Written by Jessica Schott-Rosenfield & Nomah Elliot
Eight days after the rally on Haverford College’s Founders’ Porch, SJP staged a sit-in at Bryn Mawr College outside President Kim Cassidy’s office in Taylor Hall from 8:30 am to 8:30 pm, in response to continued inaction on the part of the Bryn Mawr administration. Though members of the Haverford College administration have, since October 23rd, been in meetings with student organizers regarding the SJP demands, Bryn Mawr administration has ignored emails and requests to meet. As an SJP press release states, “SJP finds the complete disregard of Palestinian people in all of Bryn Mawr’s actions unacceptable.”
“In an institution like this, action like [a sit-in] seems to be some of the only things you can do because it seems like admin doesn’t want to listen to student demands, and academia is a powerful tool,” one student said, in response to why they decided to participate in the sit-in. Feelings of powerlessness coupled with anger at the response from both Bryn Mawr and Haverford was the push to action that many students felt. Many people pointed out that college-related action is how they can make a difference. They see calling on administrators and the school at large as the best way they can make a change.
This demonstration was sparked by the most recent email from the President and Dean, which focused on condemning the posters put up around campus displaying the emblematic phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The email stated, “We remind all students that expression of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of hate speech are antithetical to the College’s ideals and harm individuals and our community as a whole.”
This particular phrase, used as a chant in solidarity with Palestine, has sparked debate over its exact significance. Perhaps the most inflammatory argument against its use by students on campus is that the terrorist group, Hamas, has used the phrase in their own rhetoric. Some see an implication in the phrase that calling for Palestinian freedom in these specific areas means calling for a genocide or displacement of the Israeli people who occupy the same space. However, students argue that the phrase calls not for hate, but for peace; it calls for Palestinian self-determination, and invokes the hope that Palestinians could be released from oppressive Israeli control.
An attendee of the sit-in who wishes to remain anonymous said, “The Zionist logic I’m hearing is that [this phrase calls for wiping out the Israeli government.] But what that [actually] reveals is that Zionists are admitting that there is no free Palestine under the Israeli government.”
Many attendees wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from other students or outside forces. They described the current Bryn Mawr campus climate as strange, and a deviation from the status quo. One student pointed out that, “Bryn Mawr often feels single minded, so this situation feels bizarre,” and another student discussed the fact that this was the first time they weren’t sure what their friends’ views were, or and if their friends were also in support of Palestine. “Following [the] October 7 Hamas attack, I didn’t know what people thought, so for the first week it felt like I was unsure of what to say and whether to voice my opinion…For the first week I wasn’t liking certain people’s posts on instagram.” That same student also noted that they have now realized they have to voice their opinion. It seems that for a lot of people, the altered campus climate is what has shown them just how important actions like sit-ins are to them.
The President of the Middle Eastern and North African Students Association at Bryn Mawr, Mana Sadeghi, spoke to us regarding Bryn Mawr’s statement: “Bryn Mawr has been dangerously conflating anti-zionism with anti-semitism, and using that as their central narrative … Taking down posters is normalizing that what we are speaking out against is positive … there are a lot of things we could put up that are scarier to look at, but we’re just putting up words. [Bryn Mawr is] pushing people who are afraid to speak up further into that fear.”
A leader within the group asserts, “[The phrase] is not hate speech. It’s love speech.”
At 8:30 am, students gathered on the first floor of Taylor Hall, after being told that President Cassidy was in a meeting. Eventually, an attendee tells us, they moved to the second floor to sit outside offices, and began hanging posters. Dean Karlene Burrell-McRae addressed students shortly after they arrived on the second floor, saying, “You can sit here, but you might be sent to Honor Trial if you hang posters [including the phrase, ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.’]” In the course of the sit-in, she came out of her office twice to reiterate the statement. “We got threatened with Honor Board hearings,” an organizer states, “and I told them, ‘take me to trial.’”
Students are disappointed by the seeming lack of nuance in many people’s reactions, saying, “in order to be pro-Israel in this moment you have to be ignoring history.” One participant discussed the particular complexities of being Jewish, and growing up in a Zionist family, saying that becoming pro-Palestine “took unlearning on my part.”
The student pointed out that there can be a lot of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement, especially on social media, where they have noticed that people tend to repost quippy graphics that contain antisemitic dog whistles without realizing, and without looking into the creator of the post. The student asserted that the protests now are simply about an ending to the killing, and conversations surrounding political solutions cannot happen until then.
Soon after students situated themselves in the hallway, members of the press from Action News 6 ABC, as well as CBS, arrived on the scene. Students got the impression that this new addition to the situation posed a more palpable discomfort to members of administration. “This is a P.R. nightmare for them,” says MK, a Jewish senior student at Bryn Mawr involved with SJP. Within the next few hours, President Cassidy and Dean Burrell-McRae offered a 5 PM meeting to student organizers at 5pm. An anonymous attendee said, “She was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually not busy anymore today, and I just haven’t gotten any of the emails you’ve sent. I don’t know why, like, my secretary hasn’t been showing them to me.'”
The meeting between SJP organizers, President Cassidy, and Dean Burrell-McRae lasted approximately an hour and forty-five minutes. Upon exiting the office and regrouping with other students in the hallways, M.K. and K.A., a Palestinian student involved with SJP, began to give a rendition of the administration members’ responses.
“Basically, they told us, ‘you’re undermining our authority’…They said we shouldn’t demand anything because it sounds like we’re yelling at them,” M.K. said. “They insisted on policing our tone … I’m not surprised by their response. This is very similar to the rhetoric around the strike in my freshman year, about language being aggressive.” (M.K. refers here to the student strike of 2020, held for BIPOC justice.)
According to M.K. and K.A., both the President and Dean remained uncommitted to any action regarding the demands given by SJP, including especially divestment from Israeli institutions and corporations. “The administration wants it to be an education issue. Their objective is protecting future students. They have no interest in divestment of any form.”
The administration’s rhetoric right now is apparently centered on ensuring education for future students. During the meeting, they cited financial aid as one of the aspects of a Bryn Mawr experience that would not be possible without the money they make from their current investments.
“I think the current situation is not complex, but the ultimate solution to the Israel Palestine conflict will be.”
An anonymous protesting student
MK continued, “They care about money more than anything else … They’re good at fake listening. They did nothing but shoot us down with, ‘we see you, we hear you.’”
“It’s like we’re speaking a different language,” adds KA. “I mean, I talked to Cassidy and it’s literally like … we can’t understand each other.”
In a nutshell, it seems the meeting did not yield much progress beyond administrative attempts to quell use of the “From the River to the Sea” slogan, and offers of educational programming at the college, including speaker series on the history of the slogan, and “culture nights” celebrating Palestinian heritage. Students remain unsatisfied by this response, and frustrated by the apparent futility of trying to engage with a closed-off authority figure: “As students we don’t have many links to power,” MK said. “I mean, John Fetterman [responded to an email of mine] saying he loves Israel. So this is one of my only ways to access authority … We’re gonna keep demanding a ceasefire. We’re gonna insist on having humanity in this situation, which is lacking [from the college].”
