It was quarter past four on Wednesday, March 13, the week before spring break, and a crowd of protestors, many from outside the university, had formed on the sidewalks and turf in front of the Sullivan building. Another, smaller crowd of mostly Worcester State Students was forming behind the building, on the pavement between Sullivan, the Student Center and the Learning Resource Center. Catriona Standfield, a professor of political science at Worcester State, and her colleague Noa Shaindlinger, a Jewish, Israeli history professor with a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, joined them.
Among the crowd in front of the building were WSU alumni, visitors from nearby universities and members of the Worcester Independent Socialist Group, who posted an event to their Facebook page the day before the event with the following message:
The Independent Socialist Group and Free Worcester are aware of an event tomorrow at Worcester State University featuring an IDF soldier and defending Israel’s invasion of Gaza. We have heard many people are interested in counter protesting but have not seen any formally announced events. We propose that all those who stand against Israeli state terror and the IDF meet on the May St side of the Sullivan Academic building at 3:15pm for an outdoor picket. If you or your organization already has plans and wants to combine efforts, please contact us ASAP.
There were eighteen respondents.
Inside the building, an older, Jewish gentleman wearing a yarmulke asked for directions to Eager Auditorium. He was a few minutes late. Meanwhile, a Palestinian alum of Worcester State was being escorted out of the building by campus police in the opposite direction.
All of these individuals have one thing in common: they were there for the talk by an IDF (Israeli Defense Force) reservist who was called to duty in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. The talk took place in the smaller of Sullivan’s two auditoriums. The speaker, Shahar Peled, was brought by Michael Gesin, a Worcester State history professor, in collaboration with the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts and Mary Jane Rein, then-Executive Director of Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Michael Gesin was unavailable for comment.
Peled was introduced by Rein and Steven Schimmel, executive director of the Jewish Federation. A genocide studies Ph.D. student from Clark, M. K. Speth, interrupted Schimmel to argue that Rein was not representative of the Strassler Center and that her title should not be used.
In the auditorium, many members of the Jewish community were seated in the right half of the room, while several student groups, including the Muslim Student Association, Student Senate, and the Intercultural Student Alliance, were situated in the left half. “There were students sitting on one side, while on the other side were outsiders,” as Esther Celoy, a student senator who attended the event and joined in the protests, put it. By “outsiders,” she said, she means outsiders to Worcester State.
For another 20 minutes, protesters from Worcester State and other universities chanted and shouted at the speaker, while others yelled back at them.
One protestor, a WPI student, was escorted off campus by police and given an order of trespass — an order not to step foot on campus property. Other audience members, mostly older Jews, yelled at the protestors to shut up. “Savages,” shouted one of them, an Israeli woman, or, “you’re acting like savages” — students gave mixed accounts of exactly what was said. Some student accounts said the insults went further and were directed at Palestinians.
Amidst the chaos, speaker Peled periodically took out his phone to record students when he was unable to get a word in. He later posted these recordings to his personal Instagram account. Steven Schimmel, who was at the speaker’s side for much of the event, was purportedly recording students as well, and Gesin was witnessed recording student protestors outside the building. Student protesters also photographed and recorded the event. One such video was made viral on Instagram.
At about 4:35 p.m., a fire alarm was pulled by an unknown actor and police evacuated the building. Provost of the university Lois Wims, who was in attendance at the event, reminded the crowd that pulling a fire alarm on false pretenses is a felony. Students who talked to the Wormtown Herald said they don’t know who pulled the alarm.
Security presence at the event included a state trooper, Worcester State Police Captain Bill Marrier, and other campus police. According to multiple student accounts, one of the officers at the scene taunted protestors from his police cruiser.
When the building was deemed safe and the police let people back in, even more students from outside poured in to join the crowd in Eager. Some had to sit on the floor because the room was too crowded. Eager Auditorium has 166 seats.
A few of these students, holding signs or Palestinian flags in their laps, were told by police they couldn’t have these in the room. When asked where this rule was stated, the officers asserted that it wasn’t, but “we’re saying it now.” The police threatened to trespass the students — some of them residents — from campus if they didn’t comply.
When the same students left and came back shortly thereafter without signs or flags, the police tried to evict them immediately. They were allowed to stay, however, after Wims intervened.
