WASHINGTON – The pro-Palestinian protest at George Washington University is showing no signs of letting up but has for the most part remained peaceful, unlike what’s been seen at other college campuses around the country.  

The block of H Street between 20th and 21st streets, NW, remained blocked off by D.C. police Tuesday. It’s part of the large tent city on the campus of GWU that seems to be entrenched, for now.

“The fact that this is allowed to keep occurring is absolutely ridiculous,” said GWU student Sabrina Soffer.

The encampment at GWU is now on its sixth day.  Pro-Palestinian students from universities around the D.C. region are leading the protest, causing more than concern for some students of the Jewish faith.

“It’s anti-Semitism,” Soffer told FOX 5. “The ideas have been thrifted but it has a shiny new fashionable outerwear and the fact that this is given the moral high ground — it’s exactly how it happened in Germany. In the Nazi era, anti-Semitism was intellectualized, it was moralized, it was legalized and then it was normalized and that’s what we’re seeing right now. There’s blatant anti-Semitism on our campus and it’s being normalized.”

 One of the student leaders of the protest is Jewish. She has a different take on the movement. 

“Personally, I feel more safe being Jewish in here in this encampment than I do outside this encampment and the reason for that is because everyone here believes in collective liberation of the safety of all people are intertwined with each other and I know that as a Jew I’m included in that,” GW student Miriam said. 

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The dozens of tents occupy the entire university yard in the heart of GW’s campus in Foggy Bottom. Barricades that had surrounded the perimeter late last week are now piled in a heap.

“It’s important that we are still being disruptive to the University and disrupting business as usual because there cannot be business as usual during the genocide and we’re now up to 200 hundred days into a genocide and students are fed up,” Miriam said. 

But some of the recent protests on college campuses around the country have turned violent — Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Columbia University in New York among them.  

Students attending a nearby high school use the yard as a cut-through and are still doing so right now.

“I walk to Western Market for lunch every day and I just walk through. It is very peaceful. Everyone’s very quiet and I think it’s kind of cool for me to see the movements and stuff happening downtown in this space,” high schooler Kai Hardy-Kanegis said. 

There have been calls from some in Congress for D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Pamela Smith to clear the block of H Street that’s been claimed by the protestors and to assist GW in dismantling the encampment in its quad. But those calls appear to be falling on deaf ears.

“I’m upset. I’m outraged,” Soffer said. “I mean the fact that the mayor isn’t allowing the police to intervene is absolutely ridiculous and I feel like every step that needs to be taken to get police presence there right now to remove this needs to be done.”

Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers and Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels have a $10,000 bet on which LSU standout is going to win Rookie of the Year in 2024.

Nabers told The Pivot podcast that he and his college teammate made the bet well before draft night, when Daniels went No. 2 overall to Washington and Nabers went No. 6 to New York.

“Going against him is gonna be fun,” Nabers, 20, told The Pivot in Detroit last Thursday after getting picked. “We got a bet going for Rookie of the Year. Whoever loses gotta pay, I think it’s $10,000 cash.”

The two former Tigers stars are now division rivals, so they are guaranteed to face each other twice a year in the NFC East.

Nabers said both he and Daniels will have no problem treating each other as rivals.

“When we walk out that tunnel, me and him — since we [are] on different sides — we know it’s time to talk sh-t now,” Nabers said with a smile. “We done talked sh-t with other people. So it’s time to talk sh-t with each other.”

Daniels is a major reason that Nabers is in this position, though, he said. So that living out their dreams together as opponents will mean the world to them personally.

“Having that guy as a teammate, he’s a great leader, a great person to be around,” Nabers said. “I probably wouldn’t have had the year I had without him — by him pushing me every day at practice, by him waking me up in the morning to go watch film, him having my back through it all. Just having that guy in my corner has been the best.

He said their first jersey swap will be a “great moment.”

“Having that LSU legendary status when you [are] going into the league, seeing your brother across that you played with, ya’ll guys finally accomplished your dreams,” Nabers said. “So having that brother two times a year on a gameday, able to talk sh-t, able to share jersey swaps with him. That jersey’s gonna mean a lot to me and him.”

Not that Nabers will be focused on anything but winning. The young receiver’s confidence and swagger jumped off the screen as he explained his killer mentality to hosts Ryan Clark, Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder.

