AUSTIN, Texas — State officials and University of Texas at Austin faculty and student organizations have taken to social media to react to Wednesday’s demonstrations protesting the Israel-Hamas war. 

The protests were organized by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee of Austin to show solidarity with other pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses around the country. The group said that the goal of the demonstration was to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and ask that the university divest from companies funding Israel’s military. 

The demonstrators were met with a heavy police presence, which, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, was at the request of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. 

Abbott said on X, formerly Twitter, that the demonstrations were antisemitic and the protesters “belong in jail.”

“Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled,” Abbott said. 

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also called the protests “antisemitic” and applauded the police response. 

“I’m glad that UT Police & Texas DPS are responding to this situation with the seriousness it deserves,” Cruz said in a post on X. 

Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, said on X that peaceful assembly and free speech are “basic constitutional rights.”

“Student protesters — whether you agree with them or not — have a right to safety and fairness. Responding to peaceful demonstrations with weapons and riot gear escalates tensions and makes everyone less safe,” Casar said. 

At the local level, Austin City Council member Zo Qadri released a statement about the campus protests. He called the response by state law enforcement a “wasteful show of force.” 

The Palestinian Solidarity Committee of Austin posted on Instagram that they were joining another walk out Thursday afternoon to “stand with” the protesters arrested Wednesday and with the people of Gaza. The post also called for the resignation of UT Austin President Jay Hartzell.

Hartzell sent a letter to the campus community Wednesday evening thanking staff members and law enforcement for their response to the event. 

Hartzell said that while “peaceful protests” are acceptable on campus, the group leading the protest on Wednesday “was going to violate Institutional Rules.”

“Our University will not be occupied,” Hartzell said. “The protesters tried to deliver on their stated intent to occupy campus. People not affiliated with UT joined them, and many ignored University officials’ continual pleas for restraint and to immediately disperse.”

A group of UT Austin faculty members released a statement Wednesday night condemning Hartzell and the police response to the protest. 

“Instead of allowing our students to go ahead with their peaceful planned action, our leaders turned our campus into a militarized zone,” the statement said. 

The faculty members said that they are concerned with students’ safety and that some of the faculty witnessed police “violently arresting students.”

“There can be no business as usual when our campus is occupied by city police and state troopers who are preventing our students from engaging in a peaceful demonstration of their First Amendment rights,” the statement said. “By bringing militarized and armed forces onto our campus, and refusing to call them off even with ample evidence of police abuse and endangerment of students, you have made our entire campus community unsafe.”

The faculty members behind the statement said they were planning to gather with the students at 12:15 p.m. Thursday to join the Texas State Employees Union’s rally against the university’s firing of more than 60 staff members because of the state’s new law banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses.

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, 34 people were arrested in connection to the UT Austin demonstration Wednesday. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Travis County Sheriff’s Office told the Austin American-Statesman that 57 people were booked into the Travis County Jail in connection to the protest, and their charges have all been disposed. 

One of the people detained was a photographer for Fox 7 Austin, who was covering the demonstration. The Associated Press reported that the photographer “was in the push-and-pull when an officer yanked him backward to the ground, video shows.”

A student told the AP that he believed the police presence was an “overreaction.”

“Because of all the arrests, I think a lot more (demonstrations) are going to happen,” Dane Urquhart told the AP.  

Protests have popped up all around the country at colleges and universities this week, inspired by an encampment established by students at Columbia University last week that is still underway.

UT Austin isn’t the only Texas university to host demonstrations. Multiple other college campuses in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston saw student-led protests to support Palestinians. 

Rice University saw a two-day encampment on Tuesday and Wednesday put on by the Rice Students for Justice in Palestine. According to an Instagram post from the group, the goal was to establish a “Liberated Zone” on campus to show solidarity with the pro-Palestinian student movement across the country. 

At the University of Texas at San Antonio, students marched through campus Wednesday to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. UTSA officials warned on social media of increased law enforcement presence on campus Wednesday morning ahead of the expected protest.

According to the Dallas Morning News, a sit-in was staged at the University of Texas at Dallas on Tuesday, with about 100 students occupying the administration building for a few hours. 

The Dallas Morning News also reported a walk-out at the University of Texas at Arlington on Wednesday.

