‘This is our land, you came from Europe running away from the Holocaust!’ one activist yells
Anti-Israel activists at Princeton University disrupted a speech by former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, setting off a fire alarm and calling him “a fucking war criminal.” The agitators joined a larger group after getting kicked out, where they told Jews to “go back to Europe” and flashed pro-Hamas hand gestures.
During Bennett’s Monday speech, which was sponsored by Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life, roughly a dozen agitators shouted, “We charge you with genocide! You’re a fucking war criminal!” and held posters with a red handprint as they marched out of the event, footage posted by the New Jersey chapter of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) showed. Princeton students and faculty led the disruption, according to AMP. A video from the Princeton Palestine Liberation Coalition, meanwhile, showed a fire alarm going off. “GENOCIDE ALARM ACTIVATED,” the group wrote. Princeton’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter also shared footage of the disruption on its Instagram story.
After school officials escorted the agitators out of the event, they joined several dozen more outside and continued protesting for nearly three hours, an attendee told the Washington Free Beacon. They shouted down Jews, saying, “go back to Europe.” They also used their fingers to form upside-down triangles, a symbol Hamas uses to denote Israeli targets.
“Go back to Europe” yelled at Jewish students pic.twitter.com/RZ8uPbMTa1
— Danielle R. Shapiro (@Danielle_shap) April 8, 2025
Hamas triangle pointed multiple times at Jewish students. pic.twitter.com/kSayTI5r0R
— Danielle R. Shapiro (@Danielle_shap) April 8, 2025
The incident comes as the Trump administration intensifies its efforts to combat anti-Semitism at universities across the nation. Last week, it froze approximately $210 million in federal funding to Princeton amid an ongoing investigation into anti-Semitic activity on its campus. In July, for instance, the university promoted a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted school operations and led to more than a dozen student arrests.
“This is our land, you came from Europe running away from the Holocaust!” one radical yelled at Bennett. “We took you into our land! You were getting killed in Germany, the Palestinians welcomed [them] into our land! We welcomed you into our land.”
Princeton’s assistant vice president for communications, Michael Hotchkiss, told the Free Beacon that the university was investigating the incident.
“We regret the disruptions at Monday’s conversation featuring Naftali Bennett. Princeton’s expansive commitment to free expression guarantees, as our policies say, ‘all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.’ That guarantee does not provide any person the right to prevent another from speaking or to prevent an event from continuing,” he said. “We are investigating this situation, including student complaints of harassment by protesters outside the event, and any member of the community who violated our policies is subject to discipline.”
AMP’s national arm was recently accused of serving as Hamas’s “propaganda arm in New York City” and is facing a Senate committee investigation over its role in fueling anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses, the Free Beacon reported. Its founder and chairman Hatem Bazian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called for Israel’s dismantling and once argued that “it’s about time we had an intifada in this country.”
On Saturday, AMP helped organize an anti-Israel march in Washington, D.C., that included speeches from Council on American-Islamic Relations executive director Nihad Awad, notorious anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, and Grant Miner, the Columbia University graduate student expelled for storming a campus building. It also featured murals honoring Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists.
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