Columbia University Didn’t Pay Reparations for Slavery, Now It Pays Them to Zionists

By Robert Inlakesh

Part of the strategy is framing anti-Israel sentiments as antisemitism and tying sympathy for Gaza to support of Hamas.

Despite its historic ties to slavery, Columbia University has never paid reparations to Black Americans, but now it has reached a compensation deal for its Jewish staff over claims of antisemitism. Many feel this represents a blatant prioritization of some groups over others by the academic institution.

Bowing to the pressure of the US Trump Administration, Columbia University not only agreed to pay $200 million to settle a federal investigation into alleged anti-Semitism, but also reached a historic settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to pay into a $21 million class claims fund to provide reparations to Jewish employees impacted by alleged antisemitism.

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On April 17, 2024, anti-war student protesters set up their first encampment at Columbia University in order to pressure the academic institution to divest from Israel. The reaction from the University was to call in law enforcement, including riot police, to violently expel them for their peaceful activism and lawfully exercising free speech.

The violent crackdown triggered a wave of encampments by students at Ivy-league colleges across the country, before escalating across the entire North American continent and resulting in an uptick in student activism across Europe.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, compared the student protests to Nazis, which was followed by US House Speaker, Mike Johnson, labeling them all antisemitic and accusing them of being terrorist sympathisers.

Media outlets from CNN to Fox News provided wall to wall coverage of alleged “antisemitism” on college campuses, even reporting on various hoaxes that were invented by Zionist activists, like claims from a woman that she was stabbed in the eye with a flag poll, amongst others. Almost all of the violent assaults and racial abuse came from Zionist activists against the student protesters.

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Also, one of the two most prominent groups involved in organizing the encampments nationwide was Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). 

Anti-Zionist Jews were present at almost every encampment, some experiencing assault at the hands of local police forces sent in to crack down on the anti-war advocates. Perhaps the most prominent case of this came with the arrest of US Presidential Candidate Jill Stein.

Columbia University President, Minouche Shafik, despite persecuting her own students and calling in the authorities to crack down upon them, risking their safety, was still forced to resign over the student uprising. The Zionist movement openly claimed responsibility and celebrated not only Shafik’s resignation, but also that of Harvard’s Claudia Gay and others. 

The mass unseating of University Presidents was already unprecedented in the history of US academia, however, when Donald Trump took over the White House, he only accelerated this assault on free speech.

The Trump administration has been following a strategy published by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, called “Project Esther”. This document was published by the influential right-wing think tank on October 7, 2024, and has been followed almost precisely to the letter since Donald Trump’s inauguration.

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Part of the strategy is framing anti-Israel sentiments as antisemitism and tying sympathy for Gaza to support of Hamas, before weaponising the Civil Rights Act, anti-Terror legislation and claiming national security threats as a justification for a draconian crackdown on First Amendment rights.

Following this model, we saw the ICE detention of students/former-students like Mahmoud Khalil, the freezing of funds to Universities and an attempt to place the curriculum in the hands of the US federal government. 

To the average person, raising a Palestinian flag is not antisemitism and chanting “from the river to the sea” is not support for Hamas, yet this is exactly the logic of the US government and Zionist movement in claiming mass anti-Semitic persecution.

Instead of fighting the Trump administration’s push to topple academic freedom at Columbia University, it pledges to implement the US government’s reforms in a desperate attempt to unfreeze federal funding. It didn’t work however, as another Columbia President, Katrina Armstrong, stepped down, while the White House ordered an investigation into anti-Semitism.

To the great displeasure of Columbia faculty, the University decided to back down once again and hand $200 million to the Trump administration, in addition to pledging $21 million in reparations for Jewish Staff.

Putting aside the fact that the University refused to stand up for or compensate Palestinian students or others with reparations for violent assaults and trauma that they endured during this period, Columbia University has still never paid reparations to Black Americans for its ties to slavery.

The University, particularly in its early years while still called “King’s College” was deeply immersed in the slave trade. In fact, of its first 10 Presidents, at least half were proven back in 2017 to have owned slaves.

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In addition to this, slavery was such a normal part of life at the University that it had seeped its way into the curriculum by the 1760s, as most students there were of wealthy merchant families whose wealth came from the slave trade.

There was even a constant need for college building operating funds, required for maintenance,  which were donated mainly by active participants in the slave trade. The stepson of US founding father, George Washington, was even recorded as having brought a slave with him to the University.

Back in 2016, Jordan Brewington uncovered documentation that proved 28 students at the University had taken out a total of 44 advertisements for runaway slaves in local newspapers.

Although many of the records linking the University to the slave trade were destroyed or lost in transition, research from Columbia students managed to uncover many significant links that paint the picture that the academic institution was at least in part built and sustained with funds made as a result of the slave trade.

Columbia University is an institution that historically, both directly and indirectly, benefited from slavery. Research has revealed that administrators, trustees, students and faculty were directly involved in enslaving people and profiting from the slave trade. These are all things that the University acknowledges, yet it has never paid any reparations to Black Americans.

Instead, the academic institution sets up a class claims fund that will in effect pay reparations to its Jewish staff over claims that students opposing a genocide had allegedly engaged in anti-semitic acts. 

In other words, reparations for hurting people’s feelings, but no reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, the population on the backs of which the University built itself.

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.