A pro-Israel coalition of Duke students and other supporters organized a display Monday, setting up 1,200 Israeli flags on Abele Quad to memorialize the lives lost in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Several pro-Palestinian students quickly mobilized a protest, decrying what they termed “Israel’s genocide.”
The demonstration marks the first simultaneous protest by pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students on Duke’s campus since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war.
Duke Students Supporting Israel, End Jew Hatred and Passages organized the display of Israeli flags. Over 100 students stood on the quad at the demonstration’s peak, with some taking a stand on their respective issues and engaging in arguments across ideological lines while others observed from afar or walked by.
Organizers began installing the memorial early Monday morning, 150 days since the initial Oct. 7 attack.
SSI Co-President Alanna Peykar, a senior, maintained that the demonstration was about raising awareness of the Oct. 7 attack.
“We think it’s important to keep reminding people that these are lives lost, and every single person in Israel is affected by it, every single Jewish person around the world has been affected by it,” Peykar said. “At the end of the day, this is a fight for Jewish survival.”
According to junior Alexandra Ahdoot, co-president of Duke SSI who helped lead the organizing effort with Peykar, the display hoped to raise awareness of the Israelis who were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“While a lot of the conversation around Israel and the current war that’s going on has become highly politicized, the massacre of 1,200 civilians on Oct. 7 is absolutely not political whatsoever,” she said. “It’s a total humanitarian crisis, and this is all we’re trying to emphasize today.”
Ahdoot added that they chose Abele Quad given its central location and visibility on campus.
In a debate with Ahdoot, senior Benjamin Koch argued that “genocide should not be countered by nicety.” Koch later added in an email to The Chronicle that "events like these, which are argued to be apolitical by the students which organize them, are used as a space to justify an ongoing genocide and should also not be countered by niceties."
Gaza health officials estimate that Israeli strikes have killed at least 30,000 people in the region, although this is likely an incomplete estimate due to the number of people who are still unaccounted for.
Pro-Palestinian students began mobilizing on the quad at around 10:45 a.m., bringing signs to promote their opposition to “Israel’s genocide” throughout the past five months.
Junior Lina Leyhausen was the first pro-Palestinian protester to arrive at the scene, as she stood among the Israeli flags holding a sign that read, “30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel. How can we stand by and watch a genocide?”
“I am horrified that Duke is letting these people celebrate Israel’s murder, genocide of 30,000 people,” she said. “… I understand that they are saying this is a peaceful, non-political demonstration, but at the end of the day, this is incredibly political.”
Ahdoot and Sebastián Parra, a director of specialized trips from Passages, approached Leyhausen to request that she not stand amidst the display of flags, but she refused to move.
A Durham police officer came to the scene and spoke with Parra, before calling Duke security to address the situation at the quad.
Leyhausen and other protesters were allowed to continue peacefully demonstrating on the quad as long as they did not remove any of the flags or cover the lawn sign put up by SSI.
Although Leyhausen said that she appreciates SSI’s intentions to commemorate the Israeli lives lost, she believes that they should have put up another sign saying that they “do not endorse the murder of Palestinians by Israel.”
The crowd on the quad grew at around 11:30 a.m., as students from both sides contended with each other's stances. Most of the pro-Palestinian students moved to face the field of Israeli flags and unfurled a long list with the names of many of the Palestinians killed by Israeli Defense Forces since the initial Oct. 7 attack.
Amidst calls for a cease-fire by pro-Palestinian students, Peykar pointed to the fact that Israel has called for cease-fires, but that Hamas has denied those requests. Israel has also rejected multiple cease-fire proposals.
Senior Zella Hanson, a Jewish student, stood alongside pro-Palestinian protesters with a sign reading “Jews for a Free Palestine.”
“My faith and my heritage and my culture are all important to me, but I don’t think that that’s synonymous with supporting a colonial project that is responsible for the brutal occupation and wrongful death of many, many thousands of people,” Hanson said. “A blatant genocide is not something that I think aligns with [Judaism] in any way, shape or form.”
Ahdoot and a group of students in Chabad traveled to Israel last week to observe the impact of the war so far.
“We visited and witnessed firsthand some of the kibbutzim, which are the communities that were the most heavily impacted on October 7,” Ahdoot said. “Keeping that impact going on campus is a really powerful thing.”
Ahdoot clarified that the display of flags was created to represent the Israeli civilians who were “massacred” on Oct. 7, not to discredit the Palestinian civilians who are dying.
The Israeli flags were removed by 4:43 p.m., but pro-Palestinian protesters remained on the quad. Some students in support of the display remained at the scene off to the side as Hanson and another pro-Palestinian student led their supporters in chants.
“Israel, Israel, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?” students chanted. “Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry — the whole world is on your side.”
Many of the chants directly addressed members of the Duke community, charging them with complicity through inaction.
“SSI, you can’t hide — you’re supporting genocide,” students chanted. They followed up with similar statements targeted at “President Price” and “Duke University.”
The pro-Palestinian students concluded their demonstration at 5:27 p.m., though many stayed on the quad conversing with each other until 6 p.m.
Sophomore Erel Amit said that he is disappointed that people turned the memorial into a protest.
“I think you can respect murdered civilians and let different groups have their place and have their moment without disrupting their grief,” he said.
Amit also spoke about how the action of helping to set up all 1,200 flags for the display prompted him to reflect on the gravity of the war’s impact and the weight of each individual casualty.
“Every time I was trying to hammer a flag down, I was thinking, ‘This is a human life — an innocent man, woman, child, infant, Holocaust survivor — who was murdered in their home in the early hours of the morning’ … It’s really sobering,” Amit said.
Hanson spoke to the tension she experiences as an anti-Zionist Jewish student and her frustration with Israel and its supporters.
“I guess it makes me really upset because I think that they don’t understand Judaism, and they think I don’t understand Judaism,” Hanson said. “I think what they’re doing is antisemitic. I think they’re bringing stain and ruin upon the Jewish faith.”
In a later message to The Chronicle, Hanson clarified that she does not think that Zionists are acting in accordance with Jewish principles. She added that she thinks it feeds antisemitism to weaponize Jewish memory and trauma to justify the genocide, as it stains Judaism as a tradition, shared culture, faith and ethnicity.
“I feel like Duke should have the platform to be able to engage in this dialogue,” Peykar said. “I hope one day that we do … I think we're on the path to do it, but it's not as effective as it could be.”
Claire Cranford, Samanyu Gangappa and Zoe Kolenovsky contributed reporting.
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Abby Spiller is a Trinity junior and editor-in-chief of The Chronicle's 120th volume.