Protests and Purity Tests at Pomona.

By Kendall White, with photographs by the author

This piece has been lightly edited from the original, which was published by The Claremont Independent. Follow up articles are here and here.

Claremont SJP and PDfA instagrams.

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The morning of October 7, I donned an inside-out shirt, surgical mask, sunglasses, and beanie. I made sure my phone was fully charged and turned off my location-sharing services. Before leaving my dorm room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person looking back at me was nearly unrecognizable. 

I was about to meet up with a group of Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) protesters demanding that our school, Pomona College, divest from Israel. My campus is no stranger to the BDS movement. Last year, Pomona hosted two encampments, navigated the arrest of twenty students and had a federal complaint filed against it by the Brandeis Center and Anti-Defamation League. This was set to be the first major protest of the semester, the date chosen to mark “one year after the beginning of the Zionist entity’s intensified genocide in Palestine.”

For those unfamiliar, a central tenet of the BDS movement is comprehensive anonymity. Protest participants are advised to conceal themselves from head to toe. By their logic, if you can’t be identified, you can’t be punished. But there’s a flip side to this coin: While your identity may remain secret, you also have no idea who anyone else is. This created an opportunity for me, a student journalist, to blend in with the protesters and get a glimpse behind the scenes of a typically opaque and secretive group.

That morning, I gathered in the streets with hundreds of my fellow students. After an initial outdoor rally, protesters marched into Carnegie Hall, one of Pomona’s main academic buildings. There, classes were disrupted with raucous chants of, “Intifada, intifada, long live the intifada” and, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” Professors and students unaffiliated with the protests exited the building, in some cases through the windows.

Things only went downhill from there.