How Gaza Protesters Are Making Life Difficult for Democratic Leaders
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein, and Katie Glueck
2024-04-07 07:02:22GMT
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside President Biden’s high-dollar fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall last month, and several made their way inside, repeatedly disrupting the event. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
In Detroit, a congressman’s holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.
In Fort Collins, Colo., the mayor abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.
And in places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.
Protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war are disrupting the activities of Democratic officials from city halls to Congress to the White House, complicating their ability to campaign — and, at times, govern — during a pivotal election year.
Mr. Biden successfully avoided a messy primary fight, facing no viable opposition within his party. But the Gaza conflict has stoked intraparty tensions nonetheless, raising Democratic concerns that a sustained movement protesting a war thousands of miles away could depress turnout at home in November.
“If you are now organizing people to walk away from supporting the president, then you are now de facto supporting and helping Trump,” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who has disappointed progressives with his unflinching support of Israel, said in an interview this past week. “If you’re going to play with fire that way, then you need to own the burn.”
Many supporters of the Palestinian cause argue that Mr. Biden must earn their votes — and that the death toll and suffering in Gaza should transcend concerns about electoral politics.
“With all of the political threats of Donald Trump in the horizon, it should tell you something about how deeply people feel about what’s happening,” said the Rev. Michael McBride, a founder of Black Church PAC who has pressed for a cease-fire.
The national effort to pressure U.S. leaders to limit their support for Israel has focused almost exclusively on Democrats, with former President Donald J. Trump rarely — if ever — attracting significant criticism from pro-Palestinian demonstrators at his home or public appearances. Mr. Trump has said little of substance about the conflict, other than that Israel should “finish up” the war.
Demonstrators interrupted Mr. Biden as he spoke in January at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Heated protests and tight security
Mr. Biden has increasingly taken a harder stance with Israel’s government, threatening on Thursday to condition future support on how it addresses civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
But he is still confronting fierce criticism.
At a White House gathering for Ramadan this past week, a Palestinian American doctor — one of the few Muslim community leaders who agreed to attend — walked out in protest after telling Mr. Biden that Israel’s looming ground invasion of Rafah would be a “blood bath and a massacre.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have spent weeks protesting outside Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s house, spilling pitchers of fake blood and shouting at him and his family.
And even innocuous photos posted on social media by the White House — of children at the Easter Egg Roll or newly planted tulips — are flooded with comments accusing the administration of being complicit in mass killing and starvation in Gaza.
In recent weeks, Biden campaign officials have escalated their efforts to control access to his events. On the eve of Mr. Biden’s high-dollar Radio City fund-raiser last month, dozens of ticket buyers whom the Biden campaign flagged as potential Gaza demonstrators received notices from the campaign voiding their purchases, according to campaign officials and members of Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive anti-Zionist group that has protested at Biden events.
“Unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate you at this time and have refunded all tickets associated with your email address,” the unsigned email read. “This decision is final.”
Carole Shreefter, a retired ultrasound technician from Upper Manhattan, paid $250 for a ticket near the back of the first mezzanine. A member of Jewish Voice for Peace, Ms. Shreefter, 78, said she had planned to disrupt the event by shouting at Mr. Biden and his two Democratic predecessors onstage about the war in Gaza.
She passed two checkpoints and was inside the theater’s lobby when she was told her seat had been changed. Ms. Shreefter said she had been redirected outdoors to what Biden officials called the “solutions tent.” There, she was told that she would not be allowed inside.
“I said, ‘What’s going on?’” Ms. Shreefter said in an interview. “‘I’ve been waiting here for hours in the rain. I have my ticket, everything is here.'”
Carole Shreefter paid $250 for a ticket to Mr. Biden’s Radio City fund-raiser last month, but was escorted out of the venue before she could disrupt the event in protest over the war in Gaza.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, said the “solutions tent” had been staffed by officials from the Biden Victory Fund, an allied group, and from Radio City Music Hall. Its primary purpose, she said, was to help people with ticketing problems, not to remove potential troublemakers.
