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On Dec. 12, 2023, SUNY Purchase College student Cesar Paul walked into an administrator’s office and headed straight for the window, where a pair of “We Stand With Israel” banners hung facing the campus plaza. Then, Paul took the banners down in protest because, he said, Purchase College was guilty of “double standards.”

After October 2023, the Purchase campus became a protest site for students like Paul who wanted to raise awareness about Palestinians’ struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. But Paul says advocating for Palestine on campus was “dangerous.” “Students would put up [printouts of] Palestinian flags, and they would be taken down immediately,” he says. “There were students putting things up about Israel, and it was fine.”

But the double standards weren’t just relegated to the materials students hung on walls. Paul says the double standards included an institutional stance that Purchase’s leadership took with Israel. On Oct. 10, 2023, Purchase President Milagros Peña sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, Peña wrote, “We also recognize that this conflict is devastating to the residents of Gaza.” The word “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the email.

“Why isn’t Purchase talking about Palestine?” Paul wondered. He was certain that Purchase, which “claims to be diverse” and “will always talk about what’s going on in the world” would eventually “do something for Palestine,” he says. But as weeks went by, and the Palestinian death toll skyrocketed, no email was sent to acknowledge the beginnings of a genocide.

Then there was the hypocrisy, Paul says. The Purchase administration did not acknowledge that Palestinians have resisted occupation for more than a century—the last 77 years of which Israel has been the primary occupying power. When Peña released a university-wide email on Nov. 21, 2023, honoring “the Wappinger and Lenape people,” whose land Purchase’s campus occupies, Paul was “confident the school would advocate for Indigenous people [in Palestine], as they did for Indigenous people here.” But, he says, “I was wrong.”

Paul decided to advocate for Palestine himself—he draped his body in a large Palestine flag and wore it to school. But that, too, was met with resistance. “More than five times I was approached for wearing a Palestinian flag,” he says. The first interaction he remembers was with an elderly female student who yelled at him, “Palestinians are the bad people.” Another time, a female student followed him through a parking lot to ask him if he “condemns the actions of Hamas.”

“Every day felt like a fight,” Paul says. “I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Yet the two “We Stand With Israel” banners hung for weeks in the office window of Paul Nicholson, the school’s director of special programs and ombudsman, despite campus policy prohibiting both banners and large materials on windows.

Paul’s decision to take them down was to “inspire the student body to not abide by these double standards,” he says. “To not be silent.”

Paul knew he would likely face consequences. He expected Nicholson to tell him to stop or maybe call security to have Paul removed from the office. But something else happened. “As I’m taking the banners down, he cursed at me and grabbed me. He was grabbing me so tightly that even though I was wearing a really puffy jacket … I could feel it,” Paul says. “He shook me back and forth and pushed me toward the floor.”

A video recorded by Paul and posted online shows a scuffle between the two before Paul falls to the floor. Nicholson can be heard shouting in the background, “No you’re not. Get the fuck out of here!”

“I called for help immediately,” Paul explains. “I was in survival mode.”