As pro-Palestine student coalitions held sit-ins on Beinecke Plaza throughout Monday and Tuesday to urge Yale to divest from weapons manufacturers, a group of students from Yale Friends of Israel set up three adjacent tables on Cross Campus and engaged in dialogue about Israel with passerby students.
The tables were adorned with Israeli flags and photos of several hostages who Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7. A large poster leaning against the center table read “Let’s TALK About Israel.”
Eytan Israel ’26, who leads outreach for Yale Friends of Israel and helped staff the table, said that organizers aimed to engage in open dialogue with students about the hostages still in Hamas captivity and the state of Israel’s response to Hamas’ attacks. Israel himself also said that he hoped the table would spotlight pro-Israeli students and sentiment on campus to visiting prefrosh, given the pro-Palestine sit-in and hunger strike nearby.
Members of the hunger strike did not immediately respond to request for comment.
“What am I supposed to answer an admitted student who asks why there are giant tents all over campus by Yale groups whose members are calling for the death of those who support Israel?” Israel said. “I tell them about our dialogue table, and our efforts to raise awareness for the hostages and the need for Israel to defend itself, and that this is a minority of very vocal and radical students.
During its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 people as hostages. In response, the country of Israel began a military offensive in Gaza and has so far killed more than 33,700 Palestinians, the Associated Press reported on April 15 based on estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry. The Israeli government reports that Hamas still holds more than 130 hostages, of whom 36 are confirmed dead.
Groups of Yale students have protested Israel and its war since October; others first began staffing the Israel dialogue table toward the end of the fall semester.
Israel said a pro-Palestine protester called last week “for the death of those who support Israel,” citing a video that circulated on Friday. The video, which was obtained by the News, shows a Yale student reading a poem introduced as a “spiritual call” during a Friday vigil organized by hunger strikers on Cross Campus.
“To the people that financed, encouraged and facilitated this mass killing against us, may death follow you everywhere you go, and when it does, I hope that you don’t see it coming,” the student said on Friday, according to the video.
The speaker reinforced the hunger strikers’ call for the University to divest from weapons manufacturing, an issue which is also central to the demands of the Beinecke Plaza sit-in.
According to Yale’s SEC filings, the University holds over 6,400 shares — worth $680,207 — of iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF, an exchange-traded fund managed by Blackrock. The fund invests in several weapons manufacturers that sell weapons to Israel, including 0.27 percent of its holdings in Raytheon, 0.20 percent in Boeing and 0.19 percent in Lockheed Martin, or just under $4,000 across the three companies. Only 1 percent of Yale's endowment investments are publicly disclosed, so the full extent to which Yale is invested in weapons manufacturers remains unclear.
Israel himself believes that the student in the video was calling for the deaths of “the majority of the Yale and American Jewish community.”
Abe Baker-Butler ’25, who helped run the table, found the video to be deeply threatening.
“It is both deeply disappointing and darkly ironic that those who claim to condemn genocide menacingly call for the death of students on campus,” Baker-Butler wrote. “Such calls must be condemned.”
“When Jewish prefrosh see [the protests on Beinecke] it makes them not want to come here,” said Kira Berman ’25, the president of Yale Friends of Israel, who also staffed the table.
Lizzie Fisher, a Jewish prospective student from New York City, said that when she walked past the protests on Beinecke Plaza she “just kind of put [her] head down.”
She said that her friend, also a Jewish prefrosh, approached the protesters “because he saw the books on the ground and was wondering about the statement they were making.”
“We were uncomfortable to say we were Jewish,” Fisher said. “In all honesty, I think that it has a lot of associations today. And yeah, it's not something you want to mention at a pro-Palestinian rally.”
Another Jewish prospective student, Sarah Silverman, who is from Brooklyn, New York, said that the pro-Palestine protests on campus today did little to sway her college decision.
Silverman, who is choosing between Yale and Harvard for college, said that she felt she was “picking between two bad schools” in terms of campus climate around Israel. She said that she still feels it “really important” to continue attending universities that have what she described as a a bad reputation on Jewish and Israeli issues.
“I think my parents and a lot of my friends have had this kind of philosophy that if a school has been particularly bad, they won’t go,” she said. “And I feel like that's a shame because when [Jewish students] purposely don’t go to these universities, we're kind of taking ourselves out of the picture.”
Fisher and Silverman attend the same modern Orthodox yeshiva high school.
Ariane de Gennaro, a member of Yale Friends of Israel and an opinion columnist for the News, said that staffing the table was an amazing, if isolating, experience.
“Few non-Jews approach us or express interest in what we’re doing, which is particularly noticeable to me as a non Jewish student,” de Gennaro wrote.
De Gennaro said that the table is smaller than the pro-Palestine protests by design. She said that it is not intended to be a counter-protest, but instead a way to show current and prospective students that there are pro-Israel Yale students.
Silverman said that she appreciated that the table setup was not as large as the pro-Palestine demonstrations on Beinecke Plaza.
“I appreciated that it was smaller because I thought it spoke to the different approaches that the two movements took,” Silverman said.
This year, Bulldog Days began on Monday, April 15 and concludes on Wednesday, April 17.
Contact Nora Moses at nora.moses@yale.edu and Ariela Lopez at ariela lopez@yale.edu.
Update, April 17: This piece has been amended to note that as of this morning, the hunger strikers had not immediately responded to request for comment from the News.