As students at universities across the country continue expressing their opinions regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas through sit-ins, marches and protests, a group of Clemson students came together on Bowman Field on Oct. 18 to protest for Israel to ceasefire.
The students urged that individuals in the United States should oppose the use of their tax money to fund what they believe is a genocide.
The students sported posters stating, “Stop the genocide,” “Judaism ≠ Zionism” and “Israel ceasefire now.”
These are similar statements to those of a sit-in at Sikes Hall last May, the first event related to the Israel-Hamas war on Clemson’s campus. The sit-in received organizational pushback from the University, as the event was originally scheduled to take place during finals week.
The University Facilities Use Policy prevents “events or activities” from being held during finals week. However, the most recent group of protestors did not encounter the same issues as their protest did not fall during finals week.
After the Sikes Hall sit-in, participants received an overall negative online response through mediums such as Facebook, Instagram, news media and more, in addition to administrative objections.
In contrast, this recent protest for the ceasefire in Israel has received no immediate backlash.
“The reason we put this together is we just wanted to spread awareness to the fact that this has kind of been an ongoing conflict for, I mean it, the ties go back, you know, hundreds of years. But I mean, they’ve specifically been declared at war for over a year now,” Frank Jeffries, a biosystems engineering graduate teaching assistant, told The Tiger. Jeffries helped organize the protest.
While this is not the first conflict to take place in the Gaza Strip and Israel, it is “one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history,” according to the Associated Press.
Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, Israel and groups in the Palestinian territories have been involved in multiple wars. The most recent conflict — prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 2023 — was the 2014 Gaza War.
Over the course of the last year, the Israel-Hamas conflict has amassed a death toll of over 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Associated Press. The conflict began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militant groups launched a surprise attack on Israel with over 1,000 casualties. Israel responded by bombing the Gaza Strip and invading the region, and strikes across the area have continued since then.
On Oct. 1, Israeli forces began an invasion of Lebanon, the culmination of months of violence between Israel and Hezbollah. The invasion was enabled by a series of Israeli strikes that destabilized Hezbollah’s leadership, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon has displaced approximately 1.2 million civilians, according to the Washington Post.
The main goals of this protest were to bring student voices together to demonstrate awareness and further involve the Clemson community.
Jeffries stressed the importance of encouraging others to protest in support of a ceasefire.
“(In) the community in Clemson, there hadn’t really been any protests or pushes to spread awareness, so we just felt like it was our kind of duty as citizens and as students here to just be active members in this community,” Jeffries told The Tiger.
The war has divided citizens across the world, causing protests far and wide. Notable protests on college campuses include those on UCLA’s and Columbia University’s campuses, which received national attention in the spring.
At the University of Southern California, students were forcibly removed from pro-Palestinian protests, according to the Los Angeles Times. More recently, at USC, protestors shut down an intersection on the anniversary of the beginning of the attacks.
Before Clemson’s ceasefire protest occurred, the protest organizers reached out to multiple organizations dedicated to similar and related issues that could be addressed when considering the conflict, including an Israeli student association.
Students at the protest also provided numbers and historical context for people walking along Bowman. Members handed out flyers with information and sources regarding the matter, including news articles with headlines such as “Israel under pressure to justify its use of AI in Gaza” and “US-armed Israeli military kills American citizens in Lebanon.”
There is no indication whether any further protests will occur in the future.
