Late in January, Katherine Franke, a prominent Columbia Law School professor and active supporter of the Palestinian cause, appeared on television to talk about a rally demanding divestment from Israel that had taken place on the steps of Low Library a few days before. What marked this protest from the many others erupting on campuses around the country last winter was the release of a putrid smelling vapor into the crowd by a group of counterprotesters. It soon came out that at least one of them was a student and former member of the Israel Defense Forces. The university suspended him.
Some students who had been sprayed with the strange emission were certain that it was “skunk water,” a chemical the I.D.F. deploys to subdue crowds in the West Bank. Speaking to The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, they described feeling sick afterward. Later, the student who had been an I.D.F soldier filed a lawsuit against Columbia claiming that his disciplinary proceedings had been “flawed, biased and deficient.” His lawyers argued that he had merely engaged in a “harmless expression” of speech by spritzing the protesters with foul “novelty sprays” — which Columbia, seven months later, acknowledged they were — “purchased on Amazon for $26.11.”
Discussing the episode on the left-leaning radio and television platform Democracy Now!, Ms. Franke said that she and others had long been concerned about older Israeli exchange students “coming right out of their military service” because they had been known to “harass” Palestinian students and others on campus.
From this observation followed a cascade of accusations and legal entanglements that have spread beyond the fractious world of the academy to illuminate some of the extreme steps that elite law firms have taken since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas to distance themselves from Palestinian sympathies.
A few weeks after Ms. Franke’s televised comments, she received a letter from the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action at Columbia. The office informed her that it was investigating her remarks at the request of two colleagues who maintained that they constituted harassment of “members of the Columbia community based on their national origin.”