On a cold day in January, students in Swarthmore’s busy dining hall handed out pamphlets entitled “Public Enemy No. 1: The Swarthmore Board of Managers and A Letter to the Students.” The pamphlets detailed Swarthmore’s Board of Managers’ ties to Israel and fossil fuel companies and encouraged further action on campus in support of Palestine. As they gave the pamphlets to their peers, many reactions were positive. Some students expressed their appreciation for the information about their Board of Managers, which they said they were not aware of prior to reading the pamphlets.
A few weeks later, in early February, Swarthmore’s administration sent conduct letters charging eight of the students with promoting violence and provided less than a week for them to submit evidence defending themselves. The cases the students are being faced with are major misconduct violations, which is the highest severity of disciplinary action at Swarthmore, and has the potential of resulting in “suspension or expulsion from the College if the student were found responsible,” according to the college’s website.
One charged student, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear that it would affect the ongoing investigation, said that they were handing out the pamphlets, which they called zines, during the last week of fall semester and the first week of spring semester. The conduct letters charged each of the students with various infractions, including bullying and intimidation and encouraging physical harm.
The pamphlets were about Swarthmore’s Board of Managers and past student activism at Swarthmore regarding Palestine. The first pamphlet explained what the Board of Managers is and highlighted the financial ties many of the managers have with Israel and the fossil fuel industry. The cover of this pamphlet featured a collage of members of the board, with an image of a crosshair superimposed on top of it. This image has been cited by the college as promoting violence, the student involved said. The student noted that the crosshair is not pointing at any one particular member, a design choice they said was intentional to prevent the targeting of any specific members.
The second pamphlet was an overview of past actions on Swarthmore’s campus. It explained the encampments that were set up at Swarthmore the past two springs and the decreasing participation of Swarthmore students in the more recent action. The pamphlet called on students to continue engaging in activism for Palestine. Additionally, the phrasing of “the loss of the Hossam Shaba Liberated Zone was just the beginning of a new chapter for our struggle – one that will be necessarily more escalated, necessarily more violent,” drew attention from the administration.
The Hossam Shabat Liberation Zone is in reference to an encampment set up on Swarthmore’s Trotter Lawn in May 2025. The encampment was dismantled when nine protesters, including one current Swarthmore student and one student on an extended leave of absence, were arrested and charged with trespassing. The legal proceedings of that case are still ongoing.
The student clarified in a WHYY article that the encampment was not advocating for violence, but rather about understanding the risks that come with peaceful protests. The student also felt that the administration was pulling the quotes out of context and threatening free speech.
“Administration is trying to set a precedent where the College can stifle any free speech when it is critical of Swarthmore or its investments in genocide,” they said.
This is not the first time student activists for Palestine have faced backlash from Swarthmore’s administration. Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was placed on an interim suspension following their occupation of Parrish East Wing in February of 2025. The occupation was a protest against disciplinary charges for student activists for Palestine in the 2023-24 school year, according to The Phoenix.
The involved student felt that Swarthmore’s reaction to student protestors, as well as surveillance surrounding them, has been intensifying. They noted that Swarthmore’s library has several zines that are critical of the College, but have not caused this same level of scrutiny from the administration.
Swarthmore has also been increasing the amount of security cameras around the College. During the 2024-25 school year, students at Swarthmore were billed for shaking a camera that had been on the grounds of the Crum Woods, according to The Phoenix. Both students said they were shown hours of footage of themselves walking around campus and the woods that day as part of their hearing.
The student at Swarthmore involved in handing out the pamphlets was concerned that these surveillance capabilities could be used against protesters in order to further target student activists at the College.
These developments come during a time of increasing administrative action against pro-Palestinian activists throughout the Tri-Co, and increasing concerns about the way student activists are being surveilled.
Last semester, several Bryn Mawr students alleged that the school had hired private investigators to question and examine the actions of students who were involved in pro-Palestine protests. While Bryn Mawr’s president Wendy Cage said in an email that “the College considers the matter closed,” questions and tension remain over the issue of surveillance.
While there have not been many pro-Palestine protests on Haverford’s campus this year, a notable exception were the student protestors at Haviv Rettig Gur’s talk, “Roots, Return, and Reality: Jews, Israel, and the Myth of Settler Colonialism.” Student protestors disrupted the event several times, and at one point there was a physical altercation between an event attendee and a protestor. President Wendy Raymond condemned the actions of protestors in an email.
Despite this pushback from Swarthmore’s administration and the larger concerns, the student charged remains committed to their activism and believes it needs to be continued.
“When we see students being targeted with absurd charges like these, it should be a reminder to all of us that what the zines have to say is powerful,” said the student. “And it should be a reminder that the students themselves are powerful, because the school wouldn’t be repressing us this severely if they weren’t afraid of what we are capable of.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the Hossam Shabat Liberated Zone.
2 comments
The zine cover features pictures of individual members of the Board with a crosshair superimposed. I’m old enough to recall when Sarah Palin received serious flak for campaign material that included a map with crosshairs indicating districts the party was targeting to flip in the 2010 midterms. Below the map was a list of representatives names, including Gabby Giffords who then represented AZ-8. Less than two months after winning reelection, Giffords was shot in the head meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot. Giffords survived, albeit with brain damage, but six others (including a District Court chief judge and nine-year-old girl) were killed in the assassination attempt.
Palin’s campaign materials didn’t say “go shoot these representatives”, but it employed images that evoked violence (i.e. crosshairs are found on gun scopes) and was released during an extremely contentious election where the overall tone was more personal and aggressive than ordinary. This juxtaposition of violent imagery within a charged campaign season was correctly criticized out for escalating tensions and shifting the Overton window toward a more violent political environment.
Employing violent imagery and language within today’s political climate, which has become considerably worse in the past 16 years, is even worse than when Palin did it. It doesn’t matter that these zine creators didn’t directly state “go shoot these Board members” because the tenor of the Israel-Palestine debate is already boiling over: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were nearly murdered a year ago by an unstable man who blamed Shapiro for the violence against Palestinians.
This isn’t a free-speech issue. These activists aren’t being disciplined for their beliefs but for their conduct. It is quite possible to protest for justice in Palestine without contributing to the normalization of political violence.
I just hope for a fair and just resolution