Hundreds gathered at George Washington University on Friday afternoon to participate in anti-Israel protests.
Jewish students told DailyMail.com that they have felt afraid, adding that the university is “accommodating” the “pro-Hamas” activists.
The demonstrations on campus have been ongoing since the October 7 attack, but recently students have established a pro-Gaza encampment that has yet to be taken down.
Protesters set up the encampment early Thursday morning, and hundreds later joined in on the demonstrations.
Thursday evening, the tents and their occupants still stood in defiance by late Friday afternoon.
One protester at George Washington University (GWU) on Thursday was even seen carrying a sign calling for the “final solution,” which was Adolf Hitler’s plan for the “annihilation” of Jewish individuals.
“To hear people calling for more violence makes me really afraid to come out of my house out of fear that someone’s going to hurt me or do something to me,” Skyler Sieradzky, a Jewish GWU student, told DailyMail.com at Friday’s protest.
As someone whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, Sieradzky said seeing people using the Holocaust as something that should be strived for again makes her “very sad and very scared.”
Sieradzky was one of a few counter-protesters who arrived to support Israel amid calls for its annihilation at GWU on Friday.
She draped herself in an Israeli flag, which earned her some disdain and dirty looks from pro-Gaza demonstrators.
“It’s very scary to see signs calling for the extermination of the state of Israel, calling for another intifada,” Sieradzky said.
In the second intifada, one of Sieradzky’s family members was killed in a suicide bombing.
“When I see signs calling for violence against the state of Israel and more or less Jews as a whole, it makes me really scared,” Sieradzky continued.
“I’ve also never been more scared to be Jewish,” the college student added, explaining that she has heard antisemitic remarks being uttered behind her back in her classes.
Two other Jewish GWU students also shared similar concerns, though their identities have been withheld as they fear reprisal from their college colleagues for speaking out.
The student said the problem is that “nobody from the movement condemns this, nobody from the movement speaks out against it.”
“The discourse can lead to violence and the discourse right now is not was not good,” the student added.
Another Jewish GWU student told DailyMail.com the university has been complicit in accommodating the protests by blocking off roads, not enforcing their own rules, and moving final exams to different buildings away from the protests to allow for students to test in a quiet area.
“They’ve made all these accommodations specifically to allow this to go on while at the same time saying that they were breaking the rules,” the Jewish student said, adding that the protesters “are chanting and supporting terrorist organizations.”
“And so it seems like the administration is not really up to enforcing their own rules, which of course only empowers those who don’t have respect for rules in the first place,” the student continued.
The student expressed concern that there could be protests at graduation, which could “put a damper on that day for a lot of people.”
Every pro-Palestinian GWU protester approached by DailyMail.com for an interview declined to comment, with some admitting they were instructed by the protest organizers not to speak to the press.
Jinan, a D.C.-based activist and chef who does not go to GWU, told DailyMail.com she was there to support the students’ demands that the university “divest from the occupation and the state of Israel” and to demand the Biden administration pull funding from Israel.
Jinan applauded progressive “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for both visiting Columbia University’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which was the inspiration for the GWU camp.
Aya, an Israeli and Jewish high school junior who was at GWU touring the campus when she stumbled upon the protest with her parents, called the event “absurd.”
Aya was in Israel during the October 7 attack and was stunned by conversations she had with the protesters, saying “They don’t know what river or what sea they are talking about. It’s all so stupid.”