For the remainder of the talk, students and other audience members continued to interrupt the speaker to voice their views, to a mix of cheers and jeers. Some attendees booed Peled when he attempted to speak. Sharisse Kanet, a professor of philosophy who attended the talk (she also teaches classes on law), expressed afterwards that she felt deeply ashamed of the university’s students that day. She emphasized that she was only there to listen, which nobody else seemed inclined to do.
Kanet described being terrified of the current climate at college campuses, where there’s an “impetus to shut down and censor voices you disagree with.” She was shocked to see it unravel in real-time at Worcester State. “The whole project of higher education is to come into contact with ideas that push you mentally and emotionally and to be able to engage with those ideas in a civil way,” she said.
Kanet recently attended a lecture on freedom of expression at Wesleyan University, and recounts that one of the main points made is that freedom of talk isn’t enough; we have to think also about the freedom to listen. “When we shut down someone the way that [Peled] was shut down, we’re not just depriving people of the right to speak, but we’re also depriving everyone else of the right to listen,” Kanet said.
Similarly, Steven Schimmel expressed frustration that the students who disrupted the event didn’t seem interested in listening or engaging in dialogue: “They didn’t ask for evidence. They didn’t ask questions of the speaker. They chose to instead aggressively shout down the speaker and twice pulled the building’s fire alarm to halt the event.” The fire alarm was indeed pulled a second time. Police did not evacuate the premises.
Some individuals felt threatened by the protestors’ behavior. “It’s super scary and isolating,” says a young Jewish student. “[Jewish students] are afraid to speak up and have a lot of fear of harassment. It felt like a hate crime.” She brought up that most Jews believe Israel is justified in the war. According to recent polling, 89 percent of American Jews believe Israel is fighting the war for good reason. 62 percent say they believe Israel’s conduct in the war has been acceptable.
Jews and others felt uncomfortable about some student-protestors’ display of red-painted hands, which the protesters said was intended to send the message that “Israel has blood on its hands.” Despite being a popular tactic in American protest history, the display has been used to mimic that of Aziz Salha’s bloodied hands after two Israeli soldiers were killed during the Ramallah Lynching of 2000, which has significance to many Jews and others in the region.
Student protesters were eager to make clear after the event that they are not antisemitic, merely critical of Israel in the current war.
Other faculty and students reported being proud of those who were involved in the protests. “I’m proud of our students for putting their bodies on the line,” said Noa Shaindlinger, one of the professors who joined students in protest. She noted how similar events on other campuses have become violent.
Esther Celoy, a student senator, reported being “very proud of the students who protested and organized the protests.” She believes that Worcester State students “definitely align with Palestine.”
Catriona Standfield, another professor who was present at the protests, said that even the disruptive students were justified. “At Massachusetts public meetings, there is no requirement for civility,” she pointed out. “That’s what our First Amendment rights are about.” She said she thinks the police were heavy-handed in trespassing non-violent disruptive protestors from campus.
Standfield was likely referring to the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law, which doesn’t apply to private entities acting alone, such as a foreign national giving a talk about his experiences. The Public Meeting Law also does not allow for disruptive behavior, which goes beyond mere incivility.
Stacey Luster, the university’s General Counsel, told the Herald, “I do know that we believe in the First Amendment, and we want to reiterate the rules students have to follow [at events]. The ‘heckler’s veto,’ it’s a violation of the First Amendment.” The “heckler’s veto” refers to a situation in which authorities shut down a speaker due to the response of disruptive protesters.
Still, Standfield believes that most Worcester State students were non-disruptive. “Our students have a great deal of respect for the norms of academic freedom and free public debate,” she said. “But many raised very legitimate concerns about the nature of this event and the speaker.”
Stanfield joined students in protesting peacefully outside the building to show solidarity and to express her own concerns with the event and with what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank. She correctly pointed out that the International Court of Justice has found it plausible that Israel has committed acts of genocide against Palestinians in the current war in a case they’ll be ruling definitively on in the coming months.
In the meantime, the ICJ has not ordered a ceasefire. An order for mutual ceasefire and for the release of all hostages was issued by the United Nations Security Council, but was ignored by both Israel and Hamas.
Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including over 13,000 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, compared with fewer than 1,500 Israeli deaths. Although the ministry is associated with Hamas, its numbers are considered credible by many reputable Western sources, and some say they may even be an underestimate. Other sources, however, have raised concerns about statistical improbabilities in the data, and even Hamas recently admitted that they have incomplete data for about a third of the reported Palestinian casualties.