Some demonstrators did make it inside the hall, where they repeatedly interrupted Mr. Biden’s joint appearance with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
One protester, Hannah Ryan, 33, a photographer from Brooklyn, said she had been flagged by the campaign, asked a battery of questions about people she knew and how she had acquired her ticket, and had then been allowed in. She shouted at Mr. Obama, who told her and other protesters, “You can’t just talk and not listen.”
Georgia Johnson, a registered Democrat from Manhattan, said she voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but was reluctant to back his re-election bid unless the administration adopted a less supportive position toward Israel.
“A lot of people here, they’re tired of having to choose between what they feel is the lesser of two evils,” Ms. Johnson, 28, said as she joined the hundreds of protesters gathered outside the event. “What he’s doing doesn’t feel like the lesser of two evils to me. It feels like something very evil.”
‘I’ve met with them. I’ve taken their phone calls.’
Other elected Democrats have also struggled to avoid protesters.
In Santa Ana, Calif., Representative Lou Correa’s family and neighbors have grown increasingly frustrated with the loudspeaker, bullhorns and shouts from demonstrators who gather as early as 6:30 a.m. on his suburban street.
Mr. Correa, a Democrat who is often in Washington during the protests, asked the local City Council to support an emergency ordinance requiring activists demonstrating at private homes to remain 300 feet away. The proposal failed to pass.
“I’ve met with them — I’ve taken their phone calls, I respond to their emails, and now they say they’re at my house because they want to meet with me, that I won’t come out,” said Mr. Correa, who added that he supported negotiations to end the war and a two-state solution to the broader conflict. “Look, I’m an elected. I get it. But why is it in the neighborhood? Why is it the family? Why is it my neighbors? That’s what I don’t understand.”
Protesters gathered outside Representative Lou Correa’s Santa Ana, Calif., home last month.Credit...Leonard Ortiz/Orange County Register, via Getty Images
Some of the most contentious clashes have taken place on deeply Democratic terrain. A recent City Council meeting in Berkeley, Calif., turned ugly, with protesters interrupting a Holocaust survivor at a meeting where members discussed a bill marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Representative Shri Thanedar, a Democrat from Michigan, said he had been shocked when more than two dozen attendees at his holiday party at a crowded restaurant in Detroit removed their jackets to reveal pro-Palestinian shirts. As they began chanting through a bullhorn, physical altercations broke out. One older woman was sent to a hospital with a broken nose.
“To see the deaths happening in Gaza is heartbreaking,” said Mr. Thanedar, who supports a “negotiated cease-fire” that would release Israeli hostages and end the military campaign. “But if they’re trying to draw attention to that, hurting elderly people isn’t necessarily going to help them get the support that they need.”
And in Danbury, Conn., the president of the City Council described being surprised by demonstrators demanding a cease-fire call from the city of roughly 90,000 people.
“In my mind, where are you addressing that concern?” said Peter Buzaid, the council president. “You would go to the senator’s office. You could go to the congressman’s office, you’d protest outside the White House. Right? You might go to the U.N. It’s not something that I thought would happen at our local council chambers.”
Mayor Jeni Arndt of Fort Collins said she recognized how emotionally fraught the war was, but she questioned what effect local action on the issue would have.
“I don’t think Antony Blinken’s going to be like, ‘Oh, the mayor of Fort Collins just said this,’” she said. “If it’s not impactful to the members of our community and it divides, I don’t think I should do that.”
Lowering the temperature
In Ann Arbor, Mich., the City Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the face of constant protests since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
In some places, the protest tactics have been successful.
In Ann Arbor, Mich., a cadre of demonstrators had been coming to City Council meetings for years to demand a resolution denouncing Israel’s policy toward Palestinians. Six years ago, Mayor Christopher Taylor was shouted down while trying to read a gun violence awareness resolution by demonstrators demanding to know why he was not mentioning people being killed in Gaza.
