Penn encampment grows despite order to disband; protesters vowed not to comply with request for IDs

Pro-Palestinian protesters stood firm at the University of Pennsylvania Sunday, entering the fourth day of an on-campus encampment that grew — despite an explicit dispersal order — as organizers and college administrators met to discuss student demands.

As darkness fell, there were about 30 tents still pitched, and a few hundred people protesting the war in Gaza remained gathered in the center of campus, making plans in the event that police could imminently try to disband their encampment.

» READ MORE: Protests at Penn: Live updates Monday

People crouched together in lantern light shortly after 8:30 p.m. as an organizer told the group that within the next few hours, Penn police and administrators would be asking to check protesters’ identification. Encampment members would not be complying, the organizer said, suggesting Penn’s goal was to separate students from nonstudents, and that nonstudents would be asked to leave.

Protesters had divided themselves into three risk levels for those who are willing to face arrest and those who are not. Penn has been mum about how it will proceed if students do not comply, but hinted that discipline could follow.

It was a marked escalation in tensions in a day that had started with protest organizers expressing disappointment over a meeting two faculty and four students had Saturday with J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president, and John L. Jackson Jr., the provost.

“Administrators viewed our demands as unreasonable,” protest organizers said in a statement. University officials would not comment on the meeting.

Earlier in the weekend, they had asked university administrators to disclose the school’s financial holdings, divest from any investments in the war, and provide amnesty for pro-Palestinian students facing discipline over past protests.

The university would not budge, organizers said.

“This indicates a failure on the part of university leadership to understand why we have established our encampment,” they said in the statement.

Jameson on Friday night ordered the protesters to “disband their encampment immediately” because of alleged violations of university policies, including the act of the encampment, as well as the defacement of a statue on which a derogatory message was written.

But “until these demands are met, we will continue to occupy this space,” organizers said.

The organizers also said they rejected the notion that nonstudent protesters at the Penn encampment posed a safety risk to the demonstration.

Campus police took one man into custody after he appeared at a Passover Seder held at the encampment wearing a large knife in his belt.

The man, identified by his wife as Yosef Cohen, 70, of Philadelphia, “meant no harm,” Maddie Cohen said.

“He was just trying to show the other side by walking around,” Maddie Cohen said. “It wasn’t his intention to hurt anyone.”

Yosef Cohen was taken to Penn police headquarters, where he was charged with having cutting instruments in streets or public places, a summary offense, police said.

Penn’s administration had reportedly told organizers not to hold the Seder, but they persisted. Four Jewish organizations joined the pro-Palestinian encampment for a celebration.

“This Passover, Jews say: stop funding genocide,” a sign — big enough to require two people to hold it — stood by a Seder table full of matzah and a bottle of grape juice put in place by Jewish Voice For Peace Philadelphia, Rabbis for Ceasefire, Jews for Ceasefire, and Tikkun Olam Chavurah.

Calling for a “free Palestine” and talking about the meaning behind the food on the table, participants sang, “Solid like a rock, rooted like a tree. We are here, we are strong, in our rightful place.”

Protesters were buoyed by support from Gaza, said a professor with Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

“University of Pennsylvania, thank you all,” said a sign held by a woman in Rafah, a Palestinian city in the southern Gaza Strip, according to a post on Twitter by the faculty group. Two other photos were included, too, expressing appreciation for Penn’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

“They’re risking so much, to make a principled statement,” said Dagmawi Woubshet, an associate professor of English and member of the faculty group. “I’m sure it is heartening to see how they are being received in Gaza.”

Woubshet said he hopes Penn officials hear the students’ message, too.

“We’re just hoping that … the university begins to take their demands seriously and tries to resolve this as quickly as possible,” he said.

About 250 Penn faculty and students congregated outside the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, away from the encampment area, many draped in Israeli flags, for a “No Hate on Campus” rally.

“We hereby implore the university to take action,” Benjamin Abella, professor of emergency medicine, told the crowd, as they chanted “words are not enough.”

According to Abella, the group has three demands: “Work without harassment, study free from hate speech, and freedom to learn free of intimidation.”

As the crowd condemned the existence of the encampment and asked for its removal, they joined in to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

As some of the participants in the “No Hate on Campus” rally left, Penn junior Joseph Hochberg played Hebrew songs from a hand-size speaker.

Some of his friends declined to be part of the rally out of “concern for their safety,” according to Hochberg. But, he said he does not feel scared on campus.

“The things they are chanting over there [at the pro-Palestinian encampment] are anti-Jewish, anti-American,” said Hochberg, as the protesters chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

He hopes the administration follows through with its order directing that the encampment be disbanded.

“They need to be removed. If they don’t move peacefully then they will be arrested. That’s how it works in protests,” Hochberg said.

More than 100 of the participants in the “No Hate on Campus” rally marched over to the pro-Palestinian encampment.

With 25 campus police officers present and the groups separated by a path and barricades, the demonstrators chanted at each other.

“Rape is not resistance,” shouted the pro-Israeli protesters. “Intifada the revolution,” replied the pro-Palestinian side.

As the Penn protest persevered, students across the region took part in similar demonstrations.

Three colleges in the greater Philadelphia area have encampments on their college greens: Penn, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore. Haverford’s was removed voluntarily Sunday, officials said. Bryn Mawr College senior Maddy Kessler said that is because Haverford students are combining with the Bryn Mawr encampment.

Organizers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Villanova University have also planned pro-Palestinian rallies on their campuses this week.

The strength of the encampment protest model is that it’s not “one-and-done,” said Mark Bray, a Rutgers historian, activist, and former organizer of Occupy Wall Street.

Rather than the pro-Palestinian demonstrators going home after a solitary march, Bray said the encampment movement “creates this kind of ongoing spectacle of protest.”

Of course, he noted the college encampments may have a natural expiration date when the semester ends. (For Penn, the spring term ends on May 14, and commencement takes place the following week.)

”But I think that whether on an individual level or on a national level, the perseverance of these protests speaks to the dedication of the activists,” Bray said Sunday. “Even if the media isn’t paying attention to what’s going on in Gaza, these students certainly are.”

As Penn’s leaders have ordered the encampments to disband and meet with student organizers, Bray cautioned against following in Columbia University’s footsteps, when the New York Police Department raided the camp, arrested more than 100 students, and ignited the national movement.

”I think it showed that simply trying to forcibly shut these things down just generates more attention, generates more interest, generates more sympathy and solidarity,” Bray said. “In such high-profile circumstances, repression can backfire.”

Bray, who took part in the 59-day Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City’s Financial District against economic inequality in 2011, called the current movement on college campuses “a huge deal.”

Regardless if the protesters achieve their demands, Bray said the breadth of the current student movement is “having a really strong impact on the broader political climate.”

”You could argue this is the biggest wave of national student activists that we’ve seen since maybe the anti-apartheid movement of the ‘80s, or you can make comparisons to the ‘60s,” he said.

Staff photographer Elizabeth Robertson contributed to this article.