A few dozen protesters, including many Georgia State University students, returned to Hurt Park near the campus student center Saturday for another day of demonstrations.
Activists began gathering at 6 p.m. to protest the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, which is housed at the university’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies along Park Place. On Friday afternoon, protesters had a brief scuffle with officers outside the building while urging GSU to end the program, or GILEE, as it is known.
Edith Vickery, a sophomore at GSU studying history, said she attended Friday’s protest and returned to campus Saturday for another round of demonstrations because she wants the university to be more transparent about how her tuition money is being used.
”I do not stand for what GSU stands for. I don’t support what they’ve been doing with my tuition money and everyone else’s. I think the GILEE program is absolutely atrocious,” said Vickery of Decatur.
Vickery said that she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to picking a college. She explained that she heavily relied on a HOPE scholarship and wanted to stay local.
She expressed frustration with having her campus police training in Israel as part of the GILEE program.
“(GILEE) is very useful for any school that wants to treat its students like terrorists like we’ve been seeing in the past week or so,” Vickery said.
Credit: Caroline Silva
Credit: Caroline Silva
GILEE was founded in 1992, ahead of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Robert Friedmann, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at GSU and founder of GILEE, previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the 1972 Olympics in Munich, when 11 Israeli Olympians were killed by Palestinian terrorists, inspired the idea for the program. He then teamed Atlanta law enforcement with officials in Israel to share security knowledge prior to the 1996 games. More than 1,000 public safety officials, mostly from Georgia, have participated in the program in Israel.
Former U.N. Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young was instrumental in bringing the Olympics to Atlanta.
Arim Oh, a resident of northeast Georgia, said he came to campus to support student protesters and do his part as a Jewish Korean opposing the war in Gaza.
”I think giving Palestinians emancipation, freeing them from apartheid, ending the genocide, and giving Palestinians the right to return back to their homes, to their rightful homes that they were chased out of at gunpoint, I think that is the duty of all Jews everywhere if they believe in humanity and justice,” he said.
Oh said he has had reservations about openly identifying as Jewish due to feeling “ashamed … because of all the human bloodshed,” but said he couldn’t just remain silent after the start of the war on Oct. 7.
”I think the real Judaism is about being a good person and helping humanity,” he said.
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
At nearby Georgia Tech, graduation ceremonies earlier in the day had remained calm.
About eight students clutched Palestinian flags as they crossed the graduation stage. They represented only a small fraction of the roughly 1,000 students who participated in a 3 p.m. ceremony that honored students who received bachelor’s degrees from the engineering college and master’s degrees in a number of programs.
The ceremony marked the fifth and final commencement event held by Georgia Tech this week. Student and keynote speakers who addressed the crowd during Saturday’s two ceremonies barely touched on the controversial topic of the Israel-Hamas war. Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who addressed graduates during a morning ceremony, praised the students for their resilience and determination. He noted many of today’s graduates started their college careers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And, he said, they are graduating into a world that’s still volatile and uncertain. He noted the “wars are raging in Ukraine and Israel,” the disruption posed by artificial intelligence technologies, the climate crisis and a deeply divided nation.
— Staff writer Vanessa McCray contributed to this article.
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