Ofir Dayan, a former Israel Defense Force (IDF) officer and the daughter of Dani Dayan, New York’s Israeli Consul General, told the New York Post on Saturday that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has been harassing her but the university has done nothing to stop it.
Dayan, the vice president of Columbia’s Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter, detailed four specific encounters she has had with SJP:
· In fall 2017, a female student began screaming that Dayan was “killing Muslim babies” and that she needed to leave the campus for being a Zionist after she overheard Dayan speaking in Hebrew.
· At least 50 SJP members blocked a hallway that Dayan and four other SSI members were walking through while they were chanting slogans into a microphone in October 2017.
· SJP members set up “mock checkpoints” when Dayan’s father spoke at the school in February; Dayan was even given a flyer that called her father a “war criminal.”
· SJP members called Dayan and others “terrorists” as they distributed literature for Hebrew Liberation Week in March.
But the school told Dayan that they couldn’t crack down on SJP unless they become “violent.”
“We have to wait until we’re beaten to call you?” Dayan told the Post. “[The school] can protect me, but they choose not to.”
Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia’s vice president for student life, told the Post, “We will always work with students who have concerns about their physical safety, allow debate on contentious questions where our students hold strong views, and provide essential personal and group support.”
Columbia’s SJP chapter told the Post that they were against anti-Semitism but didn’t address Dayan’s complaints.
In response to the university’s handling of these complaints, pro-Israel students hosted a rally on Thursday.
SJP is scheduled to have its national convention at UCLA in November; members of the pro-Israel community have called on UCLA to either prevent the convention from being held on campus or force it to be open to the public. UCLA has told the Journal that they can’t do either, citing the First Amendment.
