A Jewish student journalist at Yale University says a protester wielding a Palestinian flag jabbed her in the eye during a rowdy anti-Israel protest on campus Saturday evening and got away with it.
Sahar Tartak, editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, had been covering the protest, which had drawn hundreds of students in support of Palestinians, when she says she was surrounded by a mob of protesters.
Tartak said the protest had been slowly brewing for the week prior, with students setting up a tent encampment in the middle of campus and creating a memorial to a Palestinian terrorist, Walid Daqqa. The crowd had also created a mock F-16 covered in fake blood to protest the Israeli military.
When Tartak went Saturday night to cover the protest with a friend, the crowd instantly singled them out because they were “identifiably Jewish,” she said.
“They made a human blockade in front of us and blockaded us whenever we tried to exercise our freedom of movement around the protest,” Tartak said.
At some point, she and her friend were separated. The protesters formed a circle around her, chanting incendiary slogans and taunting her.
“One of the students, whose face was covered in a keffiyeh, took a Palestinian flag that he was holding, waved it in my face and hit my left eye,” Tartak said.
