Anti-Israel activists interrupt Columbia's 'distraction' tree lighting

For the second consecutive year, anti-Israel activists disrupted a tree lighting ceremony at Columbia University’s campus in New York City.

Dozens of protesters began marching and holding a banner reading, “Distraction by design, turn your eyes to Palestine,” after the lights were turned on, the Columbia Daily Spectator reports. The demonstration was led by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition.

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Last year, the annual tree lighting ceremony was also disrupted by masked activists who held signs reading, “Joy Is Canceled.”

This year’s protest reportedly featured chants of, “Columbia uses these events to distract us from genocide. They use flashy lights to distract us from genocide. This is a distraction by design.” The Columbia Daily Spectator reports that demonstrators also chanted, “Intifada, Intifada” and “Up, up with liberation, down, down with occupation.”

The outlet also reports that two masked activists unplugged the lighting of many of the trees while the protest occurred.

“TREE LIGHTING is one of Columbia’s LARGEST EVENTS of the year, a distraction disguised as a community event (they’ll still market it this way as they lock Harlem residents out of a public campus and shut off acres of land in the middle of Harlem),” the divestment coalition posted to Instagram.

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According to its website, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest is “a coalition of student organizations working toward achieving a liberated Palestine and the end of Israeli apartheid by urging Columbia to divest all economic and academic stakes in Israel.” Student groups included in the coalition include Students for Justice in Palestine, the Black Student Organization, Student Worker Solidarity, the Muslim Students Association, and the Reproductive Justice Collective.

”As a coalition, our chief goal is to challenge the settler-colonial violence that Israel perpetrates with the support of the United States and its allies,” the group’s website stipulates. “We have previously refused to focus on concerns pertaining to free speech, academic freedom, and student safety on campus, as they distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.”