Dozens of protesters at the University of Texas were arrested Wednesday during a peaceful, pro-Palestinian protest hosted on the campus by the Palestine Solidarity Committee.

“UT Austin does not tolerate disruptions of campus activities or operations like we have seen at other campuses,” the UT Division of Student Affairs said in a statement before the protest. 

After about 45 minutes of the crowd marching south on the mall from the Gregory Gym area, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and campus police ordered the protesters to disperse or “be arrested as per the penal code.”

Here’s why UT-Austin students are protesting:

What is a pro-Palestine protest?

Pro-Palestinian protests are demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights, typically calling for an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Protests began in the wake of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the Palestinian militant group’s assault on Israeli communities Oct. 7, killing almost 1,200 people.

Israel’s subsequent bombardment and invasion of Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians — militants and civilians; men, women and children — and has fueled a dire humanitarian crisis.

Where is Palestine located?

Palestine is recognized as an independent state by the United Nations and more than 135 of its members, but it is not recognized by the U.S., according to History. The UN considers it a single occupied entity, but the official borders are undetermined, BBC News reported.

Though its borders have shifted over the years, Palestinian territories used to be what is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. 

When searching for “Palestine” on Google Maps, the map zooms in on the Israel-Palestine region, and both the Gaza Strip and West Bank territories are labeled and separated by dotted lines. But there is no label for Palestine.

In an email statement, Google said it doesn’t label the borders because there isn’t international consensus on where the Palestinian boundaries are located. 

Why are college students protesting?

The Palestine Solidarity Committee, a registered UT student group and a chapter of the national Students for Justice in Palestine, planned a protest Wednesday at the UT campus in solidarity with students across the U.S., including at Columbia University, Yale University and New York University, who are calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

Across the country, pro-Palestinian student protesters have occupied campuses in tent encampments this week in a campaign to urge their universities to divest, an action students over the decades have demanded from their schools’ administrators.

At pro-Palestinian rally at UT-Austin, protesters arrested

Multiple protesters on UT-Austin’s campus were arrested during a pro-Palestinian rally held by students.

What is ‘divest’?

The word “divest” refers to diverting money from a university’s endowment — the pool of money a college has and tries to grow through investments. Some of the biggest university endowments in the country total nearly $50 billion and comprise thousands of funds.

The protesters opposed to Israel’s military attacks in Gaza say they want their schools to stop funneling endowment money to Israeli companies and other businesses, like weapons manufacturers, that profit from the war in Gaza.

“The university would rather enforce and put money into policing our communities and policing their own students then they would to supporting them,” said Anachí Ponce, a UT student who attended the protest. “These are students who are protesting a genocide and the lack of action from UT administration for the way that they haven’t been super helpful against hate crimes against Muslim students on campus.”

“It’s like, why is our money being used to fund bombs overseas?,” said Layla Saliba, a student protester researching endowment investments with the group Columbia University Apartheid Divestment. “Let’s reinvest this money in our community instead,” she said.

In addition to divestment, protesters across the U.S. are calling for a cease-fire and student governments at some colleges have also passed resolutions in recent weeks calling for an end to academic partnerships with Israel.

Are universities investing in Israel?

Protesters have called for a halt to investments in Israel, but experts say that might be too simplified a take on what colleges have done with their funds. To begin with, it’s difficult to define what an “investment” in Israel entails, said economist Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies college finances.

She said bigger investments are more obvious than smaller ones tucked away in mutual funds — an investment tool that pools money and spreads it out over many assets, and a type of financial tool on which many colleges rely.

Universities hire private companies to manage their endowments to preserve their funds over the long run, Baum said.

Debates about the investments of college endowments are complicated, Baum said, because some university stakeholders argue the money needs to produce the biggest return on investment possible to fund teaching and necessary programming and services.

“The purpose of the endowment is to have money that will allow the university to permanently provide educational opportunities so that they don’t have to go out and raise new money every year to continue operating,” she said.

The bigger a university’s endowment, the more is at stake. That’s one reason why pro-Palestinian student protesters at wealthy universities are fighting so hard this week, she said. There’s a lot of money involved.

“There are always going to be differencesof opinion about what you don’t want to invest in,” Baum said.