The university’s reprisal against Yalies4Palestine followed campus protests against the visit to New Haven by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s extremist police minister, Sharon Zhang reports.
Itamar Ben-Gvir in June 2021. (Wikimedia Commons/CC0)
By Sharon Zhang
Truthout
Yale University has revoked the registration status of a pro-Palestine student group on Wednesday after hundreds of students protested against Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s speaking event this week, despite the group saying it wasn’t responsible for organizing the demonstration.
Yale students reestablished their Gaza solidarity encampment in protest of Ben-Gvir’s speech delivered on Wednesday. Roughly 200 protesters had gathered on Tuesday night, shortly before organizers disbanded the encampment due to threats of retribution from the university.
The university claimed in a statement that it had revoked the registration status for Yalies4Palestine after student protesters violated university “time, place, and manner policies.” It said the administration is investigating the protest and that supposed violators of those policies will “face law enforcement and disciplinary action, including reprimand, probation, suspension, or expulsion.”
[Ben-Givr was invited to speak in New Haven by Shabtai, a Jewish intellectual discussion group that is not officially part of Yale but was co-founded by people affiliated with the school, including the now U.S. senator, Cory Booker, and Rabbi Shmully Hecht. Ben-Givr’s off-the-record talk at the Anderson Mansion, close to campus, was attended by Yale students and faculty members.]
The suspension of Yalies4Palestine comes just two days after Yale University signed a joint statement pledging to allow their students and staff to express their viewpoints “without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation” in the face of repression by the Trump administration, sparked in large part by the wave of campus protests last spring against Israel’s genocide.
Yale students staged a protest against the visit of far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir, expressing their opposition to his presence in the United States. Several students were arrested by police during the demonstrations. pic.twitter.com/MxhgCojFUg
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 24, 2025
Yalies4Palestine, Yale’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said it was not responsible for organizing the protest, per the Yale Daily News, but had simply shared posts on social media amplifying the event. Posts from Yale pro-Palestine groups on social media said that the encampment was set up by an autonomous group.
Yalies4Palestine pledged to continue fighting. A large group of activists indeed continued to protest Ben-Gvir on Wednesday around the time of the event, with police arresting at least one activist amid the demonstrations.
“Yalies4Palestine is not just a student organization,” the group wrote on social media. “Yalies4Palestine is a movement. Gaza is our core. We will not stop. We will not rest.”
Skyline of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. (Ali Eminov/Flickr/ CC BY-NC 2.0)
Ben-Gvir is extremist even by the standards of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which is already regarded as one of the most far right and anti-Palestinian governments in Israel’s history.
The police minister is regularly protested in Israel for his extremist policy proposals, and was protested by Israeli activists in the U.S. when he landed in Florida earlier this week.
The leader of Israel’s police force, Ben-Gvir is helping to lead the charge for the annexation of the occupied West Bank and has openly called for Israel to resettle Gaza.
His far right and anti-Palestinian views were considered so extreme in his youth that he was banned from serving in the Israeli military — even amid its indiscriminate slaughter and forced expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Just before his visit to Yale on Wednesday, Ben-Gvir boasted of a meeting with Republican leaders in which they agreed that “food and aid depots [in Gaza] should be bombed to create military and political pressure” — even as the U.N. has warned that Israel’s humanitarian catastrophe has reached new depths after 50 days of Israel’s total aid blockade.
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
This article is from Truthout.
I was an ordinary citizen way back in the late 60’s early 70’s and participated in marches against the Vietnam War in E. Lansing. We had a local newspaper called the Joint Issue which was free and always mentions what actions were taking place. We also had the Lansing Area Peace council that published a newsletter updating everyone as to what was happening and where. The many groups in the Lansing are were: Clergy and Laity against the war, Tax Resisters, Women’s League for International Peace and Freedom, etc. We later brought in Daniel Berrigan who spoke against the war. My late husband Gunter Pfaff, had many anti war meetings on his farm while the FBI was compiling a red file on him that is now in the special collections library at Michigan State University.Now at the age of 91, I am repeating the same process.
May the faculty of the Yale Law School or Yale Divinity School care to comment about this?
How I DETEST these Zionists!!!
So do I. And so did my Jewish former fiance and his parents.
A history major could write a long thesis on all the connections over the years between the Ivy League and genocide. America has a long history of genocide, and the Ivy League has a long history of providing America’s leaders.
I’m sure a history major could do research connecting the Ivy League with Slavery, and then Manifest Destiny. Princeton’s Wilson was a known racist who passed limits on immigration for others than non-white Europeans. Then of course we get to Dubya, Dubya, Dubya, and Barack Obama killing Gazans by the thousands in his term, to John Kerry in Biden’s genocidal cabinet, all proud Yale-ees.
