Students and faculty from colleges and universities around the D.C. area launched a concerted rally on the George Washington University (GWU) campus Thursday morning, continuing nationwide protests against the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Hundreds of protesters, including some university professors, erected tents in the center of the GWU campus. The encampment — about a half-mile from the White House — follows a similar strategy to the Columbia University protests, which sparked a national movement and captured the political spotlight.
In addition to urging the Biden administration against arms sales to Israel and supporting a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, protest organizers also demanded that GWU and other universities stop investing in weapons manufacturers and companies that stand to profit with the conflict.
The coalition of students and faculty includes representation from Georgetown University; American University; George Mason University; the University of Maryland; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Howard University; and Gallaudet University, organizers said in a post on social media.
“As our people discover mass graves of our martyrs in Gaza, it is our moral imperative to disrupt the business as usual to put an end to institutional cooperation in the genocide,” organizers wrote, referring to the discovery of multiple mass graves in Gaza’s hospitals. Gaza this week.
GWU administrators said Thursday that the demonstration is peaceful, but asked protesters to move to other parts of campus. Administrators added that non-GWU students were not allowed on campus to demonstrate and that the protest had to end by 7 p.m.
“At 7pm, students will be forced to remove their tents and disperse,” the university saidciting a policy that prohibits overnight camping on campus.
About 30 Georgetown faculty members joined a march of more than 100 students to the GWU protest on Thursday morning, GW Hatchet reported.
Protesters prepared tents and sleeping bags, creating conflict with university administrators and D.C. police over the 7 p.m. deadline to disperse.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida), a GWU alumnus, denounced the protests Thursday.
“The alumni will never allow this to happen,” he said of demands that the university divest itself of Israeli interests.
Moskowitz is among the members of Congress who have criticized the national student protest movement as anti-Semitic. He joined a group of Jewish Democrats at Columbia University on Monday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) visited Columbia on Wednesday and was similarly critical of the protests.
“What we are seeing on these college campuses across the country is disgusting and unacceptable, and every leader of this country, every political official, every citizen of good conscience has to speak up and say, ‘This is not who we are in America. ‘” Johnson said in an appearance on Fox News before his visit to Columbia.
He added that there must be “accountability, and that is what my colleagues and I will be working on.”
Hundreds of students have been arrested in protests across the country in recent days, including more than 100 at Columbia University, more than 100 at Emerson University, more than 50 at the University of Texas at Austin, more than 40 at Yale University and dozens of others at the University of Southern California.
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