Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched from James Monroe Park to Kogan Plaza on Friday to protest Students for Justice in Palestine at GWU’s suspension and demand officials fire a professor who proposed a plan to redevelop the Gaza Strip.
About 40 demonstrators gathered at James Monroe Park at about 2:30 p.m. last week and called on the University to divest from companies supporting Israel, drop SJP’s suspension and fire economics professor Joseph Pelzman for his links to President Donald Trump’s plan to redevelop Gaza and deport Palestinians to neighboring countries. The protest was a part of SJP’s Palestinian Liberation Week, which the organization puts on annually to educate and mobilize students around Palestinian rights.
A student at Friday’s rally spoke on behalf of SJP, who said the organization wasn’t able to attend the protest because of its suspension.
“The suspension comes without any prior charges being leveled against SJP or any due process,” the student said. “An unprecedented move by GW and is simply another example of the nationwide escalation of repression against the student movement for Palestine following the Trump administration’s rollback of fundamental First Amendment protections.”
At about 3 p.m., protesters marched down 21st Street toward University Yard, the site of the pro-Palestinian encampment last spring, chanting statements like “From the belly of the beast, hands off the Middle East,” and “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious.”
Officials closed U-Yard during the protest as security guards patrolled the entrances, only allowing University staff inside. About six Metropolitan and GW Police Department officers guarded the main entrance of U-Yard on H Street as demonstrators stopped at the location.
A representative from Jewish Voice for Peace, who spoke to the crowd outside of U-Yard, said it has been two weeks since Immigration Customs and Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and green card holder who led pro-Palestinian protests on its campus last spring.
The representative said the call to combat antisemitism has been weaponized to repress pro-Palestinian student movements and distract people from Israel breaking January’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered airstrikes in Gaza on March 18 after Hamas refused Israeli demands to free half of the remaining hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, as a precondition for extending the three-phase ceasefire, killing more than 400 Palestinians.
The Israeli military has bombarded Gaza in the weeks and days since, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed since the collapse of the ceasefire to about 600.
“This is not about protecting Jewish students, and it never was. This is fascism,” the representative said. “We know the true threat to safety is our University’s collaboration with the fascist state.”
A representative from DMV SJP then spoke about Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow who was detained by federal immigration agents because of alleged ties to Hamas.
“These abductions of our community members only put the empire’s weaknesses on full blast and show the world the level of violence and bloodshed empires must commit to maintain their rules,” the representative said. “Let me clear that this level of violence will only make us more committed, enraged and united in our struggle.”
Officials earlier this month barred SJP from hosting on-campus events “until further notice,” saying the group violated a policy by preventing Division for Student Affairs personnel from attending programming, which students claimed wasn’t a policy in a prior version of student organization rules. Officials said they were “separately reviewing” incidents at recent SJP events to determine if any violated the Code of Student Conduct or other University policies.
About two weeks later, the University temporarily suspended SJP for no longer than 21 days, pending format conduct proceedings. Officials said SJP’s actions posed “a threat to the stability and continuance of normal university functions” and threatened additional disciplinary action if the organization hosted off-campus or virtual programming, SJP said Thursday.
“From Columbia to Georgetown to right here at GW, administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech are not isolated instances, but rather a part of a long and sordid history of the same repression against students who dare to challenge oppressive powers,” the DMV SJP representative said at Friday’s rally.
Demonstrators marched toward 20th Street to gather outside the F Street House, University President Ellen Granberg’s on-campus residence, which was guarded by about 10 GWPD, MPD and security officers.
Netfa Freeman, a representative from the Black Alliance for Peace, read the lyrics of “Blessed Are Those Who Struggle” from The Lost Poets, a Black spoken-word music group that started in the late 1960s. A speaker from the Muslim Students’ Association then spoke about the continuous violence from Israel faced by Palestinians during Ramadan.
“We must remember that every Palestinian has a right to return, and we owe it to every martyr to keep on fighting,” the MSA representative said.
A representative from the Arab American Association of Engineers and Architects called on the University to divest from manufacturing companies whose weapons are allegedly used in the war in Gaza. After the speech, demonstrators marched to Monroe Hall, where Pelzman’s office is located.
Pelzman published a paper in July 2024 through the Center of Excellence for Economic Studies of the Middle East and North Africa, a nonprofit think tank he co-founded and directs, calling for mass excavation of Gaza and replacing it with a “sovereign demilitarized green economy.”
A representative from Socialist Action Initiative said GW “funnels” students into the U.S. Department of State and private contracting companies while maintaining investments in weapon manufacturing companies. The representative condemned arguments of placing Gaza’s economy in the hands of foreign investors, referencing Pelzman’s paper.
“Promoting the carpet bombing of Gaza and considering the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Palestinians that would be murdered only as ‘lost human capital,’ presents the disturbingly sick genocidal fantasies of an Islamophobic, fanatic, slum of the earth, racist freak,” the SAI representative said.
The representative alleged Pelzman had tweeted Islamophobic statements like “f*ck Palestine” and referred to Islam as a disease. Pelzman’s X account currently only shows one post — a picture of a “notice of eviction” flyer placed by student protesters on his Monroe Hall office door, along with a message saying that he filed a complaint with the DOJ about the GW administration’s inaction in handling the response to his paper on the reconstruction of Gaza, which “created a violent action by SJP.”
Pelzman looks forward to Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Leo Terrell’s visit to GW. The U.S. Department of Justice antisemitism task force, led by Terrell, announced last month that it will visit GW and nine other universities that they said have experienced “antisemitic incidents” since the onset of the war in Gaza.
“Every day that the Palestinian people are subjugated to the violence and brutality of the Zionist occupation of their homeland, we must recommit ourselves to the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” a speaker at the protest said. “It is our responsibility at the bare minimum to demand that GW divest from genocide and Zionism. We know that the liberation of Palestine is inevitable, and so too is divestment.”
A representative from CODEPINK — a women-led grassroots organization which aims to end U.S. militarism and support human rights initiatives — encouraged demonstrators to attend the organization’s “Students Educate Congress on Palestine” event on Thursday.
Attendees will meet with representatives’ staffers to push for legislation like funding UNRWA, the United Nations Palestinian relief agency, and congressional joint resolutions of disapproval to block weapons transfers to Israel.
Protesters moved to their final destination in Kogan Plaza at about 4:30 p.m., where they read testimonies from people in Gaza about the suffering they’ve endured since the war’s onset and wrote statements in chalk on the sidewalk like “Pelzman go to hell.”
Demonstrators concluded the protest around 5 p.m., and maintenance workers hosed off the chalk a few hours later.
Jenna Lee contributed reporting.
