ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The University of Michigan’s club fair quickly descended into chaos Wednesday afternoon when police shut down an anti-Israel protest after a day of antics from student activists.
The protesters, there to demand that the school divest from all companies that support Israel, identified themselves as members of the TAHRIR Coalition, whose name is an acronym for “Transparency, Accountability, Humanity, Reparations, Investment, and Resistance.”
The school’s club fair was disrupted almost immediately by a sit-in of a few dozen anti-Israel demonstrators chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a slogan that implies the state of Israel must be eliminated.
A group of pro-Israel counter-protesters also quickly gathered, holding American and Israeli flags.
Yitz Pierce, the program director at the Jewish Resource Center on campus, stood with the counter-protestors, bringing them water bottles in the oppressive summer heat.
“I came out just to make sure things stay safe. I wanted to be here to show my support for my people and make sure they felt that they have a face that they know, because although it hasn’t gotten violent, it’s gotten very scary,” Pierce told The Post.
The anti-Israel protestors, who did not have a permit to demonstrate, passed out fliers listing their demands that the school divest from “Israeli apartheid and genocide,” establish a “People’s Audit,” boycott Israeli academic institutions, and abolish campus policing.
Unfortunately for these anti-cop activists, the police arrived and demanded over a megaphone that the protestors disperse.
When protestors did not comply, the police officers ran into the crowd, arresting at least one student protester and pushing the mob away from the space in front of the library.
Forced to relocate, the protesters marched around the campus, eventually arriving at an Army ROTC table, where they yelled at student representatives of the organization.
The melee on the first week of the fall semester at U-Michigan is just the latest in a long saga of campus chaos enveloping the school since the Israel-Hamas War.
Last spring, anti-Israel activists at U-Michigan running under the banner of the “Shut It Down” party won control of the student government. Since then, they’ve withheld funding from clubs on campus, demanding that the University divest from companies that support Israel.
In a March press release, university regents made clear they won’t buckle under political pressure to divest.
As a result, clubs are struggling to function and the administration is attempting to find temporary methods to fund student orgs, the New York Times reported.
Amid tensions between protestors and club members, The Post spoke with UM campus leaders of Jewish student organizations like Rabbi Alter Goldstein, who runs the Chabad House on campus that fortunately doesn’t rely on university funding.
“This is something that is disappointing. And obviously, there’s different ways of making a point. But again, I believe things could be resolved more in dialogue than just trying to lock doors. Telling people they can’t have resources or whatever it is—I don’t think that’s productive to anyone,” Rabbi Goldstein told The Post.
The Israel-Palestine issue may prove to be decisive in the 2024 election, as more than 100,000 Michigan Democratic Primary voters voted “uncommitted” in the state’s February presidential primary in protest of President Joe Biden’s support of Israel.