The Gaza Strip, home to just over 2.1 million people, is roughly half the size of Chicago, which has a similarly-sized population of 2.65 million.
Israel claims the war’s high Palestinian death toll is due to Hamas using hospitals and schools as cover for their operations — a claim which is likely founded. Furthermore, Israel is likely using the highest proportion of precision-guided weapons in the history of urban warfare, and taking extra precautions to minimize civilian harm even when using unguided munitions, according to U.S. State Department and Department of Defense officials. It is notable that in the current war, there are fewer reported Palestinian deaths than the number of bombs dropped by Israel, meaning a rate of less than one person per bomb dropped.
An expert at the Modern War Institute at West Point has said that Israel “has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.”
Some organizations, on the other hand, such as Amnesty International, a human rights-focused organization, have raised doubt that Israel has done enough to prevent civilian casualties.
Some of Israel’s more questionable tactics include its alleged use of white phosphorus bombs in a dense population center like Gaza, which is against international law if used to target civilians, and its alleged use of a sophisticated AI system to identify Hamas militants to target, with minimal verification of the tool’s info or reasoning, as reported by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.
Israel denied use of white phosphorus in October, saying the charges are “unequivocally false.”
Professor Standfield specifically mentioned being disturbed by the language used to advertise Peled’s talk, such as vague references to Hamas’s “evil propaganda” which appeared on flyers posted to bulletin boards around campus. This type of language suggested to her that the purpose of the event was not to “help students to understand and, in a nuanced fashion, work through the current realities and historical context” of the war, but to “further escalate the dehumanizing rhetoric towards Palestinians.”
A Jewish student who was involved in organizing the protests holds similar views. He said he never intended for people to enter the building. “I specifically didn’t want people inside the event because we could be recorded and our words misconstrued… which is unfortunately what happened.” Nonetheless, “I do not condemn their actions,” he said, as “they were well within their rights to vocalize concerns. I just wouldn’t do it myself.”
He, too, was concerned with the language on the flier, so he looked up the speaker. He found an interview that Peled had done with NewsMax, an organization the student called “a far-right news company” that engages in conspiracy theories. “They were a favorite of Trump’s,” the student added. He reports being similarly concerned with some of Peled’s statements in that interview. The interview can be found on YouTube.
Motivated to act, the student said he got in contact with a faculty member at Worcester State who was willing to support him, and contacted a few student clubs on campus, as well as external organizations. Over the weekend, he coordinated with these groups and made plans to protest the speaker.
He made clear his aim wasn’t to deplatform Peled. “I fully respect the rights of this individual to speak on campus.” But, he added, “as a student, I have the right to voice opposition.” He also made clear that, while he doesn’t support the IDF, he doesn’t like Hamas, either. He says they’re both in the wrong.
Despite his peaceful intentions, and those of many of his fellow students, he said he’s not surprised things got heated. “One would have to be very unaware of the situation to assume it would have gone any other way.”
The student requested to remain anonymous for this story.
Some who did attend the talk expressed like attitudes; David Maciewski, for instance, a 2013 alum of Worcester State who said he’s against de-platforming “on a point of principle” and “not a big fan of cancel culture” attended non-disruptively with the intention of handing out flyers and picketing after the event. He had been handing out flyers beforehand as well. His goal was to combat purportedly false claims Peled had been making regarding Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, including that Hamas had beheaded a number of infants and that women were raped en masse.
In an interview with Friends of the IDF which was posted to YouTube, for instance, Peled quoted a ZAKA volunteer saying that they recovered 22 dead babies, some of them beheaded. ZAKA is an Israeli volunteer organization which was involved in the recovery of bodies after the Oct. 7 attacks. The organization’s credibility has been questioned several times, including by the Times of Israel, a major Israeli newspaper. Peled also mentioned beheaded babies in his NewsMax interview.
The Times of Israel reported that two Israeli infants were killed on Oct. 7, suggesting these allegations are false.
For Peled’s part, the claim about mass rapes has merit, as significant evidence exists which shows that Hamas committed acts of sexual and gender-based violence against the victims of October 7.
It is noteworthy that there have been several claims of acts of sexual violence committed against Palestinian women by IDF soldiers, as well. Although some instances of this are proven, other claims have not been verified and some have already been proven false. Nonetheless, they’ve prompted UN rights experts to call for an investigation into these allegations, some of which predate Oct 7. Sexual violence is prohibited by the IDF code of conduct, and all IDF soldiers found guilty of such acts have been punished.
