Blog

Oct 14, 2024

Police in riot gear dismantle anti-Israel encampment at Chicago's DePaul University | The Times of Israel

Police began dismantling an anti-Israel encampment early Thursday at DePaul University in Chicago, hours after the school’s president told students to leave the area or face arrest. Officers and

Police began dismantling an anti-Israel encampment early Thursday at DePaul University in Chicago, hours after the school’s president told students to leave the area or face arrest.

Officers and workers in yellow vests cleared out tents and camping equipment at the student encampment, leaving behind yellow squares of dead or dying grass where the tents had stood. Front-loaders were being used to remove the camping equipment.

Just across the street from where the encampment was spread across a grassy expanse of DePaul’s campus known as “The Quad,” a few dozen protesters stood along a sidewalk in front of a service station, clapping their hands in unison as an apparent protest leader paced back and forth before them, speaking into a bullhorn.

In videos from the scene broadcast on local media and social networks, protesters could be heard chanting anti-Israel slogans such as “Intifada, intifada,” a reference to periods of deadly Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians in the late 1980s and early 1990s and again in the early 2000s.

Chicago police said that all of the protesters at the encampment “voluntarily left” the area when police arrived early Thursday.

“There were no confrontations and there was no resistance,” Jon Hein, chief of patrol for the Chicago Police Department, said at a news briefing. “As we approached, all the subjects voluntarily left the area.”

Scenes from the Quad as the encampment gets dismantled @TheDePaulia pic.twitter.com/zTOmpzUbCz

— Lilly Keller (@lillyraekeller) May 16, 2024

Hein said, however, that two people, a male and female in their 20s, were arrested outside the encampment “for obstruction of traffic.”

The university posted on its website examples of over 1,000 registered complaints about the protest encampment, including pictures of antisemitic stickers and posters, damage to university property and testimony from students.

“My son and I watched a group of five masked men carrying Palestinian flags push a Jewish man to the ground and then steal his Israeli flag. I was called a baby killer, a murderer, a genocide supporter.  My friends had paint thrown on them, were pushed and verbally assaulted,” one student testimony from DePaul read.

Police also found knives and a pellet gun while dismantling the tents, according to the university.

After clearing out the encampment at DePaul University, Chicago police found multiple knives and a pellet gun.

Protestors erected a wooden board with protruding nails to serve as a trap. pic.twitter.com/HRTe1yFk8x

— Antisemite Stopper (@StopChiAntisems) May 16, 2024

The move to clear the campus came less than a week after the school’s president said public safety was at risk.

The university on Saturday said it had reached an “impasse” with the school’s protesters, leaving the future of their encampment on the Chicago campus unclear. Most of DePaul’s commencement ceremonies will be held the June 15-16 weekend.

In a statement then, DePaul President Robert Manuel and Provost Salma Ghanem said they believe that students intended to protest peacefully, but “the responses to the encampment have inadvertently created public safety issues that put our community at risk.”

Efforts to resolve the differences with DePaul Divestment Coalition over the past 17 days were unsuccessful, Manuel said in a statement sent to students, faculty and staff Thursday morning.

“Our Office of Public Safety and Chicago Police are now disassembling the encampment,” he said. “Every person currently in the encampment will be given the opportunity to leave peacefully and without being arrested.”

He said that since the encampment began, “the situation has steadily escalated with physical altercations, credible threats of violence from people not associated with our community.”

Students at many US college campuses this spring set up similar encampments, calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it, to protest the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza. The protests, which has also spread to universities in Europe and around the world, began as schools were winding up their spring semesters and are now holding graduation ceremonies.

Tensions at DePaul flared the previous weekend when counter protesters showed up to the campus in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood and prompted Chicago police to intervene.

The student-led DePaul Divestment Coalition, which is calling on the university to divest from Israel, set up the encampment April 30. The group alleged university officials walked away from talks and tried to force students into signing an agreement, according to a student statement late Saturday.

“I don’t want my tuition money to be invested in my family’s suffering,” Henna Ayesh, a Palestinian student at DePaul and Coalition member, said in the statement.

DePaul is on the city’s North Side. Last week, police removed a similar encampment at the University of Chicago on the city’s South Side.

The Associated Press has recorded at least 79 incidents since April 18 where arrests were made at campus protests across the US. More than 2,900 people have been arrested on the campuses of 60 colleges and universities. The figures are based on AP reporting and statements from universities and law enforcement agencies.

Are you relying on The Times of Israel for accurate and timely coverage right now? If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6/month, you will:

We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.

That’s why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.

So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.

For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.

Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel