SINCE the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war, New York's Colum-bia University has been gripped by divisions over the conflict and rancour over where free speech ends and hatred begins.
Noisy campus protests in Manhattan's Morningside Heights have become regular events, with hundreds of students, some wearing keffiyeh headscarves and flying the distinctive Palestinian colours, calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza.
Aiming to eliminate Hamas after it attacked Israel on Oct 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, Israel launched a retaliatory offensive in Gaza that has killed 18,787, according to the territory's Health Ministry.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," chant some students invoking the controversial call that some claim calls for Israel's destruction. Others take it as a demand for Palestinians to be liberated from occupation.
Nearby a small group of pro-Israeli counter-marchers hold aloft the blue and white Star of David flag, dancing as a sound-system blares.
The private university, a hotbed of student protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, has once again been thrust into the spotlight over free speech on campus since the Oct 7 attacks.
Lively debate about the situation in the Middle East has a long history at the institution, where Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said was a lecturer.
In 2020, students voted in favour of divesting from Israel, which was rejected by the university's management, which has an exchange programme with a Tel Aviv-based institution.
Since Oct 7, pro-Palestinian groups on campus have been accused of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, which they deny, countering that the school's administration is pro-Israel, which it rejects.
Joseph Howley, an associate classics professor, supported the boycott of Israel and said that there was an unprecedented level of "unease or tension" in the wake of the newly invigorated pro-Palestinian protest movement.
Following several heated encounters between opposing protesters, two pro-Palestinian student groups were temporarily suspended in November for breaches of university rules.
They were specifically singled out for staging a gathering that the university said was "threatening rhetoric and intimidation".
English and gender studies Professor Jack Halberstam said he had never seen "so much effort going to the suppression of speech on campus" at Columbia.
Halberstam said the severity of the administration's response was motivated by allegations it was stirring up anti-Semitism, and pressure from donors.
At the end of October, Laura Rosenbury, head of Columbia's women-only Barnard College, said she was "appalled and saddened to see anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism spreading throughout Barnard and Columbia, (and) by the anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim rhetoric on our campus".
But Halberstam said conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism made open debate "almost impossible".
"If you can't critique a state that is conducting illegal military operations along its borders, and against a civilian population, then we've moved into some new era of suppression of freedom of expression."
While defending free speech, Columbia's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies co-director Rebecca Kobrin said there was unease among Jewish students.
Slogans like "from the river to the sea" struck some as a "call for violence", she added.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israelis, the response by the Students for Justice in Palestine group provoked a backlash 'when it called the incursion "an unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza" and "a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor".
An open letter followed from faculty members, some of whom were outraged that Hamas' "barbaric attack on Israeli civilians" had not been mentioned by the pro-Palestinian group.
Others came to the defence of the young activists, some of whom had their faces and names broadcast around campus labelled as "anti-Semitic".
Howley, the classics lecturer, said "the loss of life, and the violence on Oct 7, was terrible, and is to be condemned".
"(But) having grown up and formed my political commitments in the shadow of Sept 11, and the (US) war on terror, I found myself very sensitive to, and very concerned about a political response that immediately targeted young activists and sought to shame them or discipline them for not using exactly the right words."
* The writer is from Agence France-Presse