Anti-Zionist protesters being arrested at Pomona College on April 5, 2024. They had taken over an administrative building. Photo: Screenshot/Students for Justice in Palestine via Instagram

Pomona College in Claremont, California has levied severe disciplinary sanctions, ranging from expulsion to banishment, against 12 students who participated in illegally occupying and vandalizing the Carnegie Hall administrative building on the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

The news was first reported on Saturday by an Instagram accounted operated by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff Pomona Divest from Apartheid (PDfA), the group which led the assault on the building. PDfA acknowledged that “property crimes” were perpetrated but maintained that the college lacked evidence to identify the offenders. Noting that PDfA members concealed their identities with masks, it charged that Pomona president G. Gabrielle Starr has resorted to “indiscriminately” punishing minority students, as well as depriving them of housing and food, for the sake of upholding fascism.

“Pomona is surveilling all students and indiscriminately suspending them,” PDfA said. “Students are being targeted for: wearing keffiyehs or masks, attending a rally outside, walking out of class. Pomona can’t identify who did property damage so they’re resorting to mass racial profiling. No protest is safe here.”

Starr, who is an African American woman, has told a different story, however, accusing the group of “violation of our collective life on campus” in a statement issued on Friday which noted that the pro-Hamas student group was aided by non-student adults who managed to gain access to the campus.

“The destruction in Carnegie Hall was extensive, and the harm done to individuals and our mission was so great,” Starr wrote. “Starting this week, disciplinary letters are going out to students from Pomona and other Claremont Colleges who have been identified as taking part in the takeover of Carnegie Hall. Student groups affiliated with this incident are also under investigation.”

She added, “As always, we have due process on our campus, with opportunities appeal.”

According to The Student Life, Pomona’s official campus newspaper, PDfA and its collaborators flooded Carnegie Hall and, once inside, proceeded to graffiti its walls — with messages such as “F—k Pomona” and “From the river to the sea” — and wreck “AV equipment, printers, plaques, and various materials.” The students destroyed important college “memorabilia” too, the paper added, prompting university leaders to denounce their “wanton” behavior.

This was not Pomona’s first clash with pro-Hamas insurgents. In April, 21 of them were arrested after taking over Starr’s office and uttering racist remarks about African Americans. Neither was it the only school targeted on Oct. 7.

As Jews across the world mourned the victims of Hamas’s violence, pro-Hamas students at America’s Ivy League universities committed a series of violent property crimes apparently aimed at celebrating terrorism and intimidating administrators into adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Bring the war home,” a group of Harvard students — who vandalized school property to mark the anniversary — captioned a video they filmed of themselves smashing the windows of University Hall and discharging red paint, symbolizing the spilling of blood, on a statue of John Harvard which stands outside the building.

The group of students responsible for the act, who described themselves as “anonymous,” later said in a statement, “We are committed to bringing the war home and answering the call to open up a new front here in the belly of the beast.” On the same day, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) also proclaimed that “now is the time to escalate,” adding, “Harvard’s insistence on funding slaughter only strengthens our moral imperative and commitment to our demands.”

Princeton University also saw a shocking vandalism for which an anonymous student group has claimed responsibility. Targeting the building which houses the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), it involved splattering red paint on the entrance door and graffitiing the perimeter of the building with the slogan “$4genocide.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.