CHICAGO — It’s the day after Thanksgiving, but about 50 American college students are not with their families, or watching football, or trying to snag a Black Friday deal. They’re packed into a conference room in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, trying to figure out how they’d handle an Israeli official visiting their campus.
And they’ve turned it into a contest between two teams: females versus males. A woman in a purple hijab, named Jenin Alharithi, is leading the game. She hits the timer on her phone and tells the group they have five minutes to “figure out strategies.”
“A war criminal is coming to your campus,” said Alharithi, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “What are you going to do?”
A woman in a green chiffon hijab is the first to speak up, saying the students should form a protest, starting with recruiting demonstrators over the secure messaging app Telegram.
“I think we should demand, like, international justice,” she said, spreading her hands wide as she imagined the words on a poster. “And put ‘emergency rally’ in the school Telegram group.”
Then, a young woman with dark curly hair speaks. She says it is important to deflect any accusations of antisemitism, so she would enlist the group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) to join the protest. The Anti-Defamation League calls JVP a “radical” organization “that advocates for the eradication of Zionism and the boycott of Israel.” The group has more than 25 chapters across the country; last spring, Columbia University banned its chapter for using “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” at campus events.
“The first complaint is going to be ‘Oh, this is antisemitic,’ ” the woman explained of the protest. “I think we need like a JVP, or something like that, with Jewish people. We want white people, Jewish students there.”
