“Apartheid Wall” built by GW Students for Justice in Palestine. c, 2018. Photo: Twitter.

The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has opened a first of its kind investigation of alleged anti-Palestinian discrimination at George Washington University, a pro-Palestinian nonprofit announced on Thursday.

“This is an important step that shows OCR is taking anti-Palestinian discrimination seriously,” Radhika Sainath of Palestine Legal, which filed the complaint that prompted the government’s inquiry, said in a press release. “Even if pro-Israel groups don’t like it and complain, the law is clear — Palestinian students are entitled to the same educational opportunities and services as other students.”

Palestine Legal said OCR will examine allegations that Palestinian students, as well as those perceived as being Palestinian, could not access mental health services, came under the scrutiny of campus police more frequently than other groups, had to defend themselves against “months-long” disciplinary proceedings, and endured racist comments.

The investigation is the second launched against George Washington University in a little over a month.

OCR is also probing a complaint, filed by educational nonprofit StandWithUs (SWU), alleging that the university allowed antisemitic abuse of Jewish students, refusing to intervene when Psychology Professor Lara Sheehi, who teaches a mandatory diversity course, invited an antisemitic speaker to address her class for a “brown bag lunch,” launched a smear campaign against Jewish students, and filed disciplinary charges against them in retaliation for their accusing hear of antisemitism.

“Just as StandWithUs has condemned antisemitic harassment and discrimination at GWU, it condemns others forms of identity-based attacks, including any that may have impacted Palestinian students,” Carly Gammill, director of SWU’s Center for Combating Antisemitism, said in a statement sent to The Algemeiner on Thursday. “To the extent the allegations in this new complaint overlap with allegations in our own Title VI complaint against GWU, we expect that OCR will conduct a thorough investigation and fashion an appropriate remedy to ensure that GWU upholds its obligation to provide a discrimination-free environment for students of all backgrounds.”

Allegations detailed in Palestine Legal’s complaint accuse university officials of reporting the president of Students for Justice in Palestine to campus police and offer an alternative account of what transpired between Professor Leehi and her Jewish students, insisting that Jewish students uttered anti-Palestinian comments during the “brown bag lunch” when they described Palestinian jihadists as terrorists and discussed former President Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order establishing that Zionism is a component of Jewish identity protected by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

George Washington University has become a central theater in a political war pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian advocates are fighting on the campuses of US colleges and universities, with multiple incidents, from the construction of “apartheid walls” to antisemitic outrages, feeding larger, heated debates about the future of Israel and the Palestinian territories and the line between antisemitism and pro-Palestinian activity. Most recently, two professors employed by the university co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs accusing Israel of being an apartheid regime and violating human rights, and in October, just days after Yom Kippur, Students for Justice in Palestine plastered around campus posters that said, “Zionist F*** off.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.