Student protesters at Georgetown University Law Center attempted to drown out a speech by an Israel Defense Forces reservist by yelling from outside the venue on Thursday evening.

The Georgetown Law Zionists organization invited Rudy Rochman, an IDF reservist and activist who advocates for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, to address their group. Before the event, the Georgetown Law Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Students for Justice chapters posted a joint statement on Instagram announcing their intention to protest.

“Mr. Rochman’s presence is inconsistent with the law school’s values and threatens the safe learning environment for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students on campus,” the statement reads. “IDF soldiers are sent to campuses across the U.S. to whitewash Israel’s actions in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice ruled to be a plausible genocide . . . Although we cannot tell for certain what actions Mr. Rochman engaged in, his proximity to these crimes make [sic] it likely that he contributed to the war crimes and genocide in Gaza.”

The writers of the statement continued, saying Rochman’s “presence on campus and the message of his scheduled event will create a hostile environment and threaten the sense of safety of GULC students of Palestinian descent” and calling on the law school administration to “denounce the presence of those on our campus who, like Mr. Rochman, are implicated in war crimes and genocide and clarify that these actions are not in alignment with GULC’s values.”

The organizations also advertised a protest, asking their followers to join them to “make it clear IOF [Israel Occupation Forces] snipers are not welcome on our campus.”

Julia Wax-Vanderwiel, a Georgetown Law student and the founder of the Georgetown Law Zionists who organized the Thursday event, told National Review that the crowd outside chanted things like “you murdered children!” toward the venue at a volume loud enough that those in the back of the room had trouble hearing Rochman.

About ten or 15 minutes into the event, Wax-Vanderwiel said, a group of students stood up on one side of the room, holding signs and wearing keffiyehs and shirts with anti-Israel slogans before a planned walkout. One of those students had her hands painted red.

Red hands — also featured on pins many celebrities wore at the Oscars earlier in March — call back to a scene from Ramallah in 2000. Two Israelis who seemingly made a wrong turn were attacked by a mob that then beat, stabbed, and disemboweled them. One of the most well-known photos from the Second Intifada is an image of one member of the mob holding his blood-covered hands in front of a window in celebration while a cheering crowd looks on.

“Right when [the demonstrators] were about to walk out, she put her hands up like the guy in Ramallah,” Wax-Vanderwiel told NR. “It was very clear, from my perspective, that she was recreating the image,” and whether that student knew the context in which the picture was taken, Wax-Vanderwiel said, “every Israeli in the room” did.

Despite the shouting from outside and the silent protest in the venue, Wax-Vanderwiel said there were two moments that stood out for her.

“When [the protesters] stood up and walked to the side of the room, Rochman said, ‘you guys are more than welcome to do that,’ and he just kept giving his speech,” she told NR. “There was a girl wearing a ‘Bring Them Home’ shirt, and she got up and stood silently in front of them — she didn’t block their signs, she didn’t disrupt what they were doing — she just stood there in her shirt, which I thought was very powerful.”

The second inspiring moment came when Rochman addressed his IDF service.

“While they were all standing there in line with their protest signs and their bloody hands, Rudy got to the point in his speech where he said ‘I served in the IDF,'” Wax-Vanderwiel told NR. “When he said that, everybody else listening to him stood up and applauded him for five minutes straight. While you had protesters outside saying ‘IDF off campus,’ you had 50 people in this room all standing up, cheering, clapping their hands, saying ‘thank you’ for his military service.”

National Review contacted Georgetown Law for comment and received a statement from Peter Byrne, a law professor and director of the school’s climate resource center:

Last night I was the Speech and Expression manager for a talk by Rudy Rochman, who had been invited to speak by a student Zionist organization. Mr. Rochman spoke and answered questions for more than two hours without any interruption, which was the point of my being there. At one moment, a few protesters silently stood against a side wall holding signs for a few minutes before leaving the room silently. I would not have understood red hands as anything other than a complaint about the killing in Gaza. In my view and in the view of my colleagues at the event, this event was a free speech success — the Zionist students and guests fully heard from their invited speaker and other students were able to protest without preventing the speaker from being heard and seen.

While Wax-Vanderwiel did say the event went well and Rochman was able to give his talk as intended, she told NR that the chanting from outside was loud enough to obscure Rochman’s speech for those sitting in the back of the room. She also said that, in her view, without the security present for Thursday’s event, the protesters outside may have been able to shut down the talk. That would be a frightening proposition, she said, given the environment on the law school campus.

“Before this event, I had students come up to me in the hallways and ask if they should wear some sort of disguise when the come to the event, ask if they shouldn’t wear a Jewish star, and even ask me if it was safe to go” because of the planned protest, which Wax-Vanderwiel said had been shared not just by law school organizations but by Washington-area activist groups. “I think that if the protesters had come into the room, they would have screamed so loud that they would have disrupted it, and I think there’s a possibility it could’ve gone violent based on the shouting and screaming outside.”