GWU drops charges against leader of pro-Hamas student group
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. has dropped its charges against former Students for Justice in Palestine president Lance Lokas.
'The students at GW have demonstrated that no amount of institutional repression can silence dissent over US support for this genocide and the call for Palestinian liberation,' Palestine Legal writes.
George Washington University in Washington, D.C. has dropped its charges against a former Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter president.
A group called Palestine Legal that was involved in the matter shared the update on April 23, calling the charges against Lance Lokas “baseless and discriminatory.” According to the statement, Lokas received a disciplinary hearing in February “merely for participating in an on-campus event,” after he had “already been placed on disciplinary probation and removed from the leadership of [SJP] at GW.”
Palestine Legal, which represented Lokas, writes that 950 people emailed the GWU administration demanding that the charges be dropped.
“The students at GW have demonstrated that no amount of institutional repression can silence dissent over US support for this genocide and the call for Palestinian liberation,” Palestine Legal staff attorney Dylan Saba said in the update.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Lokas is a junior at George Washington University and was previously the president of GWU’s chapter of SJP, which placed pro-Hamas messaging on the outside of a campus library in October following attacks on Israel. The messages included “Glory to our martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist genocide now,” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Lokas’s action took place months before the current campus protests against Israel, which began in Columbia University and have spread to many other American colleges and universities.
The Free Beacon writes that in May 2023, Lokas gave a speech at a “Nakba Day” rally during which he stated, “For every martyr that Palestine gains, another rises to take their place.”
(”Nakba,” Arabic for “Catastrophe,” is how Palestinians and anti-Israeli activists reference Israeli independence.)
“The more the Zionists try to extinguish the fire of resistance, the brighter it will grow. For every martyr that Palestine gains, another rises to take their place,” Lokas reportedly said in his speech. “To condemn Palestinian resistance is to demand that the Palestinian people submit passively to the daily violence of colonialism. It is a call to lie down and accept death.”
The Free Beacon also noted that Lokas once identified himself in 2022 as a “mixed-race and Arab student at GW majoring in Photojournalism” who has been “involved in organizing against all forms of imperialism and colonialism.”
At the time, the SJP group was reportedly charged with damaging a bench near a Hillel group building on campus, which Lokas claimed was really a response to an anti-Israel poster on campus.
“The ongoing colonization of Palestine is a matter of great importance to me,” Lokas stated in December 2022. “74 years of exile from the homeland, the ethnic cleansing of our people, the continued violent campaign of indigenous land theft, the endlessly and unforgivably long and growing list of our martyrs: these issues and the suffering of our people weigh heavily on my mind and my heart each and every day.”
Campus Reform has contacted George Washington University and Palestine Legal for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