Mr. Taylor, the mayor since 2014, has long argued that Israel and other foreign policy issues were not the city’s concern. But in the face of unending protests since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, he and the council acquiesced and passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire. The temperature lowered, and most of the protesters stopped disrupting council meetings.
“Foreign policy is far from our remit, but special circumstances can arise,” Mr. Taylor said. “When community groups are in deep pain, we speak in support of those who are suffering.”
Even Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a hero of progressives who broke with the administration to oppose giving additional military aid to Israel, faced interruptions from protesters on an overseas trip.
Mr. Sanders has encouraged the protesters in the U.S. to back Mr. Biden, arguing that Mr. Trump would be worse on the issue of Palestinian rights. But he also acknowledged the pain and frustration of the current moment.
“You have had hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets in this country because they are absolutely outraged at the humanitarian disaster that is currently taking place in Gaza,” he said. “They are right.”
---
Hillary Clinton Returns to Wellesley, but the Homecoming Is More Complicated
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Jenna Russell
2024-04-06 22:01:04GMT
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations surrounded an appearance at a new research center named after the former secretary of state and presidential nominee at her alma mater.
Hillary Clinton gave the commencement address at Wellesley College in 2017. She returned to her alma mater on Saturday.Credit...Paul Marotta/Wireimage
Hillary Clinton returned on Saturday to her alma mater, Wellesley College, to celebrate the opening of a new research and study center that bears her name, more than half a century after she graduated and set off on the path that would make her its most famous alumna.
She was met, as ever, by Wellesley faculty, students and alumnae who see her as a rock star, a kind of campus demi-deity who forever elevated the status of this small liberal arts college west of Boston.
But as Mrs. Clinton moderated a panel on “democracy at a crossroads” at the new center’s inaugural summit, a group of student protesters outside chanted and raised signs objecting to her presence, an angry display of the more critical way many in the latest generation of Wellesley women view her legacy.
Near the end of the panel, a student attendee inside the event stood and started shouting, accusing Mrs. Clinton of indifference to violence against Palestinians.
“We’re having a discussion,” Mrs. Clinton told the woman, who was escorted out of the hall by college staff members. “I’m perfectly happy to meet you after this event and talk with you.”
Protesters who gathered on campus Friday and Saturday to show their disregard for Mrs. Clinton, a former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and Democratic Party nominee for president, declined to speak to reporters or identify the group or groups behind the demonstrations. “Do not talk to the cops, do not talk to the press,” a protest leader with a bullhorn reminded them Saturday morning.
As she has moved through her polarizing, high-achieving career, Mrs. Clinton, 76, has frequently found herself on the receiving end of protests. At Columbia University, where she began teaching a class called “Inside the Situation Room” last fall, protesters gathered outside her first lectures to register their objections to some of her past actions as secretary of state.
But Wellesley has long been a safe space for her to return to her roots and find reliable support. She spoke at the college’s commencement in May 2017, six months after she lost the presidency to Donald J. Trump, delivering a speech that railed against his “assault on truth and reason” without mentioning his name — and one in which she also reassured her heartbroken alma mater that she was “doing OK,” even though “things didn’t exactly go the way I planned.”
The overall reception on Saturday was decidedly more mixed. Signs hoisted at the protests appeared to respond to Mrs. Clinton’s statements in recent months opposing a cease-fire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war. “Hillary for Women Unless They’re Palestinian,” read one. “Hillary, Hillary, you’re a liar; we demand a cease-fire,” protesters chanted as summit attendees filed into the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall. Most of those demonstrating wore medical masks to partially obscure their faces; several were draped in the black-and-white kaffiyehs that have become symbolic of the pro-Palestinian movement.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Mrs. Clinton spoke out against a proposed cease-fire, arguing that it could empower Hamas and fuel more violence, a position in conflict with the liberal wing of her party. She has stressed, in recent TV appearances, that a cease-fire was already in place last October, until Hamas violated it, and has said that those calling for another cease-fire do not understand Hamas or the history of the region.
