‘You’re baby killers’: The pro-Palestine university protest spilling out into the streets of New York

“You’re f------ baby killers, that’s what you are”, a protester wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh bellows at a Jewish Columbia alumnus outside the Ivy League university’s gates.

It’s not even 10am on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and expletives are already being traded across the metal barriers set up by police to pen in pro-Palestinian protesters.

“I don’t support the Israeli state but I don’t support the slaughter of Jewish people”, Elliott, 76, who graduated from Columbia in 1968, shouts in response.

The chant “from the river to the sea” means “end the occupation”, replies Lee Ali, a demonstrator who drove an hour and a half from Pennsylvania to protest outside the school. “I’m not going to talk to a f------ Nazi”, he continues.

While the central protest is going on inside the campus, non-student pro-­Palestinian protesters have been gathering outside the gates each day to show their support. The terse exchange is an example of tensions spilling out beyond the grounds of one of the United States’ most prestigious universities, where hundreds of students have for days been occupying the campus’s main lawn to demand Columbia cut ties with anything related to Israel.

Months of student demonstrations against the war in Gaza have reached a crescendo and now dozens of New York Police Department officers and private security staff line the streets outside.

The arrest of more than 100 students last week failed to deter the Gaza Solidarity Encampment protesters, who have made it clear they will not budge.

On Wednesday morning, Minouche Shafik, the university’s president, delivered a stark warning that the camp would be dismantled if the protesters did not disperse by 8am. The deadline was later extended by 48 hours to give more time for university bosses and student representatives to negotiate throughout the day and night.

Protesters have demanded the university divest from any financial interests connected to Israel and administrators offer amnesty to those involved with the protest. The weeks-long demonstration has upended learning at the university, with students at Barack Obama’s former university told they don’t have to attend classes on campus for the rest of the term. It sparked similar protests at institutions across the US. Police officers arrested at least four pro-Palestinian protesters who were demonstrating at the University of Texas campus on Wednesday.

Dozens of Texas Department of Public Safety officers in riot gear were deployed to disperse the crowd of protesters. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, another Ivy League school, warned on Wednesday that more than 90 protesters camped out on university grounds to disperse or “face conduct proceedings”.

Encampments have also sprung up at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, while riot police arrested more than 60 people at Yale on Monday and more than 150 people in downtown Manhattan at New York University.

The fevered protests on university campuses have in recent days become a political flashpoint stretching from the White House to the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, called the protests “anti-Semitic” and claimed they “incite terrorism”. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister also waded in, saying “more has to be done” to stop pro-Palestinian protests that have spread across US campuses.

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific,” he said in a recorded statement, accusing “anti-­Semitic mobs” of taking over leading universities. “It’s unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally,” he said. “The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.”

“I condemn the anti-Semitic protests,” Joe Biden told reporters on Monday. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Mike Johnson, the House Speaker who was among a string of Republicans who called for Baroness Shafik to resign, visited Columbia to speak to Jewish students.

Despite all the chaos and hostility surrounding the demonstration that has gripped the country, the students holed up on the university’s south lawn seemed anything but concerned. Visibly relaxed, protesters emerged from dozens of tents peppering the carefully cut grass to apply sun cream in the April heat.

“We will not be stopped and we will not be moved”, one student dressed in a green cardigan and a keffiyeh shouted from a megaphone at the centre of the encampment. “We must continue to be disciplined”, she said to a rapturous applause.

The Gaza Solidarity Encampment is a well-oiled machine, one protester said. There are several different committees, including a media team – that will only speak to the press at a specific time – and a security group. There have been poetry readings, guest speakers and a Passover celebration held in the encampment, which one protester described as a “festival of peace”.

But the demonstration has been less pleasant for some Jewish students on campus. A group of 133 Israeli students this week wrote to Baroness Shafik, a former president of the London School of Economics, saying that they feared for their lives.

“The campus has become a place I dread entering”, one signatory told The Telegraph. “Over the last few days I’ve feared speaking in Hebrew on campus, telling anyone that I’m Jewish or interacting with my professors”, they said.

Another student who wished to remain anonymous said he felt unsafe and had fled to London to join family.

It is the fear felt by Jewish students that prompted Elliott to grill Mr Ali outside the university gates about the meaning of the chant often used by pro-Palestinian protesters.

The retired lawyer and Columbia donor still attends two classes a week at his old university, where he heard from a Jewish classmate that they felt uncomfortable on campus. On Wednesday morning, he was on his way to a seminar on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky when he had the altercation outside the school gates.

Elliott, who did not want to give his last name, said he was arrested at Columbia as a student in 1968 for opposing the Vietnam war.

“You could argue that what we did was wrong, and I would have that argument, but there was never an instance where anyone was singled out for their ethnicity”, he told The Telegraph.

Despite the bedlam engulfing Columbia that saw the former student branded a “baby killer” and “Nazi” outside the university gates, Elliott says he has been inspired to increase rather than cut off his donations to his former school.

“I think the university, I think Minouche [Shafik] has done as good a job as she can”, he said.