LAST WEEK, police at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland arrested four students on felony vandalism charges in relation to protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The students were transferred to the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, jail, a detention facility subject to calls for closure over inhumane conditions, abuse by jail staff, and the use of solitary confinement. All four students were released from jail over the weekend.
The arrests are part of the long arm of the crackdowns on campus protests that started in the spring and kept pace this fall. School officials had described the spray paint as “antisemitic.”
A local news clip shows a wall spray-painted with the names of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and Haiti. A building entrance was also splashed with red paint, including handprints, with posted signs that say, “Your school funds genocide.”
The protest and its aftermath came as Case Western was facing a federal civil rights complaint alleging bias against protesters and Palestinian students. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation at Case Western.
The latest arrests were part of an expansive crackdown: The school spent more than $300,000 on public safety staffing, equipment, and remediation after tearing down protest encampments, including removing signs and painting over murals on a campus “spirit wall,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. (The school said it could not comment on the criminal investigation.)
Case Western issued notices of interim suspension or other warnings to students after protests in the spring and barred some graduating students from campus. Only one student, however, was suspended for the fall semester: Yousef Khalaf, president of the school’s undergraduate chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Among seven violations referenced in the notices, Khalaf faces school disciplinary allegations for engaging in intimidating behavior, including using the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” He is barred from campus until the spring of 2026.
Khalaf said he was treated differently than other protesters. His was the only case for which the school hired an outside firm, BakerHostetler, he said. He said SJP students have been contacted by school administrators for posting flyers or attending group events. (BakerHostetler and Case Western did not respond to a request for comment.)
“They don’t treat any other club this way,” Khalaf said. “We see very clearly the ‘Palestine exception’ being applied here.”
With Israel’s war on Gaza entering its second year, Khalaf is among thousands of students and faculty members still being targeted in universities’ battles over harsh protest crackdowns, free speech, academic independence, and discrimination.
The fights are playing out online, in campus quads, internal disciplinary proceedings, and in the courts. Organizers among the students and faculty say universities are retaliating against them for their activism and restricting their civil liberties and freedom of expression while claiming to uphold both.
“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again.”As campus protests reached their height in May, Dahlia Saba, a second-year Palestinian American graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote an op-ed supporting the demonstrators’ demands. She called on the school to address calls to divest from industries that profit from Israel’s war. She and her co-author Vignesh Ramachandran, another graduate student, were met with student nonacademic disciplinary investigations that relied solely on the op-ed for evidence.
“The university is threatening us with sanctions that could jeopardize our academic careers if we choose to speak out again,” Saba said. “They’re low-level sanctions to begin with, but the university is pursuing sanctions against many people on very little evidence.”
The issue is not so much the severity of the sanctions, Saba said, but using punishments to chill students’ speech. The disciplinary actions become a tool, she said, to help universities keep track of people involved in protests for Palestine.
“They are basically trying to get any sort of sanction on people’s records,” Saba said, “so that if they speak up again, if they do anything that criticizes the university’s investment policy, or if they in any way speak out in support of Palestine or in solidarity with Palestine, that students could be scared that the university could........