Those statements alienated many current students at Wellesley, whose views have shifted to the left since the college rallied behind Mrs. Clinton’s run for president eight years ago, said Lawrence Rosenwald, a retired English professor who taught there from 1980 to 2022.
Mr. Rosenwald recalled participating in a campus protest against Mrs. Clinton 20 years ago, when she was a senator from New York and had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. Even in that moment of division, he said, the institution’s deep pride in her was felt.
“It was a strange sort of protest, with a lot of affection mixed in with the opposition,” he said. “Both were genuine.”
On campus Saturday, several students not attending the Clinton summit, or the protest of it, expressed appreciation for the protesters’ vocal critique.
“Just because she’s a well-known alum, it doesn’t mean we need to hold her up as perfect,” said Maura Whalen, 18, a first-year student from New Jersey.
At Wellesley, as at other campuses around the country, painful tensions emerged in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. When some Wellesley faculty members asked the college’s president, Paula A. Johnson, to state publicly last year that criticism of Israel was not antisemitism, she refused, citing the risk that “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist speech” could create a hostile environment for Jewish students.
Some Jewish students had already complained about a campus email, sent by student resident assistants at one dorm, that said there should be “no space, no consideration and no support for Zionism” at Wellesley. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation of antisemitism at Wellesley in November, one of dozens of similar inquiries launched by the government since the war began.
Yet for all the unrest, some faculty members have been troubled that they have not seen more student protests. A professor who in February helped start a Wellesley chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine told the student newspaper, The Wellesley News, one reason for creating the group was to help make students feel safer speaking out.
On Saturday, the empowerment strategy seemed to be working, as dozens of students braved the raw April morning, in scattered showers and temperatures in the 30s, to gather outside the summit. Anticipating that some protesters might attend the event, college staff members handed out yellow fliers to those taking seats, warning them that “heckling, shouting and other disruptive behavior is not allowed,” and that they could be charged with honor code violations.
Ironically, their target, Mrs. Clinton, had been revered by many of her own Wellesley classmates for boldly speaking out against an establishment politician of her own era, U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke, after he delivered the commencement address at their graduation in 1969.
The first senior to deliver a graduation speech in Wellesley’s history, the young Hillary Rodham, a political science major, was so troubled by the senator’s emphasis on modest goals and his concern about protest as “counterproductive disruption” that she began her own address with a blunt critique of his — shocking some listeners but receiving a standing ovation from her class.
“We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest,” she said.
At Wellesley, which enrolls about 2,500 students, the new Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership and Democracy will advance her earliest ideals, with its focus on preparing “the next generation of civic leaders and change-making citizens.” It will host faculty research across disciplines, a “civic action lab” for students and an annual spring summit to grapple with critical global issues.
Panelists at the inaugural summit included Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Chelsea Miller, co-founder of Freedom March NYC; and Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. More than 400 people attended in person; 200 more logged into a livestream.
Mrs. Clinton, seated in a plush white armchair on a stage bathed in lavender light, voiced concern at the summit about recent regression in women’s rights around the world after a period of steady progress. “It felt like an upward trajectory,” she said, “and then these forces began to rise up and push back.”
Kayla Brand, 22, a Wellesley senior, said she was excited to hear from Mrs. Clinton, and grateful for her long advocacy for the rights of women, children and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. She said she was saddened by the protests, and her sense that the energy spent yelling at Mrs. Clinton could be channeled into more productive work.
“I appreciate her legacy, and I think she’s helped a lot of people on this campus,” said Ms. Brand, a computer science major from California. “And I also hope for peace in the region, for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
Patricia Berman and Tracy Gleason, the faculty co-directors of the new Clinton Center, said it was difficult to see student protesters struggling with global pain and violence. But they also saw the protests as one thread of the hard conversation they hope to foster.
“Our goal is for students to use their voices, but also to open their hearts and minds to other perspectives,” Ms. Gleason said.
Mr. Rosenwald, the longtime professor, said he believes that students’ pride in Mrs. Clinton endures, even if it is more complicated than in a simpler past.
“Wellesley students are activists,” he said. “They also understand how hard it is for women to get to where she is.”
