptors at a missile launched from Yemen that landed in central Israel on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
A police officer inspects the area around a fire after the military said it fired interceptors at a missile launched from Yemen that landed in central Israel on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
Smoke rises from a fire in central Israel after the Israeli army said a missile fired from Yemen landed in an open area on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
