A Jewish professor was arrested late Wednesday at a pro-Palestine protest at Dartmouth College and subsequently banned from the campus for six months, according to reports.
“Those cops were brutal to me,” Professor Annelise Orleck tweeted Thursday. “I promise I did absolutely nothing wrong. I was standing with a line of women faculty in the their [sic] 60s to 80s trying to protect our students. I have now been banned from the campus where I have taught for 34 years.”
Video after video circulating on social media showed an elderly woman being thrown to the ground, after which she rose to her feet and shouted at the officers before being pushed down and detained. The woman was Professor Orleck, according to multiple outlets.
“I was mad because they had taken my phone, and I was mad because they just body-slammed me, and it hurt. And so, I went and said, ‘Give me back my phone,'” Orleck said, WMUR reported. “I’m trying to get my phone back. I did. And, at that moment, three police lifted me up in the air, slammed me down onto the ground. I mean, threw me down onto the ground on my bad shoulder. And they said I was resisting arrest.”
Orleck, a former Jewish Studies Department chair whose specialties include American history and radicalism, Jewish immigration, and gay and lesbian studies, was videotaping the police, leading to her exchanges with the police and eventual arrest, fellow Jewish professor Jeff Sharlet told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).
Orleck describes herself as a “general troublemaker” among other things, according to her Twitter bio.
My colleague & friend, the great labor historian Prof. Annelise Orleck. Annelise is out & ok, but was told that a condition of her release is being banned from campus, despite currently teaching two courses. https://t.co/VQp8UAqu7W
— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) May 2, 2024
Protesters set up tents on the campus during the protest Wednesday, contrary to the college’s Department of
Safety and Security’s (DSS) assurances to the Hanover Police Department (HPD) that “no encampment or tents would be allowed,” according to a Thursday statement from the HPD Chief Charles Dennis.
The protesters had told the college administration that they would set up the encampment in a “safe and responsible way,” according to the student newspaper The Dartmouth. The administrators reportedly warned the protesters “If there is an encampment, there will be no dialogue.”
Many of the protesters defied multiple multi-agency calls to disperse, leading to the arrest of 90 students and non-students “for multiple offenses including criminal trespass and resisting arrest,” the statement revealed.
Armored vehicles rolled onto the campus after midnight as the protests dissipated, with officers calling out, “It’s past your bedtime” and “It’s time to go home,” the outlet noted. (RELATED: Billionaire Dem Donor Cuts Huge Check To Frat Boys Who Held Up American Flag At Protest)
Good! She deserves to be fired for standing up for genocidal pro-Hamas thugs!
— Michael Freund (@msfreund) May 2, 2024
Some 100 faculty, staff, and students protested Orleck’s and others’ arrests Thursday, The Dartmouth reported.
Orleck “intended to be arrested,” current Jewish Studies chair Susannah Heschel told the JTA. “She put herself in the place where everyone was told, if you are in this place, we will arrest you. And she stayed in that place, whereas others left.”
“Good! She deserves to be fired for standing up for genocidal pro-Hamas thugs!” Michael Freund, a former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reacted.
The Anti-Defamation League of New England thanked Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock “for protecting all students’ right to learn in a safe environment while upholding the value of freedom of speech” and praised Beilock’s “leadership at a challenging moment.”
Former U.S. diplomat and weapons expert Josh Paul — who resigned from the U.S. government over the U.S.’s military support of Israel —was due to speak at a panel at Dartmouth College Thursday alongside fellow dissident diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford but canceled his appearance over the ensuing unrest, MyNBC5-WPTZ News reported.
College spokesperson Jana Barnello told The Dartmouth that the bail commissioner, not the college administration, imposed Orleck’s ban.