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein, and Katie Glueck
2024-04-07 07:02:22GMT
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside President Biden’s high-dollar fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall last month, and several made their way inside, repeatedly disrupting the event. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
In Detroit, a congressman’s holiday party devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.
In Fort Collins, Colo., the mayor abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a cease-fire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.
And in places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.
Protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war are disrupting the activities of Democratic officials from city halls to Congress to the White House, complicating their ability to campaign — and, at times, govern — during a pivotal election year.
Mr. Biden successfully avoided a messy primary fight, facing no viable opposition within his party. But the Gaza conflict has stoked intraparty tensions nonetheless, raising Democratic concerns that a sustained movement protesting a war thousands of miles away could depress turnout at home in November.
“If you are now organizing people to walk away from supporting the president, then you are now de facto supporting and helping Trump,” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who has disappointed progressives with his unflinching support of Israel, said in an interview this past week. “If you’re going to play with fire that way, then you need to own the burn.”
Many supporters of the Palestinian cause argue that Mr. Biden must earn their votes — and that the death toll and suffering in Gaza should transcend concerns about electoral politics.
“With all of the political threats of Donald Trump in the horizon, it should tell you something about how deeply people feel about what’s happening,” said the Rev. Michael McBride, a founder of Black Church PAC who has pressed for a cease-fire.
The national effort to pressure U.S. leaders to limit their support for Israel has focused almost exclusively on Democrats, with former President Donald J. Trump rarely — if ever — attracting significant criticism from pro-Palestinian demonstrators at his home or public appearances. Mr. Trump has said little of substance about the conflict, other than that Israel should “finish up” the war.
Demonstrators interrupted Mr. Biden as he spoke in January at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Heated protests and tight security
Mr. Biden has increasingly taken a harder stance with Israel’s government, threatening on Thursday to condition future support on how it addresses civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
But he is still confronting fierce criticism.
At a White House gathering for Ramadan this past week, a Palestinian American doctor — one of the few Muslim community leaders who agreed to attend — walked out in protest after telling Mr. Biden that Israel’s looming ground invasion of Rafah would be a “blood bath and a massacre.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have spent weeks protesting outside Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s house, spilling pitchers of fake blood and shouting at him and his family.
And even innocuous photos posted on social media by the White House — of children at the Easter Egg Roll or newly planted tulips — are flooded with comments accusing the administration of being complicit in mass killing and starvation in Gaza.
In recent weeks, Biden campaign officials have escalated their efforts to control access to his events. On the eve of Mr. Biden’s high-dollar Radio City fund-raiser last month, dozens of ticket buyers whom the Biden campaign flagged as potential Gaza demonstrators received notices from the campaign voiding their purchases, according to campaign officials and members of Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive anti-Zionist group that has protested at Biden events.
“Unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate you at this time and have refunded all tickets associated with your email address,” the unsigned email read. “This decision is final.”
Carole Shreefter, a retired ultrasound technician from Upper Manhattan, paid $250 for a ticket near the back of the first mezzanine. A member of Jewish Voice for Peace, Ms. Shreefter, 78, said she had planned to disrupt the event by shouting at Mr. Biden and his two Democratic predecessors onstage about the war in Gaza.
She passed two checkpoints and was inside the theater’s lobby when she was told her seat had been changed. Ms. Shreefter said she had been redirected outdoors to what Biden officials called the “solutions tent.” There, she was told that she would not be allowed inside.
“I said, ‘What’s going on?’” Ms. Shreefter said in an interview. “‘I’ve been waiting here for hours in the rain. I have my ticket, everything is here.'”
Carole Shreefter paid $250 for a ticket to Mr. Biden’s Radio City fund-raiser last month, but was escorted out of the venue before she could disrupt the event in protest over the war in Gaza.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, said the “solutions tent” had been staffed by officials from the Biden Victory Fund, an allied group, and from Radio City Music Hall. Its primary purpose, she said, was to help people with ticketing problems, not to remove potential troublemakers.
