Liam Beran
The Palestine rally on Library Mall.
Protesters surrounded the encampment in front of the Memorial Library.
UW-Madison officials warned students on Friday that encampments were forbidden by university and state policy. But come Monday morning, pro-Palestinian student demonstrators risked discipline and legal consequences as they set up tents on the Library Mall, mirroring protests that have roiled campuses across the country, including Columbia University and the University of Southern California.
Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students have protested often on the Library Mall since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which has killed 1,136 people, according to Israeli officials, and the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the latest numbers from health officials in Hamas-controlled territories of Gaza. But the encampment and divestment protest, led by Students for Justice in Palestine-Madison (SJP-Madison) and Young Democratic Socialists of America, is an effort by opponents to increase the pressure for an end of the war in Gaza.
At Columbia and USC, protesting students have faced expulsion and arrest. Police officers have arrested more than 800 students nationally since an April 18 police intervention at Columbia, where administrators requested that the New York Police Department break up an encampment.
On Monday morning, under a light drizzle, demonstrators at UW-Madison opened with call-and-response chants of “free, free Palestine” and “globalize the intifada.” Many attendees held up signs with phrases like “Genocide is not a Mitzvah” and “fight back.”
In an Instagram post, SJP-Madison outlined its demands for university administrators, calling for the UW to divest from all companies that contribute to Israel’s war effort and that it get “cops off campus.” A spokesperson for SJP-Madison did not immediately return a request for an interview via email.
At the same time as demands went out, demonstrators began a tent encampment they called “Popular University for Gaza;” by 9:35 a.m., demonstrators encircled the encampment of more than a dozen tents as the crowd swelled to more than 200 people. Throughout the afternoon, protesters talked, ate food, and listened to teach-ins.
Some counterprotesters attended the rally, but interactions between the two groups remained peaceful as of the time of this article’s publication. One counterprotester, UW-Madison student David Skadron, held up a sign saying “Terrorism is Bad” and “Hamas Hates Palestine.”
Skadron said the Monday protest had been “peaceful,” in his experience, and would only cross the line if protesters started to use “very inflammatory language.”
Camping on campus grounds is forbidden by Wisconsin Administrative Code Chapter 18. In an April 26 campus-wide email, Christina Olstad, UW-Madison dean of students, and Brent Plisch, UW Police Department interim chief, highlighted Chapter 18’s restrictions on camping and UW-Madison’s protest policies.
Olstad and Plisch said students can protest “within the boundaries of law and campus policies,” but “can and will” face consequences if they protest in violation of policy.
Chapter 18 does permit the chief administrative officer of a university — a chancellor or designee — to authorize zones for camping. But in a Friday afternoon statement to Isthmus, Kelly Tyrrell, UW-Madison director of media relations and strategic communications, said there are “no plans” to authorize an encampment area.
Liam Beran
David Skadron at the Palestine rally at Library Mall.
David Skadron, a counterprotester, said the demonstration had so far been peaceful.
Police officers, many of whom were on scene, have taken no action against the encampment at this time.
Adam Boardman, a UWPD officer, said in an interview that if the protests were to turn violent, UWPD would attempt to contact any “handful of agitators” without disturbing anyone protesting safely.
The rally ended around 11:20 a.m. The encampment is ongoing at this time and protesters erected an additional set of tarps and tents at 1:25 p.m.
The atmosphere has been tense for Jewish and Palestinian students over the fall and spring semester, according to several students Isthmus spoke to. UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin told student media in an April roundtable that the school supports protests as long as they “stay within permissible limits and rules.”
In a Monday morning statement, Melinda Brennan, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, encouraged UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, where another pro-Palestine rally and encampment started this morning, to refrain from using force against students. ACLU legal observers, who said they weren’t authorized to comment, attended Monday’s protest.
“The next few hours, days, and weeks will reveal whether the Wisconsin Idea still lives and if free speech and First Amendment protections for all of us are valued,” Brennan wrote.
Samer Alatout, a UW-Madison professor of community and environmental sociology, was watching the protest on the steps of Memorial Library. He tells Isthmus that the student protest was “beautiful and peaceful” and not anti-Semitic — a claim levied against similar student protests nationally.
“[The protest] shows that another world is possible. Look at them. It’s all about cultivating new types of relations between different colors, different religions — including Jewish, Muslim, Christian and others — different races, ethnicities,” Alatout said. “Those relations are seeing each other as kin, as related to each other. And bringing a new world.”
“The students are brave,” said Victoria Gutierrez, a Madison-based nurse who held up a banner saying “Healthcare Workers Against Genocide in Gaza,” She’s been struck by images and stories of ravaged hospitals and dead hospital workers in Gaza since Israel began an offensive in the region.
Gutierrez said she was part of an April 1986 shantytown demonstration calling for Wisconsin’s and UW-Madison’s divestment from South Africa during apartheid, an effort she found analogous to Monday’s protest.
Liam Beran
Victoria Guttierez at the Palestine rally on Library Mall.
Guttierez, a nurse, held a sign that said, "Healthcare Workers Against Genocide in Gaza."
She said the shantytowns helped create “a global international movement of pressure.” Now, she added, “I am in full support of putting that pressure on those institutions. Listen to the students.”
Benjamin Newman, a UW-Madison senior who is Jewish, was part of an April 26 interfaith dialogue with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, alongside other Jewish students and Palestinian, Arab and Arab-American students. He ran into one of the students he met there at the Monday pro-Palestine rally. She was an organizer, he said.
“She came up to me, we talked and we engaged,” Newman said, adding that the student dialogue with Khanna had been a positive experience.
Though he said he saw hateful things written in chalk, Newman said he felt Monday’s protest was largely free from efforts to prevent collaboration between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian supporters — he said these “anti-normalization” efforts reflected “the worst attitudes” of similar protests.
Still, Newman criticized students chanting phrases like “globalize the intifada,” saying the phrase could cause harm. He said the university is not preparing students to deal with these international issues.
“If we had been engaging on these kinds of subjects in every class, we’d know how to debate,” Newman said. ”But this whole experience shows just how broken the culture at universities is — when we’re not talking about these issues, we’re not taught to have true critical thinking.”
Newman said he believes UW-Madison has one choice in dealing with the encampment.
“They have to [take it down],” he said. If the encampment continued, he added, it would “undermine UW-Madison’s mission of “teaching and learning.”
An organizer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that protesters are prepared to stay “indefinitely.” Tyrrell said Lori Reesor, UW-Madison vice chancellor for student affairs, met with protest organizers earlier in the day and had another meeting planned tonight. UW leaders “stand ready” to meet with protesters if the tents are taken down, according to a statement released Monday evening.
