BOCA RATON — A march to show support for Palestine at Florida Atlantic University Wednesday afternoon was met with counter protests, ending in two arrests, including that of a young woman who was tackled to the ground by a campus police officer.
The arrests arose out of an “opposing side in our crowd conflicting with our side,” said Sabha Hammad, who works for CAIR-Florida and helped organize the protest.
A pro-Israel counter-protester told officers that a pro-Palestine protester had elbowed her, according to police and witness reports. Meanwhile, a male student is accused of hitting the female president of the Muslim Student Association.
The protest comes four days after Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, killing more Jews in a single day since the Holocaust; the death toll in Israel currently sits at over 1,000. In Gaza and the West Bank, 830 people have been killed, the AP reported.
The march began peacefully about 1 p.m., as approximately 100 students and other supporters gathered outside of FAU’s Student Union building. Many wore Palestinian flags around their backs, carried signs with phrases like “no justice without return” and chanted “free free Palestine” and “end the aggression, stop the crimes, get out of Palestine.” One sign described Palestine as the world’s “biggest open air prison.”
Several campus police officers walked with the marchers. As they walked, some passers-by joined the marchers, including fellow students and mothers with young children. Others recorded on their phones. Many looked on ambivalently.
The marchers entered the campus breezeway, a long walkway where students eat and groups stand at tables, passing by a table for FAU’s Chabad community, where Jewish students watched in silence. Danielle Newman, a student who was at the table but is not Jewish, was visibly upset as she saw the students go by.
“It’s really aggressive, and it’s not empathetic to what’s happening in Israel,” she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
As the marchers reached the center of the breezeway, they passed a group of counter-protesters who wore Israeli flags and danced to Israeli music, but passed them with no interruption.
At this point, however, tensions began to emerge; a few students had started to walk ahead of the group, waving small Israeli flags. A man angrily shouted at the marchers from a car.
Then, the marchers encountered two young men wearing Israel flags, who began to walk with them, yelling and cursing.
“We’re not engaging, keep walking,” protest organizers told the group. They did, and the men continued to walk with them.
The tensions reached a breaking point towards the end of the march. One of the students had swung at another with an elbow, according to Campus Police Chief Sean Brammer.
When an officer tried to separate the student from the crowd of protesters, Brammer said, she kicked him, so they “did the take down.” He would not elaborate on what that meant, adding that he had not yet reviewed the witness or bodycam footage.
Video footage taken by Mae Antar, another protester, shows the officer trying to restrain the young pro-Palestine student as she struggles.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” one student shouts at the officer.
Then he throws her to the ground. A crowd of screaming students forms around him as he ties her arms behind her back.
The student protester is now charged with two counts of battery, one for the elbowing and one for resisting the police officer, Brammer said. He said she was not injured.
Though Brammer did not say whether the student who made the initial complaint about the elbowing was a pro-Israel counter-protester, friends and fellow pro-Palestine marchers said that she was, arguing that the student had merely jostled her because of the tight space.
“They brushed against each other,” Antar said, adding that the pro-Israel students “were instigating.”
Meanwhile, the woman who is president of the Muslim Student Association was also hit by another student, Brammer said. That student, a man, was being processed for disorderly conduct and battery Wednesday afternoon. Paramedics also came to assess him, though Brammer didn’t know if he was hospitalized.
The campus police officer who arrested the woman will be investigated, Brammer said. “We investigate everything.”
About 3 p.m., the marchers gathered on the lawn to make speeches. But the organizer who had led the march asked them not to; she didn’t want to “silence anyone,” she said, but people needed to make their statements to police.
The group began to disperse. Officers told the two pro-Israel students who had followed the marchers to leave. As some students gave statements, others remained, talking to each other. Some were in tears, many were calling their parents. Several university officials stood at the perimeter.
Krishna Madan, one of the pro-Palestine protesters and a former Broward history teacher, told the Sun Sentinel that the police officers were “not proactive.”
Officers should have made sure the counter-protesters were kept at a 6-foot distance from the marchers, he said, adding that they “would never have allowed Arab students to approach Jewish students.”
“It was an act of provocation,” he said. “Police have a responsibility to prevent that.”
Several pro-Palestine students also expressed frustration, though many would not give their names. Some said that their concerns for Palestinians were not being represented in the media or by their own university; FAU itself recently put out a statement in support of Israel.
“As ardent supporters of Israel, Florida Atlantic University vehemently opposes the ongoing violence and loss of life witnessed this weekend in Israel and urges an immediate cessation of hostilities to avoid further loss of life,” the statement read. “We condemn the terrorist attacks that were carried out against civilian communities and we support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Meanwhile, Jewish students condemned the march.
“To walk onto our campus and shout free Palestine? I have no words,” Danielle Yablonka, a senior and member of the university’s Hillel of Broward and Palm Beach, said in a text. “This terrorism is only hurting their cause. You know there is strength in coming together but unfortunately this hate pulls us farther apart.”