Illustrative: Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters, primarily university students, rally at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on Oct. 28, 2023. Photo by Sayed Najafizada/NurPhoto

Jewish students at Concordia University in Montreal must fend for themselves when their anti-Zionist classmates resort to assault and harassment on campus, according to students who spoke with The Algemeiner.

No single incident, they said, evinced their alleged abandonment by school officials more than one on March 12 in which Jewish students were trapped in the school’s Hillel office while members of the anti-Zionist club Supporting Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), concealing their faces with keffiyehs and surgical masks, banged on its windows and doors and stomped on the floor of the room above it.

“It’s usually just a safe place for Jewish people to come and hang out,” Chana Leah Natanblut, president of Chabad Concordia, said of the Hillel office. “We were all doing our work and chilling, and all of a sudden we started hearing chanting, like screaming and stuff. We thought maybe it had something with the student strike going on, but then we started hearing people scream terrorists and banging on the ceiling. The Supporting Palestinian Human Rights club is directly above us.”

Seeking the source of the din exploding around them, Natanblut and her friends walked to the window, where they saw a crush of SPHR activists, some standing on the fire escape outside of it, others standing in the parking lot below.

“B—ch!” “Dog!” “Zionism is terrorism!” they screamed, while the person on the fire escape whacked away at the window. The rioters came from “all sides,” Natanblut explained, sprinting through the hallways to hammer the walls outside the club and setting off what felt like seismic shocks that shook the room. Amid the clatter, Natanblut noticed that a shopping bag hooked on a wall mount behind the door was swinging like a pendulum, as if to count down the time they had left before the worst occurred.

“We immediately locked the window and made sure that the door to the room was locked,” Natanblut continued. “We really felt trapped, and I couldn’t even leave to use the bathroom. I was wondering how would I get out and if I would be attacked if I did. So, I started to videotape what was going on, and I called my friend, the person in charged of advocacy for Hillel, telling him to come right away. Then I called security.”

Security arrived promptly, Natanblut said, and reprimanded the SPHR rioters. However, to Natanblut’s astonishment, they refused to discipline those involved in the disturbance on the grounds that Jewish students had contributed to instigating the incident.

According to Natanblut, the SPHR students told the officers that they behaved as they did because the Jewish students had filmed them. To no avail, Natanblut and her friends explained that they only began recording after the banging and screaming started and that they had all been minding their own business. Declining to privilege one account of what happened over the other, security took their statements and left, refusing to answer questions about next steps, including whether the rioters would be allowed back in the building.

“We only filmed because they were harassing us, for evidence, and we didn’t feel safe,” Natanblut said. “Security obviously told them to disperse and that they couldn’t act that way, but they didn’t say what would happen and it felt almost as if they had taken their side. Who’s to say they won’t do it again? What kind of message does it send to do nothing about it?”

Similar occurrences are the new normal for Jewish students attending Concordia University, Anastasia Zorchinsky, founder and president of The StartUp Nation, a pro-Israel club, told The Algemeiner. On Nov. 8, for example, just over a month after Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel, anti-Zionist protesters approached Jewish students and punched several in the face. No one was punished for these offenses, she explained, and the university has had the habit of refusing to denounce antisemitism as a stand-alone problem, always being sure to mention Islamophobia as well to insinuate that Jewish students are engaging in hateful behavior themselves. With several large anti-Zionist events coming up later this month and in April, she fears Jewish students will be targeted again and denied justice.

“The university must enforce its policies, which it’s not doing,” Zorchinsky said. “There’s a clear double standard when it comes to violence against Jewish students, and there must be investigations of these students and expulsions of any found to have committed antisemitic violence. We don’t need pro-Hamas students on our campus behaving this way. We don’t need students who support terrorism on campus. They’re a danger to everyone. Not just us.”

On Tuesday, Concordia University spokesperson Vannina Maestracci told The Algemeiner that the university is “alarmed” by what Natanblut and others endured on March 12 and maintained that it has done all it can to prevent antisemitism, which she described as “strictly prohibited.” However, she declined to say whether Concordia has ever disciplined anyone for beating up Jewish students.

“More generally, Concordia has clearly condemned antisemitism and any kind of violence or intimidation,” Maestracci continued. “The university has also taken several measures on campus to ensure our community’s safety, including monitoring events and demonstrations as well as adding supplemental personnel when appropriate, meetings with student groups, and the creation of a committee with expertise in mediation and conflict resolution. We have also increased workshops on anti-discrimination for our community and launched an active listening initiative to help community members address distressing events.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.