The 50 Chapel Hill High School students who walked out of class Thursday morning and marched across the street, a quarter mile into the woods, to protest what they called the “intensification of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” would’ve preferred to stage their demonstration on campus.
“We wanted to work with the administration to hold the walkout on campus and make the event as safe as possible,” says sophomore Finn McElwee.
But students ultimately decided to relocate after negotiations with the administration broke down.
According to McElwee, who approached administrators with plans for the walkout several weeks ago, administrators wanted student organizers to submit in advance everything anyone would say during the demonstration. This posed a particular problem because organizers had planned an open mic portion. McElwee says administrators also told organizers that students’ use of the word “genocide” would be “challenged” during the review process. Rather than accept those conditions, the students chose to hold their demonstration off school property.
The walkout comes as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza remains, as McElwee put it, “apocalyptic.” According to the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 56,000 people have been killed since the war began, including more than 10 thousand children and hundreds of journalists and aid workers. Gaza’s 2.1 million residents are facing mass starvation after months of blockade. Despite the blockade ending in mid-May, humanitarian groups say insufficient aid is being allowed into the territory to prevent famine.
Chapel Hill High School disputes the students’ characterization of conversations with the administration. In a statement to the INDY, Andy Jenks, Chief Communications Officer at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, wrote that “students were not told they could not use that word, but rather that they should be mindful of their word choices in the school environment.”
“This feels like a mischaracterization of what is otherwise our normal steps for addressing student-led events (and their associated flyers/posters/verbiage),” Jenks wrote. “Our school made every reasonable effort to allow the students to hold a peaceful event on campus, as is their right, and the students eventually chose otherwise.”
McElwee believes the school’s concerns around word choice were directly related to criticism the school received after a similar walkout in support of Palestine last year.
“I was told by my principal that during the walkout that happened last year, [student protesters] used the term ‘genocide,’ and then the school was [verbally] attacked by organizations like Voice4Israel,” McElwee says. McElwee says Chapel Hill High School principal Steven Sullivan told him “we didn’t realize the implications of this term [at the time of last year’s walkout].”
Sullivan and Jenks did not directly address McElwee’s claims about these specific statements when contacted for comment.
Jenks disputes that the school’s actions this year were shaped by past criticism, stating that while the school did receive messages from outside organizations after last year’s walkout, its approach has always been driven by concerns for “the physical and social-emotional wellbeing of everyone at school.”
Whether or not last year’s messages influenced this year’s approach, Voice4Israel of North Carolina did mobilize community members to contact Chapel Hill High School administrators in the days leading up to Thursday’s walkout. In a Wednesday newsletter obtained by the INDY, the organization warned members about the planned walkout and stated it had “contacted local parents who quickly moved into advocacy to protect Jewish students.”
Jenks says ahead of Thursday’s walkout, the school received six emails from people asking that it take steps to prevent the demonstration, none of whom were parents of current Chapel Hill High School students.
Voice4Israel of North Carolina did not respond to a request for comment.
Several Jewish students were among the walkout’s organizers and speakers, including Zev, who opened the demonstration by discussing the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism. Zev led pro-Palestine chants in both Yiddish and Palestinian Arabic, calling them “two languages that are very suppressed by Israel.”
Throughout the demonstration, students looked backward and forward in time while discussing the present day. They invoked the historical vindication of student movements—one student carried a sign reading “The students were right: on civil rights, on Vietnam, on South African apartheid, on the genocide in Gaza”—and speculated about how history will view this moment.
“In 20 years, people will look back on the people doing exactly this now and say, ‘Oh yeah, obviously they were in the right,’” one student said.
“What we’re doing isn’t wrong,” several others affirmed.
Many expressed dismay at adults who had dismissed their activism, and pushed back against characterizations of the Israel-Palestine conflict as too complex to understand or act upon.
“When all this stuff in Gaza and Israel started happening a couple of years ago, I spoke about it to my parents, and my dad told me, ‘It’s complicated. You can’t support one side over the other. It’s not a genocide, and Israel isn’t doing anything wrong,’” one student said. “But I had seen on the internet photos of bombed houses, so many bodies, children who were in pieces.”
About 20 minutes into the demonstration, two student counter-protesters arrived carrying Israeli flags. McElwee instructed participants not to engage with them.
The counter-protesters told the INDY they found the walkout to be anti-semitic and made them feel unsafe. When asked to elaborate, one of the counter-protesters said, “First of all, I want to say that this walkout is not condoned by the school at all. There are going to be consequences for these students.”
“It is absurd to support what Hamas is doing,” the other counter-protester said.
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