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Pro-Palestinian students at Yale pitched a short-lived encampment on Tuesday night — and formed a human chain that kept their Jewish peers from seeing what they were up to, according to a viral social media video.
Yale senior Netanel Crispe alleged that the protest was far from peaceful.
“I was shouted at quite a lot,” he told The Post. “I had people shoving me. I had people putting their flashlights in my eyes to try to keep me away. I was physically barred and blocked, at times followed and surrounded and pushed and shoved.”
Crispe said his exchange with agitators who gathered on Tuesday night to protest an upcoming speech by Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir culminated in him being physically blocked from accessing parts of the campus quad. Some of the interaction was caught on a video that he posted on X on Wednesday and has attracted 7.6 million views.
“There was one protester specifically who called us scum,” Crispe, who showed up to the rally with a couple of his friends, alleged. In a video posted to social media, a protester tells him “you people” are “trying to victimize yourselves.”
When Crispe asks who “us people” are, the man says, “You’re Israelis, bro, you’re Zionists”
Though the roughly 200 student protesters promised an overnight encampment — they screamed “We’re here, and we’re staying the night” on a megaphone — they ultimately dispersed before 11:30 p.m., following a final warning from the university, according to the Yale Daily News,.
Crispe, a 22-year-old who has both Israeli and American citizenship, grew up in Danby, Vermont. He believes the fact that he is visibly Jewish — he wears a yarmulke every day — caused the protesters to be so hostile.
“They created this human chain which they’ve used as a tactic in the past to keep Jewish students out,” he said.
His experience echoes that of some Jewish students at Columbia, who also faced a human chain last spring when they attempted to enter their classmate’s pro-Palestine encampment.
Videos posted to social media showed a Columbia student encampment leader screaming, “Excuse me, everybody, we have Zionists who have entered the camp,” as Jewish classmates attempted to access the “liberated zone,” which was in a public area of campus. “We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy and try to disrupt our community,” the leader yelled.
“I 100% felt physically unsafe,” Jessica Schwalb, one of the Columbia students who was blocked from entering the encampment told The Post at the time. “If this sort of thing was happening to any other minority group, the whole world would shut down.”
I was never subjected to any sort of human chain while reporting on Columbia’s encampment as a non-Jewish part-time student last school year, but I was told by a student protester that I wasn’t allowed to access the tent city because I hadn’t pledged allegiance to their community guidelines.
Those who enter must “recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us colonizers, on this land,” promise “[to grant] ourselves and others grace,” and “[refuse] to comply with any demands if the NYPD or Columbia admin try to force us to disclose the identities of any fellow campers,” the guidelines read.
For Crispe, the human chain was just one of many painful experiences he’s had on Yale’s campus since October 7th.
“Immediately following the massacre, hundreds of my classmates and professors were gathering right off campus for a protest rally to celebrate the resistance’s success,” he said. “We were still mourning the loss of our friends and our family members in the immediate aftermath, and this is the type of response that we received from the larger Yale community.”
Crispe lamented that “vehement anti-Semitism and anti-Western ideologies” are pervasive on his campus.
“That was not something that I expected to be facing at Yale,” he said. “This was a place that at one time I considered to be a home, but now it feels more like an asylum that has been taken over by the inmates.”
But Crispe is glad that Yale is finally starting to stand up to these students. After the incident on Tuesday, the university revoked Yalies4Palestine’s official status as a student organization. The school also announced plans to investigate antisemitic conduct that night.
“I give them credit for taking these initial steps,” he said. “I hope to see more of it.”
The university did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
As the federal government cracks down on schools such as Harvard over antisemitism, Crispe hopes his viral experience at Yale might encourage the administration to straighten out his university ,too.
He said, “Yale is finally getting the attention that it requires and deserves, which I hope will inspire the federal government to prioritize this place and really come down with force.”