Some demonstrators did make it inside the hall, where they repeatedly interrupted Mr. Biden’s joint appearance with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
One protester, Hannah Ryan, 33, a photographer from Brooklyn, said she had been flagged by the campaign, asked a battery of questions about people she knew and how she had acquired her ticket, and had then been allowed in. She shouted at Mr. Obama, who told her and other protesters, “You can’t just talk and not listen.”
Georgia Johnson, a registered Democrat from Manhattan, said she voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but was reluctant to back his re-election bid unless the administration adopted a less supportive position toward Israel.
“A lot of people here, they’re tired of having to choose between what they feel is the lesser of two evils,” Ms. Johnson, 28, said as she joined the hundreds of protesters gathered outside the event. “What he’s doing doesn’t feel like the lesser of two evils to me. It feels like something very evil.”
‘I’ve met with them. I’ve taken their phone calls.’
Other elected Democrats have also struggled to avoid protesters.
In Santa Ana, Calif., Representative Lou Correa’s family and neighbors have grown increasingly frustrated with the loudspeaker, bullhorns and shouts from demonstrators who gather as early as 6:30 a.m. on his suburban street.
Mr. Correa, a Democrat who is often in Washington during the protests, asked the local City Council to support an emergency ordinance requiring activists demonstrating at private homes to remain 300 feet away. The proposal failed to pass.
“I’ve met with them — I’ve taken their phone calls, I respond to their emails, and now they say they’re at my house because they want to meet with me, that I won’t come out,” said Mr. Correa, who added that he supported negotiations to end the war and a two-state solution to the broader conflict. “Look, I’m an elected. I get it. But why is it in the neighborhood? Why is it the family? Why is it my neighbors? That’s what I don’t understand.”
Protesters gathered outside Representative Lou Correa’s Santa Ana, Calif., home last month.Credit...Leonard Ortiz/Orange County Register, via Getty Images
Some of the most contentious clashes have taken place on deeply Democratic terrain. A recent City Council meeting in Berkeley, Calif., turned ugly, with protesters interrupting a Holocaust survivor at a meeting where members discussed a bill marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Representative Shri Thanedar, a Democrat from Michigan, said he had been shocked when more than two dozen attendees at his holiday party at a crowded restaurant in Detroit removed their jackets to reveal pro-Palestinian shirts. As they began chanting through a bullhorn, physical altercations broke out. One older woman was sent to a hospital with a broken nose.
“To see the deaths happening in Gaza is heartbreaking,” said Mr. Thanedar, who supports a “negotiated cease-fire” that would release Israeli hostages and end the military campaign. “But if they’re trying to draw attention to that, hurting elderly people isn’t necessarily going to help them get the support that they need.”
And in Danbury, Conn., the president of the City Council described being surprised by demonstrators demanding a cease-fire call from the city of roughly 90,000 people.
“In my mind, where are you addressing that concern?” said Peter Buzaid, the council president. “You would go to the senator’s office. You could go to the congressman’s office, you’d protest outside the White House. Right? You might go to the U.N. It’s not something that I thought would happen at our local council chambers.”
Mayor Jeni Arndt of Fort Collins said she recognized how emotionally fraught the war was, but she questioned what effect local action on the issue would have.
“I don’t think Antony Blinken’s going to be like, ‘Oh, the mayor of Fort Collins just said this,’” she said. “If it’s not impactful to the members of our community and it divides, I don’t think I should do that.”
Lowering the temperature
In Ann Arbor, Mich., the City Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the face of constant protests since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
In some places, the protest tactics have been successful.
In Ann Arbor, Mich., a cadre of demonstrators had been coming to City Council meetings for years to demand a resolution denouncing Israel’s policy toward Palestinians. Six years ago, Mayor Christopher Taylor was shouted down while trying to read a gun violence awareness resolution by demonstrators demanding to know why he was not mentioning people being killed in Gaza.
Mr. Taylor, the mayor since 2014, has long argued that Israel and other foreign policy issues were not the city’s concern. But in the face of unending protests since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, he and the council acquiesced and passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire. The temperature lowered, and most of the protesters stopped disrupting council meetings.
