Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza has triggered the largest and most militant expressions of support for Palestine in the United States to date. The Palestine movement has gained huge amounts of traction in the past year in response to heightened awareness of Israel’s brutal occupation and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians throughout their ongoing genocidal war on Gaza. This major upsurge in the movement has hit Ohio State University as well.
This piece documents the major events and the pattern of repression meted out against the Palestine movement by OSU. This article is part of a larger series of articles Columbus Worker will be publishing detailing major events in the Palestine solidarity movement at OSU over the last decade. This includes republications of past articles written over the last decade documenting what the movement for a free Palestine has looked like at Ohio State University — its tactics and strategy and how institutions from OSU administration to the Ohio state government have attempted to stop it. We hope that these articles will prove useful for students who seek to learn the lessons of the movements’ past in order to win the basic historic demands of the movement. Let us now consider the events of the past year, the advance of the movement, and the alarming attacks meted out by the establishment.
OSU has, for decades, attempted to undermine student movements and struggles for social justice – from protests against the Vietnam War to OSU’s complicity in South African apartheid. However, the scale of repression that students are facing today is largely unprecedented, both on OSU’s campus and nationally. OSU has proven over the years that they care little for optics as they silence social justice movements, as long as they can continue to profit from imperialism.
On November 16th, two dozen protesters shut down an OSU Board of Trustees meeting before leaving after warnings from security. Students and faculty alike called for OSU to divest from Israel and fossil fuels.
On December 7th, the student wing of the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists (CORS) at OSU was suspended following an educational meeting titled “Intifada, Revolution, and the Path to a Free Palestine”. CORS was placed on interim suspension with OSU alleging that our group posed “a significant risk of substantial harm to the safety and security of your organization members, other members of the university community, or to university property”. This suspension came at the same time that pro-Palestine student organizations across the country were being suspended and was a direct product of Zionist backlash to the surging Palestine movement. Despite CORS’ student leaders being doxxed and suffering a coordinated campaign of harassment and slander, OSU administration classified our pro-Palestine educational meeting as the real threat. CORS resisted OSU’s repression and garnered vital support from students, faculty, and workers at OSU, the whole Columbus Palestine movement, and organizations across the country. Thanks to this show of unity and an outpouring of solidarity from the community and the movement, OSU backed down, reinstating CORS and withdrawing the spurious charges against the group. This struggle is detailed more extensively in a previous statement of ours.
In February and March, a ballot initiative was presented to the OSU student body by OSU Divest and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) OSU, entitled, “Initiative Urging the Ohio State University to Divest from Companies Profiting from Human Rights Violations”. After collecting well over a thousand signatures, the campaign met the threshold required to put the initiative on the ballot for OSU’s undergraduate student government elections. However, the Judicial Panel of the USG intervened against OSU Divest, disqualifying 415 signatures and ignoring the typical procedure of holding a hearing. In response, OSU Divest filed a complaint against USG’s Judicial Panel, and had the initiative officially instated on student ballots, with voting commencing at 12PM on March 4th.
At 12:56 AM on March 5th, just over 12 hours after voting had begun, the initiative was removed from the ballot in the middle of the voting period by the OSU administration. This maneuver was shockingly familiar to those who saw the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), under pressure from OSU admin, pull BDS off the ballot at the last minute in 2015 citing invented rules on the collection of signatures. On March 7th, OSU announced that students would not be permitted to vote on this initiative, citing Ohio Revised Code 9.76 of House Bill 476, which makes boycotts, divestments, and sanctions of Israel by institutions that contract with the state government illegal. According to OSU, Ohio Attorney General David Yost effectively intimidated the administration into removing the initiative from the ballot due to its “illegality”, sending a letter to the university on March 6th that outlined the Ohio anti-BDS law (pbs.org, palestinelegal.org). OSU administration additionally asserted that this initiative would not be enacted even if passed because the university is beholden to state laws. If the initiative wasn’t binding (which it wasn’t), why did OSU insist on intervening against a symbolic vote? It’s clear the administration sees even a symbolic victory for the movement as a threat to the imperialist bottom line.
On April 23rd, two students were arrested at a small protest outside of a meeting of the OSU Board of Trustees, calling again for divestment from Israel and fossil fuels. The Board called off its meeting preemptively in anticipation of this small protest. Despite this, there was still a large police presence. Protestors gave a few speeches and chanted before leaving after warnings from security. Though the crowd was dispersing, police swooped in for a targeted arrest of 2 people. The students who were targeted were organizers who had been charged previously by student conduct for their activism. It’s clear they were targeted for their roles in leading the fight against OSU’s investments in Israel and fossil fuels. After these arrests, OSU invoked invented rules around “Reading Day” to justify this repression, just as they did as part of the justification for the CORS suspension. They claimed that the protestors broke a noise ordinance on campus for that day to defend these unprovoked arrests, despite the absensce of audio amplification devices or any behavior that would break a noise ordinance.