Vietnam was an illegal unconstitutional undeclared war as all of the USA invasions and proxy wars post WWII.
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.” Thoreau
Ban Yale!
And all Yale-ees. Like Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
None of them are on your side. If they are from Yale, know that they s$$k. Have nothing to do with anyone associated with Yale. Whole Ivy League really, as they are all elitist scum.
My Dad went to Yale. But he’s been dead for more than 20 years and so doesn’t have to feel bad about it.
Protest against genocide, and you are banned from campus. Advocate for the slaughter on thousands of innocent people, and you’ll be given an invitation to speak on campus. What a twisted country this has become.
True indeed and I agree.
Absent is yale’s diplomatic discussion with its students and with the israeli murderer/psychopath.
$$$, all the way down …
Destroying a brand the erosion of the brand’s reputation and leading to a loss of trust, impacting on the prestige and even business viability.
Attica !!! Attica !!!
America! Wherefore art thou?
More to the point.
On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine Kent State students. The impact of the shootings was dramatic. The event triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close. H. R. Haldeman, a top aide to “President Richard Nixon, suggests the shootings had a direct impact on national politics.” Ya Think?
“What a twisted country this has become.”
Governed by twisted ideologies.
One can only imagine how much longer the senseless killing (of both the Vietnamese people and American soldiers) and destruction of the Vietnam War would have persisted had there been similar Fascist suppression of university students’ voices of opposition, shouting “Stop the War!” at universities across America, while becoming a major force in ending the Vietnam War human catastrophe.
One can only imagine how much longer the brutal conditions endured by South African citizens would have persisted had there been such Fascist suppression of student voices demanding the end of South African apartheid, again, making a key difference in eventually shortening the days of the brutal, ruthless South Africa apartheid government monstrosity.
It has become self-evident that the Palestinian people currently qualify for categorization as “the least among you” as described by Jesus Christ: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Zionist Christians might appreciate hearing an unambiguous, sincere, friendly reminder.
There was similar fascist oppression in the 1960’s.
In 1964, students who’d been protesting for Civil Rights over the summer returned to the Cal campus and Berkeley and found a very establishment administration shutting down free speech and talk about what they’d been doing on their summer vacations. Those students did not just take this. The result was the famous Berkeley Free Speech movement, which gave us a remarkable statement ….
“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
That doesn’t mean — I know it will be interpreted to mean, unfortunately, by the bigots who run The Examiner, for example — That doesn’t mean that you have to break anything. One thousand people sitting down some place, not letting anybody by, not [letting] anything happen, can stop any machine, including this machine! And it will stop!!”
— Mario Savio, Sproul Hall, Dec 2, 1964. hxxps://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm
Students in the 1960’s had the right to organize and protest on campus because they fought for that right and won. The Elites will never give you anything. You always have to fight for everything. This was as true in the 196o’s as today. But, students stopped fighting sometime back in the last century.
And, the most powerful weapon against school administrators is empty classrooms. Empty not because the students are out protesting today, but empty because the students saw no value in corporate training for corporate jobs that comes at the high price of massive debt and the even higher price of sacrificing your freedom. If you want to make a school administrator cry, let them see you burning your tuition check instead of giving it to them.
Vietnam was an illegal unconstitutional undeclared war as all of the USA invasions and proxy wars post WWII.
I remember the campus protests of the late sixties to mid seventies very well. I was a grad student and then assistant professor of U. S. History. It is true that the protests of that era were given much more leeway than the current protests. During the time of the antiwar protests, few to none questioned our right to do them. They were nonviolent and often drew large numbers of students, as well as faculty. Any attempt to ban such similar protests against Israel’s genocidal war today is not at all in keeping with the First Amendment right to free speech and protest for redress of grievance as guaranteed in the Constitution. There is a far more repressive attitude among those who are in positions of authority today.
Thank you Sharon Zhang,
It must be gratifying to Terrorist Ben Gvir’s Jewish billionaire class, enraptured in Israel’s bacchanalia of Genocide, to see this headline:
MEMO>>BREAKING: “WFP runs out of food stocks in Gaza as Israel keeps crossings closed”
and this headline from Dropsitenews: “Israel Is Using Suicide Drones to Target Displaced Palestinian Families Sheltering in Tents”
Will the funeral for Pope Francis stop the world’s most moral army from killing children on Saturday?
The university system is more about their business model than education. They are profit centers that align with the MIC and imperialist foreign policy.
The ‘A’ in MICIMATT (Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank), coined by Ray McGovern.