“Foreign policy is far from our remit, but special circumstances can arise,” Mr. Taylor said. “When community groups are in deep pain, we speak in support of those who are suffering.”
Even Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a hero of progressives who broke with the administration to oppose giving additional military aid to Israel, faced interruptions from protesters on an overseas trip.
Mr. Sanders has encouraged the protesters in the U.S. to back Mr. Biden, arguing that Mr. Trump would be worse on the issue of Palestinian rights. But he also acknowledged the pain and frustration of the current moment.
“You have had hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets in this country because they are absolutely outraged at the humanitarian disaster that is currently taking place in Gaza,” he said. “They are right.”
---
Hillary Clinton Returns to Wellesley, but the Homecoming Is More Complicated
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Jenna Russell
2024-04-06 22:01:04GMT
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations surrounded an appearance at a new research center named after the former secretary of state and presidential nominee at her alma mater.
Hillary Clinton gave the commencement address at Wellesley College in 2017. She returned to her alma mater on Saturday.Credit...Paul Marotta/Wireimage
Hillary Clinton returned on Saturday to her alma mater, Wellesley College, to celebrate the opening of a new research and study center that bears her name, more than half a century after she graduated and set off on the path that would make her its most famous alumna.
She was met, as ever, by Wellesley faculty, students and alumnae who see her as a rock star, a kind of campus demi-deity who forever elevated the status of this small liberal arts college west of Boston.
But as Mrs. Clinton moderated a panel on “democracy at a crossroads” at the new center’s inaugural summit, a group of student protesters outside chanted and raised signs objecting to her presence, an angry display of the more critical way many in the latest generation of Wellesley women view her legacy.
Near the end of the panel, a student attendee inside the event stood and started shouting, accusing Mrs. Clinton of indifference to violence against Palestinians.
“We’re having a discussion,” Mrs. Clinton told the woman, who was escorted out of the hall by college staff members. “I’m perfectly happy to meet you after this event and talk with you.”
Protesters who gathered on campus Friday and Saturday to show their disregard for Mrs. Clinton, a former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and Democratic Party nominee for president, declined to speak to reporters or identify the group or groups behind the demonstrations. “Do not talk to the cops, do not talk to the press,” a protest leader with a bullhorn reminded them Saturday morning.
As she has moved through her polarizing, high-achieving career, Mrs. Clinton, 76, has frequently found herself on the receiving end of protests. At Columbia University, where she began teaching a class called “Inside the Situation Room” last fall, protesters gathered outside her first lectures to register their objections to some of her past actions as secretary of state.
But Wellesley has long been a safe space for her to return to her roots and find reliable support. She spoke at the college’s commencement in May 2017, six months after she lost the presidency to Donald J. Trump, delivering a speech that railed against his “assault on truth and reason” without mentioning his name — and one in which she also reassured her heartbroken alma mater that she was “doing OK,” even though “things didn’t exactly go the way I planned.”
The overall reception on Saturday was decidedly more mixed. Signs hoisted at the protests appeared to respond to Mrs. Clinton’s statements in recent months opposing a cease-fire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war. “Hillary for Women Unless They’re Palestinian,” read one. “Hillary, Hillary, you’re a liar; we demand a cease-fire,” protesters chanted as summit attendees filed into the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall. Most of those demonstrating wore medical masks to partially obscure their faces; several were draped in the black-and-white kaffiyehs that have become symbolic of the pro-Palestinian movement.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Mrs. Clinton spoke out against a proposed cease-fire, arguing that it could empower Hamas and fuel more violence, a position in conflict with the liberal wing of her party. She has stressed, in recent TV appearances, that a cease-fire was already in place last October, until Hamas violated it, and has said that those calling for another cease-fire do not understand Hamas or the history of the region.
Those statements alienated many current students at Wellesley, whose views have shifted to the left since the college rallied behind Mrs. Clinton’s run for president eight years ago, said Lawrence Rosenwald, a retired English professor who taught there from 1980 to 2022.
