By Willa Umansky PZ ’27 and Madeleine Farr PZ ’27

Over two years ago on October 7, 2023, Hamas initiated “Operation al-Aqsa Flood,” firing thousands of rockets and launching an incursion into Israel in a historic attack. The operation resulted in the death of 1,200 people and the abduction of 251 hostages, marking the beginning of a war that has since accelerated Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military operation has claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 Palestinians, provoking increasingly loud condemnation from the international community. This isn’t news, especially to anyone on a college campus. 

College students nationwide have responded to the conflict’s escalation in a myriad of ways; in turn, many university administrations have employed punitive responses, including suspensions and arrests. The Claremont Colleges are no exception. Here, we intend to examine how the consortium’s social and political landscape has evolved in the two years since Oct. 7, 2023, particularly in relation to administrative repression.

Student organizing and protesting has perhaps taken the largest and most tangible hit since we returned for the fall 2025 semester. Think about the last time you heard about Pomona Divest from Apartheid (PDfA) or Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), at one time two of the most prominent pro-Palestine groups on campus. Their posts; their demonstrations; their vocal presence on campus have been eliminated. While Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) still exists and meets regularly, Pomona College has banned them on Instagram from October 2024 to March 2025, completely hindering the ability to communicate with their base.  

Consider how actions on Oct. 7, 2024 compared to Oct. 7 this year. Last year, students occupied Carnegie Hall for nearly the entire day, and some autonomous actor(s) vandalized walls, technology, and statues. In response, Pomona issued dozens of suspensions and campus bans. This year, SJP and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) each hosted their own vigils, but no protest or rally took place. Nothing even remotely resembling Oct. 7, 2024 at the Claremont Colleges occurred on the same day a year later.

One SJP organizer said that the punitive and repressive response that protestors have experienced directly influenced their choice to host a vigil rather than a demonstration. 

Controversies have been few and far between as campus protest climate has drastically shifted since Oct. 7, 2024. Recently, however, four masked individuals made Claremont (and Israeli) headlines when they disrupted a Hillel memorial event on Oct. 15, later defending their actions in a letter featuring offensive, inflammatory rhetoric. Gary Gilbert, associate professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College, commented on how the event stood out in the last few months of school in a Nov. 3 opinion piece for the Times of Israel.

“After a month into the fall semester, the political situation on the campuses of the Claremont  Colleges in California appeared quiet,” Gilbert wrote. “We saw none of the marches, encampments, or building invasions that had taken place in previous years. This year, especially with the recently announced cease fire, we hoped this year would be different. We were wrong.”

Gilbert accurately highlighted how the Hillel incident disrupted a pattern of inaction and quiet regarding demonstrations on campus. However, this disruption stood out from other protests in the last two years for a more important reason: it went unclaimed by any major student organization, and to date seems largely decentralized. While the disruption certainly interrupted a more quiet period, it failed to signal a resurrection of larger, mobilized groups like the ones we saw last year. 

In response to the 2024 protests, Pomona College invoked mass disciplinary action that resulted in the interim suspension of 12 Pomona students and campus bans for dozens of non-Pomona 5C students. This was done on the grounds of the 7C demonstration policy, which states: “Disruptive actions or demonstrations are those that restrict free movement on any of the campuses, or interfere with, or impede access to, regular activities or facilities of any of the Colleges or The Claremont Colleges Services.” 

Pomona President Starr clearly cited this policy, saying specifically about the events of Oct. 7, 2024, “the events at the Carnegie Hall targeted our academic mission, significantly disrupted the educational process of hundreds of Pomona and Claremont Colleges students, and were painful for faculty and staff, especially those who teach and work at Carnegie,” Starr wrote in an Oct. 23 message. “Several students charged with violations of The Claremont Colleges demonstration policy were placed on interim suspension.”

The demonstration policy reads that “non-peaceful or disruptive” demonstrations can be described as those that “interfere with … regular activities or facilities of any of the Colleges,”  and Starr cited a “target[ing] of our academic mission.” If you’re thinking that this seems like an oddly broad and widely applicable policy, you might be onto something. 

Is that one kid in your seminar who waffles not undermining the academic mission of at least a dozen students? This sounds like a ridiculous example, but if an authoritarian leader who sought to wage war against higher education institutions came along — shouldn’t our protest policies be a little more concrete to ensure there weren’t vast records of collectively punished students for an unclear crime? 

In an interview with The Outback last fall, Oli Rizvi PO ’27, the Associated Students of Pomona College’s Board of Trustees representative, explained “What Gabi Starr did totally disrupted the precedent for protest because suddenly, you are responsible for the actions of everything involved in the protest,” Rizvi said. “If I go to sit-in here on [Pomona’s] Walker Beach, and people start digging trenches, then I’m liable because I shared my intent with them, and I’m liable to be punished as they would be.” 

Given the College’s intellectual aptitude and resources, including a vast array of decorated faculty in the politics department, shouldn’t they have predicted that the authoritarian leader in question might come along? He already came along once: in 2016, the American electorate and complimentary Electoral College system brought Trump into office. Pomona should have been better equipped for his return. 

Pomona College, in turn implicating all of the Claremont Colleges, has thus been at the forefront of student repression in regards to Palestine — prior to any influence from Washington. Before Columbia made national news for arresting students, Pomona made the LA Times for having 20 Claremont students arrested on April 5, 2024. In order to identify and punish students on Oct. 7, 2025, Pomona administrators tracked students’ wifi usage.

When Pomona received a congressional inquiry from the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce, they suddenly seemed eager to protect their students. In an April 11 statement, interim president Bob Gaines stressed that “no identifying information of any kind about individual students was shared with the committee.”

With the threat of punishment no longer abstract and increased gravity to those consequences, student activists are more cautious than ever. It is the threat of unpredictable disciplinary measures from our own college administrations that successfully quelled protests on these campuses, but really it is a genuine fear of consequences on the federal level — far beyond the scope or salvation of our deans and presidents. 

There’s really nothing to say other than what we’ve already implied. The protest policy needs to be more specific in order to ensure the freedom, comfort, and safety of our student body. Perhaps with greater protections, we might see demonstrations return to the consortium. These institutions showed a desire to protect students, but they have an opportunity to translate intent into action that students can feel on a ground level.