“This game could have been taken from me early a lot of different times. So when I’m out there on the field, the mentality that I have is, ‘I’m gonna f— you over,’” Nabers said. “When I get that opportunity, I’m gonna do it. Because a person’s gonna do it to me. So if I can do it to you before you do it to me 100 times on the field before you can get that one, I’m gonna keep doing it every time.

“I’m not gonna stop,” Nabers continued. “It is what it is. Because that one time it’s gonna happen to me, it’s gonna be pushed and talked about more than anything. So if I got the ups, I got the ups. That’s just how it is. I’m hoping to have the ups every time.”

Nabers didn’t know he was going to the Giants specifically when the first round of the NFL Draft arrived, but he said “I kept hearing I’m not getting past top 8.”

“So they was telling me anybody after four, you make ’em pay when you play ’em,” he said. “So it was just whoever passes me up after that, it’s war after that.”

That puts the Los Angeles Chargers on the hook as a team Nabers has circled to embarrass whenever he faces them.

It stuck out how much this journey means to Nabers personally, however, when he described the dinner he had with family and friends in Detroit the night before the draft.

“We shared tears in this restaurant,” he said. “Last night I went around the table. And I spoke about [how] all the people that [were] here at the table [were] here for a reason. I shared a story that a lot of them probably thought I forgot or didn’t know. A lot of key moments in my past that — they helped me when I was a child, they helped my mother, when she didn’t have — they helped me when I didn’t have school clothes to go to school.

“So it was just the little things that mattered to me when I was a kid that led to this moment,” he added. “The little things that counted for me rather than the big things. To spend that night with them, they’ve been crying all week, crying all month to hear my name. So I’m just living it up with them.”

And he balances that sentiment with supreme confidence that he takes to the field.

Like how he handles the pressure of being the next great LSU wide receiver.

“I know there’s gonna be a lot on my shoulders for that — but I’m like that,” Nabers said with a huge grin.

Asked how he will handle New York, Nabers said: “I got a nice smile so, I got a nice style so, yeah. I’m ready.”

After NYU said it would proceed with disciplinary action against protesters at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment — citing students’ failure to respond in negotiations and decision to remain at the demonstration — NYU’s Palestine Solidarity Coalition and faculty mediators denied the university’s account of student meetings with administrators, calling it “disingenuous” and “misleading.” NYU PSC also said negotiations are currently “at a standstill.”

In a statement yesterday afternoon, NYU spokesperson John Beckman said protesters had agreed to leave the encampment in exchange for “many hours of discussion” with administrators on Saturday, and that “students failed to honor that promise.” Beckman cited a last-minute decision “that all demands must be met as well” for students to leave the encampment as having caused negotiations to fall through on Saturday. He said the decision came at the insistence of “others, including, we believe, outsiders.”

Beckman also said that the next day, NYU gave protesters two options: to cease overnight stays at the encampment and proceed with discussions, or continue staying overnight and face conduct charges. According to his statement, students did not respond to the university’s proposals.

In a statement in response to the university, NYU PSC challenged Beckman’s account of events, saying student organizers had discussed all four of their demands from the beginning of negotiations. Protesters’ demands include the disclosure of the university’s investments, divestment from companies with ties to Israel, the closure of NYU Tel Aviv, the removal of police from campus and the pardoning of disciplinary action taken against pro-Palestinian protesters.

NYU PSC said the university had offered to disclose its investments and pardon the protesters arrested at Gould Plaza if demonstrators agreed to leave the current encampment during the nighttime, but that student protesters refused it. The group also said negotiations are currently “at a standstill.”

“The students have made it clear what the only appropriate resolution is,” NYU PSC’s statement reads. “We will not de-escalate, we will not de-camp and we will not rest until this university cuts every last tie, monetary or otherwise, from the Zionist project.”

Three faculty mediators who were present at the negotiations backed much of NYU PSC’s account of events in a letter to administrators. The professors said the university’s statement misinterpreted communications about student organizers’ decision-making process as involvement by “outsiders” in negotiations. They called for NYU to issue an apology for and retract its statement on the negotiations.

“We also note that this is the second time since Monday April 22, 2024, that NYU has released an official statement describing events in tendentious ways without accurate information,” the letter reads. “At best, this pattern of misrepresentation demonstrates incompetent communication among senior administration. At worst, it indicates a reckless and calculated disregard to the safety and well-being of our students.”

An NYU spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Contact Carmo Moniz at [email protected].