Pro-Palestinian students march for divestment at LSU

Pro-Palestinian students are met with counter-protesters while marching for divestment at LSU (Matthew Perschall / LSU Reveille)

Roughly 100 pro-Palestinian LSU students marched across campus Friday, calling on the university administration to divest its endowment from Israel and companies supporting Israel.

“We want them to have extra … transparency, honesty, disclose and immediate call for immediate ceasefire,” Ayah Hamdan, a spokesperson for the protest, said in an interview with the Illuminator.

The nonviolent protest soon caught the attention of counter-protesters. What started as a handful of conservative students waiving American flags soon grew into a crowd of over 100, as news of the gathering spread on social media. The crowd attempted to drown out the chants of the pro-Palestine group.

“LSU don’t you hide, you’re supporting genocide,” one group shouted. “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

“Palestine has zero national championships,” the other responded. “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

Ethan Vogin, one of the original counter-protesters who is Jewish, said he believes the Pro-Palestinian group and its opposition to the state of Israel is antisemitic.

“I can condemn Hamas, I condemn the Israeli government … killing civilians,” Vogin said.

Criticisms of the existence of the state of Israel is included in some definitions of antisemitism, including the one popularized by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It was later incorporated into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which dictates what counts as discrimination on college campuses, on the orders of former President Donald Trump. The creator of that definition, Kenneth Stern, has expressed alarm its use on college campuses, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports .

Vogin, a legislative aide to state Sen. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, was accompanied by his boss for part of the demonstration. Vogin described the arch-conservative lawmaker as his political mentor.

In an interview, Seabaugh condemned LSU for refusing to enforce state law. When asked to clarify, Seabaugh cited an anti-Klu Klux Klan law that prohibits individuals from wearing masks to conceal their identities. Several protesters were wearing medical masks, which are exempted from the law. At least one protester was shielding their face with a keffiyeh, a Palestinian cultural headdress.

“I don’t know about that law. But given the violence on campuses across the country we are extremely proud of our students for holding a civil protest. Masks or no masks,” LSU spokesperson Todd Woodward said in a statement.

Unlike protests on the same issue at universities across the nation, LSU’s remained peaceful and no arrests were made. Campus police officers briefly detained a counter-protester who got into a heated exchange with a pro-Palestinian student but let him go with a warning moments later.

Student protests against Israel’s handling of its conflict with Hamas, which has led to the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians, have swept across the nation in recent weeks. Students have called for their universities to divest their endowments — which total billions of dollars collectively — so the funds are not used to support the Israeli government.

While the protests remained nonviolent, they were not always civil.

Counter-protesters mocked pro-Palestinian students weight and gender identities and called them “Nazis” and “terrorists.”

“I’m used to it; I’m Palestinian,” Hamdan said. “So my whole life I’ve understood the occupation. It makes me very happy to see the solidarity with the group.”

“I really don’t care what they have to say,” Hamdan said of the counter-protesters.

Other counter-protesters remained quieter, choosing to pray or sing.

For the most part, the pro-Palestinian students did not engage with the counter-protesters, although they briefly bonded over a common cause: their distaste for U.S. President Joe Biden.

“F— Joe Biden,” both groups chanted.

The pro-Palestinian group described Biden as complicit in genocide, while the counter-protesters simply expressed their preference for Trump.

Woodward did not immediately provide a comment regarding calls to divest LSU’s roughly $1 billion endowment. To what — if any — extent the endowment, which is managed by the private LSU Foundation, is invested in Israeli and pro-Israeli companies is not public.

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