Early in the morning on April 25th, students from SJP made an initial attempt at starting an encampment on the South Oval of OSU. Less than 4 hours later, OSUPD ordered students to scatter, asserting that food and blankets were not permitted there and that large group gatherings would not be allowed on the South Oval that day. This was clearly inconsistent with general practices on campus, where students are often seen with food and blankets on the oval. Students were not told by police which of OSU’s rules they were breaking, but were given five minutes to disperse. Students scattered when over a dozen OSUPD cars surrounded the South Oval. A single member of CORS was arrested by six OSU police officers, despite having complied with the dispersal order and behaving well within legal constraints.
Later that same day, on April 25th, hundreds of student protestors showed up to demand a free Palestine and that OSU cut all ties and support for Israel, setting up a second encampment on Ohio State’s South Oval — one of hundreds of encampments set up at universities across the country. Students resisted OSUPD and state troopers’ attempts to disperse the protest for hours. Ultimately, 38 community and student protestors were arrested by Ohio State’s Police Department. The scale of the arrests and disciplinary proceedings initiated against protestors was unprecedented. It was perhaps the largest attack on the movement at OSU since they called in the National Guard and shut down campus for 2 weeks during the anti-Vietnam War, women’s liberation, and black liberation struggles in May, 1970.
Protesters faced high levels of aggression from the campus and state police and were charged with trespassing on their own public university’s campus. At the time of writing, criminal charges against these students have been dropped, but non-student community members are still fighting the charges pressed against them.
Following April 25th, student and community activists have continued the fight for divestment at OSU throughout the summer semester, and have been hit with myriad attempts at suppression. Two students were detained by OSUPD on May 1st while flyering at a rally. Their information was taken, but charges by student conduct were brought against only one student, who was placed on probation and even threatened with deportation.
On June 1st, a rally was held in protest of OSU hosting the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an organization that partners with Northrop Grumman, a weapons manufacturer that supplies the state of Israel with weapons used to commit genocide against the people of Palestine. HRC also partners with and endorses some of the largest fossil fuel companies on the planet. At this rally, three individuals were targeted as organizers and arrested by OSUPD.
On June 30th, three students and two community members were detained by eight OSUPD officers while chalking pro-Palestine messages on campus sidewalks and buildings to call out OSU’s investments in genocide. The individuals were forced to get on the ground with their hands over their heads and were threatened with arrest. The involved students were reported to student conduct, but no disciplinary actions were brought against them. A police report was also filed by OSUPD, but no legal charges were made. OSU has since begun strictly enforcing university guidelines for chalking, despite decades of students using chalk on campus to advertise events and share beliefs and slogans without issue.
While the actions taken by OSU against students are not wholly unprecedented, we can see that at OSU and universities across the country, administrations are escalating crackdowns on student support for a free Palestine. Students and community members at Ohio State University are facing a variety of suppressive tactics from university administrators. The university has clearly weighed the costs and benefits of allowing a student movement for Palestine to persist on its campus, and has decided that a profitable relationship with Israel supersedes any legal right to "freedom of speech.” The university clearly cares far less about the appearance of arresting and attacking their students (who are exercising their basic free speech and protest rights) than they do about their ability to maintain a profitable relationship with and ideologically defend U.S. imperial interests.
This type of large-scale repression of student activism is occurring in all parts of the country and clearly points to coordinated efforts to undermine the Palestine solidarity movement on the part of government institutions and universities. State authorities collaborated with the federal government to squash protests for Palestine, arresting over 3,000 people, and brutalizing many more across the United States. Many academic workers have been fired for their support of or participation in the mass movement for Palestine. Just two weeks after individuals were detained for chalking on OSU’s campus, Harvard University passed legislation that bans chalking and unapproved signage on campus. University administrators have implemented dozens of new regulations and restrictions to make sure that no further Palestine activism will go unpunished. Universities across the country are collaborating with local and state governments, as well as various levels of law enforcement, to silence activists. With OSU’s history of involvement with militarism, investments in imperialism, and student repression, it is no surprise that students are facing escalating aggression from administrators in the fight for a free Palestine.
With students returning to campus for the Fall semester and classes starting up, university administrations and students alike are gearing up for the next phase in the battle over divestment. As the 6th largest university in the country, with an enrollment of nearly 70,000, OSU’s student body holds immense power and influence if effectively organized. Likewise, as the largest employer in Columbus, OSU’s workers too have a lot of potential power. Given the university’s $7.4 billion worth of investments and its links with the state of Israel, OSU plays an important role in economically bolstering and ideologically aiding Israel and the occupation of historic Palestine. A mass movement forcing OSU to divest from genocide would be hugely significant.
As OSU employs increasingly severe and varied tactics of suppression, students will be forced to engage in greater levels of strategic and creative organization to achieve their goals as they stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement and seek to aid the resistance to apartheid and genocide. Decisive battles are on the horizon at OSU. With the lessons of a decade of struggle, students and workers have the chance to turn the tide on OSU’s decade-long subversion of the BDS movement. With organization and mass struggle, we can do our small part at OSU in the worldwide struggle for Palestinian liberation against imperialism and racial rule.