Mr. Rosenwald recalled participating in a campus protest against Mrs. Clinton 20 years ago, when she was a senator from New York and had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. Even in that moment of division, he said, the institution’s deep pride in her was felt.
“It was a strange sort of protest, with a lot of affection mixed in with the opposition,” he said. “Both were genuine.”
On campus Saturday, several students not attending the Clinton summit, or the protest of it, expressed appreciation for the protesters’ vocal critique.
“Just because she’s a well-known alum, it doesn’t mean we need to hold her up as perfect,” said Maura Whalen, 18, a first-year student from New Jersey.
At Wellesley, as at other campuses around the country, painful tensions emerged in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. When some Wellesley faculty members asked the college’s president, Paula A. Johnson, to state publicly last year that criticism of Israel was not antisemitism, she refused, citing the risk that “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist speech” could create a hostile environment for Jewish students.
Some Jewish students had already complained about a campus email, sent by student resident assistants at one dorm, that said there should be “no space, no consideration and no support for Zionism” at Wellesley. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation of antisemitism at Wellesley in November, one of dozens of similar inquiries launched by the government since the war began.
Yet for all the unrest, some faculty members have been troubled that they have not seen more student protests. A professor who in February helped start a Wellesley chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine told the student newspaper, The Wellesley News, one reason for creating the group was to help make students feel safer speaking out.
On Saturday, the empowerment strategy seemed to be working, as dozens of students braved the raw April morning, in scattered showers and temperatures in the 30s, to gather outside the summit. Anticipating that some protesters might attend the event, college staff members handed out yellow fliers to those taking seats, warning them that “heckling, shouting and other disruptive behavior is not allowed,” and that they could be charged with honor code violations.
Ironically, their target, Mrs. Clinton, had been revered by many of her own Wellesley classmates for boldly speaking out against an establishment politician of her own era, U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke, after he delivered the commencement address at their graduation in 1969.
The first senior to deliver a graduation speech in Wellesley’s history, the young Hillary Rodham, a political science major, was so troubled by the senator’s emphasis on modest goals and his concern about protest as “counterproductive disruption” that she began her own address with a blunt critique of his — shocking some listeners but receiving a standing ovation from her class.
“We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest,” she said.
At Wellesley, which enrolls about 2,500 students, the new Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership and Democracy will advance her earliest ideals, with its focus on preparing “the next generation of civic leaders and change-making citizens.” It will host faculty research across disciplines, a “civic action lab” for students and an annual spring summit to grapple with critical global issues.
Panelists at the inaugural summit included Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Chelsea Miller, co-founder of Freedom March NYC; and Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. More than 400 people attended in person; 200 more logged into a livestream.
Mrs. Clinton, seated in a plush white armchair on a stage bathed in lavender light, voiced concern at the summit about recent regression in women’s rights around the world after a period of steady progress. “It felt like an upward trajectory,” she said, “and then these forces began to rise up and push back.”
Kayla Brand, 22, a Wellesley senior, said she was excited to hear from Mrs. Clinton, and grateful for her long advocacy for the rights of women, children and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. She said she was saddened by the protests, and her sense that the energy spent yelling at Mrs. Clinton could be channeled into more productive work.
“I appreciate her legacy, and I think she’s helped a lot of people on this campus,” said Ms. Brand, a computer science major from California. “And I also hope for peace in the region, for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
Patricia Berman and Tracy Gleason, the faculty co-directors of the new Clinton Center, said it was difficult to see student protesters struggling with global pain and violence. But they also saw the protests as one thread of the hard conversation they hope to foster.
“Our goal is for students to use their voices, but also to open their hearts and minds to other perspectives,” Ms. Gleason said.
Mr. Rosenwald, the longtime professor, said he believes that students’ pride in Mrs. Clinton endures, even if it is more complicated than in a simpler past.
“Wellesley students are activists,” he said. “They also understand how hard it is for women to get to where she is.”
