Assessing Countermeasures for Effectively Managing Disorderly Protesting Crowds at Private Sector Facilities

By Dr. Joshua Sina

Effectively managing disorderly protesting crowds is especially crucial in the period following Hamas’s hundreds of fighters carrying out a massacre of Israeli citizens along the bordering Gaza settlements on October 7, 2023, which led to the Israeli military forces invading Gaza to defeat Hamas’s military infrastructure. In support of Hamas’s attacks against Israel, hundreds of disorderly pro-Hamas demonstrators proceeded to take over parts of university campuses throughout the United States and Western Europe, with the affected adminis­ trations and their security departments un­ able to manage such violent disturbances. These were accompanied by massive and often unruly pro-Hamas demonstrations in U.S. and Western European cities. In the case of university administrations, failing to mitigate the impact of the distur­ bances at their campuses, many university administrators ended up appeasing the demonstrators and building intruders by giving in to their extremist demands.

These included agreeing to abolish cooperative agreements with Israeli academic institu­ tions, disinviting Israeli academics from speaking at their campuses, and promising to hire only Palestinian academics to their Middle Eastern studies departments. Such appeasements ended up demoralizing their universities’ security departments from effectively dealing with their disorderly students and outside agitators. Especially astonishing is that lessons should have been learned from t...