Anti-Israel Protest at Yale Turns Violent, Anti-American
“He stabbed me in the eye with a Palestinian flag”
A Yale Jewish student, Sahar Tartak, was “jabbed in the eye with a flag pole,” last night in a confrontation with anti-Israel protesters, the Jerusalem Post reported. On Friday night, at the same anti-Israel encampment at Beinecke Plaza, students cheered in celebration as they removed an American flag, according to a video circulating on Instagram. The same anti-Israel protest obstructed an entryway to Yale’s Schwarzman Center with a Palestinian flag, in apparent violation of college rules.
Until this weekend, Yale has largely avoided being grouped with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Harvard, and MIT as among the universities that have struggled worst in navigating anti-Israel activism. Yale, like Harvard, has so far been reluctant to ask police to arrest or remove disruptive anti-Israel protesters. In contrast, university administrations at Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Brown, the University of Massachusetts, Brandeis, and Columbia have all called in police to make arrests, clear campus spaces, or issue summonses.
“Tonight at Yale, I was assaulted by a student today at an anti-Israel protest. He stabbed me in the eye with a Palestinian flag. Now I’m in the hospital. This is what happens when visibly Jewish students try to attend and document these rallies,” Tartak posted on X.
The spectacle of the anti-Israel students erupting in celebration as the American flag was removed underscored a conceptual point that has surfaced elsewhere, too, about an overlap of anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments.
The Yale Daily News reported “the action to take down the flag was not sanctioned by the student coalition that organized the bulk of Friday’s demonstrations, an organizer told the News.” The News also reported that last night some students with an American flag and a speaker playing the national anthem showed up at the encampment, apparently to rebuke their peers.
“Aaron Schorr ’24, a member of the group, told the News that the students were ‘concerned with the desecration of the American flag,’” the News reported.
A video recently posted by Columbia student Lishi Baker shows anti-Israel protesters shouting, “Death to America” and reacting with hostility to visitors holding American flags.
“If anyone thinks the efforts against Israel and against America are separate, they are mistaken,” Kira Berman, a Yale junior and the president of Yale Friends of Israel, told me.
I was in New Haven earlier this year and visited the Yale art museum, where one of the first works I saw was Dread Scott’s “Imagine a World Without America,” a map of the world without the United States. The explanatory text alongside the art in the gallery says the work “challenges the idea of ‘American patriotism as a unifying value.’”
At the time I shrugged it off as typical art world wokeness and not that significant. After all, the museum also included classic portraits of George Washington and John Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is noteworthy that the key demand of the student protesters isn’t only that the Yale endowment divest from Israel but that it divest from the defense industry that makes arms to protect Ukraine and America.
It’s easy to get disheartened by the state of the campuses. At Yale the bright spots are students like Tartak, Berman, and Schorr who understand the issues and what is at stake. If these institutions are salvageable, they will be saved one at a time by students showing up, singing the national anthem, and defending the American flag.
These things happen when there is no true leadership at our learning institutions and our nation as a whole. Tragic. Protesters who don’t like America can leave and go where it’s better.