Johns Hopkins student protest of Israel enters third day: ‘We will not stop. We will not rest’
The encampment at Johns Hopkins University was quiet Wednesday morning as the third day of pro-Palestinian protests on campus continued.
A few people involved with the protests carried bottled water to the collection of tents on “The Beach,” a grassy hill by the intersection of Charles Street and University Parkway, before noon on Wednesday as most students carried on their day. Later Wednesday, protesters planned to hold teach-ins for May Day, celebrated in labor movements as International Workers’ Day.
The night before, university officials reiterated that administrators are “extremely concerned about the health, safety and welfare of students involved in the protest who have chosen to encamp, as well as others in our community.” They said that by remaining on campus after 8 p.m., protesters had breached an agreement reached hours after demonstrations began Monday afternoon, and threatened “disciplinary action” against students engaging in protests after the set hours.
“We declare that Johns Hopkins University has no place to speak on health and safety, as a so-called leader in public health education that has done nothing but enable one of the largest public health and humanitarian crises of our time,” the collective of student groups leading the protest said in a news release Wednesday morning.
Students took turns on the microphone Tuesday night to continue to call on the school to cut ties with Israel during Baltimore’s version of a nationwide campus protest movement that has resulted in mass arrests elsewhere.
“Dissolve. Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest,” the crowd chanted.
The peaceful encampment launched Monday around 4 p.m. on the Beach, near the campus’s library complex. The crowd peaked at more than 200 people Tuesday night.
Tables near the front offered free food and drinks as well as hygiene and medical supplies. A sign with a phone number to call if arrested was tied to a tree. One speaker shared tips on what to say when confronted by law enforcement.
Hopkins is one of several universities nationwide where student groups have initiated pro-Palestinian protests as the end of the academic year approaches and Israel’s offensive in the Middle East continues. Similar protests have also sprung up at the University of Maryland, College Park, as well as the small, private Goucher College in Towson, where the president ordered Tuesday for an encampment to clear after protesters clashed with school faculty on Monday.
The demonstration at Hopkins has remained peaceful, while others have been mired in chaos as protesters clash with police and counter-protesters. Early Wednesday morning, dueling groups of protesters clashed at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Associated Press reported.
Around 1,000 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests at universities since New York Police arrested more than 100 demonstrators at Columbia University on April 18, according to the AP. Tuesday night, on the 56th anniversary of a similar police action against students protesting racism and the Vietnam War, hundreds of police officers stormed the Manhattan campus to arrest protesters, according to the AP.
At Hopkins on Wednesday, campus security officers continued watching the quiet encampment from uphill. A lone Baltimore Police officer placed traffic cones on the roadway leading into the campus before moving across Charles Street. Regardless, protesters prepared for encounters with police, planning additional training Wednesday for demonstrators who may eventually need to wash chemical agents like pepper spray from their eyes.
Students are demanding the university, which has 5,253 undergraduates enrolled, divest its endowment from companies that support Israel, including Elbit Systems, BlackRock, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Google. Students also demand the school reveal all financial ties to Israel, lobbying efforts to increase militarized spending, and an account of the use of weapons and military technology developed at Hopkins, protest organizer the Hopkins Justice Collective said in a news release. University board of trustees member Gary Roughead is also on the board of Northrop Grumman.
In addition, the students demand the university disband a cooperative degree program with Tel Aviv University and stop accepting U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop weapons through the applied physics lab. In August 2022, the defense department said it awarded Johns Hopkins an over-$4 billion contract for “research, development, engineering, and test and evaluation for programs throughout the Department of Defense.”
Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, and put over a million people at risk of starvation during widespread famine, according to the United Nations. Israel’s strikes have been in response to an attack Oct. 7 by Hamas-led terrorists embedded in Gaza that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 others hostage, according to The Associated Press.
Goucher College President Kent Devereaux ordered for protesters in a “small number of tents that have emerged on the academic quad” to “immediately remove their tents and abide by the campus demonstration policy.”
A reporter was denied entry into the campus Tuesday by a security officer, who said the institution was trying to ensure that non-students did not enter. The encampment at Goucher was still in place Tuesday afternoon, and vehicular access to the campus was limited to curb people from outside the campus community “interfering with students’ studying during the last two weeks of the semester,” a spokesperson said.