Maciewski also sent out emails to professors in the History & Political Science Department before the event expressing his concerns. He said he wanted to “challenge the university to do better,” by which he seemed to mean that Peled should have been hosted as part of a panel instead of as an independent speaker. He dropped names of individuals who could’ve been on the panel — Omer Bartov, for instance; an Israeli-born historian and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Dr. Bartov takes a more critical view of the Israeli government and the IDF.
Maciewski compared inviting Peled to speak alone to inviting an ex-Hamas militant to do the same: “If there’s someone who’s a former Hamas militant, would you invite him in to speak if you got an academic to back him? I bet a lot of people would be up in arms about that. You’d probably have riots out front.”
Similarly, M. K. Speth, the visiting Ph.D. student from Clark University who shouted at Steven Schimmel and Mary Jane Rein at the opening of the event, expressed concern with the lack of scholars engaged in the conversation. “These events are political,” she points out, mentioning that Peled is a soldier, not an academic. “I try to hold my political views to myself,” she adds, though she admits it can be challenging for such a touchy issue. She was vocal in expressing her views during the talk.
Speth’s and other Clark University students’ behavior at the Worcester State event, as well as Clark’s unwillingness to condemn them, sparked Rein to retire from her position as head of the Strassler Center at Clark and join Assumption University, a Catholic school, as she recently wrote about in a Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece.
Clark’s President David Fithian condemned the disruptors, but said his university is unable to do much as far as disciplinary action, given the event happened at another university. He does, however, give Worcester State some flack, saying that “had this kind of disruption or confrontation happened at an event on our campus, we would have intervened and enforced our Student Code of Conduct.”
Worcester State’s President’s Office sent an email to students on March 22, nine days after the speaker and protests occurred, which stated that “the event on March 13 failed to adhere to some of our best practices with respect to WSU event sponsorship” and reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to free speech.
On April 9 and 10, President Maloney held two private meetings in his office regarding the events of March 13; only students and community members who specifically wrote to the school administration expressing concerns were invited. The earlier session included those who were concerned about the behavior of the protesters, while the later meeting consisted of those concerned about the speaker and event in the first place. Both meetings were held off the record. President Maloney and General Counselor Stacey Luster declined to comment.
Daniel Margolis, a student who attended the former of the two meetings, says that the president clarified Michael Gesin’s “best practices” violations to be that he did not introduce the speaker and was not visibly present at the event. Maloney also said in the meeting that the disruptive students were out of line and affirmed that the university knew about the event well in advance, according to Margolis.
In an interview, the Herald asked General Counsel and Assistant to the President Stacey Luster the school’s attitude toward the disrupters. “These are learning opportunities,” she said. “We don’t want to condemn our students, but give them a place to learn.”
On April 17, an event related to Israel and Palestine was held: a “Solidarity for Justice in Palestine Symposium” from 9:30 to 1:45 in Sullivan Auditorium, with speakers on topics from Islamophobia to Palestinian journalism and human rights. Another talk originally scheduled for April 17, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Aftermath of the October 7,” was postponed. On April 22, Professor Cynthia Enloe spoke on “Feminists Everywhere Stay Active While Bombs are Falling.”
The symposium notably included a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace, a group who describe themselves as the “largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world,” though whether a majority of their members are Jewish is unclear. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish non-profit which supports a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, calls the JVP a “radical anti-Israel activist group.” They have notably supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, one of the Palestinian groups responsible for the attacks on October 7. The remainder of the speakers at the symposium were professors, some of whom have also courted criticism for their stances on Israel.
On April 30, the university will host Dr. Loretta Ross, who will be discussing First Amendment rights on topics related to global and American politics, race, immigration, ongoing armed conflicts/war and additional issues that will bring diverse perspectives.
Although none of the more recent talks sparked widespread conflict, only time will tell whether the conflicts of that day were a one-off, or if tensions on campus will continue.
Daniel Margolis and Maroua Rahaoui provided additional guidance for this story.
Corrections/Edits: An earlier version of this story misidentified Dr. Noa Shaindlinger as an Israeli-American scholar with a degree in genocide studies, misidentified the campus location of April 17 symposium, and incorrectly indicated that a second campus event was held April 17 (it was postponed). An earlier version of this story was entitled Foreign Conflicts Brought Home: IDF Reservist Sparks Protests at Worcester State.
