Columbia University
Columbia UniversityiStock

Ofir Dayan, 24, an undergraduate at Columbia University and the daughter of Israel Consul General in New York Dani Dayan, said she is being harassed and threatened by campus student group “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) - and that the school administration is failing to protect her.

“SJP is violent,” she told the New York Post. “I’m worried about my personal safety.”

Dayan, who previously served as an IDF officer in Gaza and Lebanon and now studies political science at Columbia, described to the New York Post a series of tense encounters with the anti-Israel student group since beginning her undergraduate studies, which have been ignored by administrators.

In one incident during fall 2017, Dayan was talking in Hebrew on the phone in the lobby of the campus building which houses the “Middle East Institute” when, she said, “A girl heard me and started screaming, ‘Stop killing Muslim ­babies! . . . You’re a murderer!’ “Then she screamed, ‘Zionist, get out!’ A nearby public-safety ­administrator did nothing.”

In another incident during October 2017, Dayan said that she and four other members of the “Students Supporting Israel” (SSI) group, of which she serves as Vice President, were leaving an on-campus event for Israeli beauty queen Titi Aynaw, when they were spotted by SJP members.

“They started screaming their slogans with a microphone to intimidate us. There were at least 50 SJP members blocking the walkway,” she described.

“They were really angry and it was scary,” Dayan said. “I believed it would escalate to physical violence.”

A complaint SSI filed with a student run “adjudication board” was ultimately dismissed by a school administrator who advises the board as being “too complicated” for the board to deal with because the incident in question was from a previous semester.

Dayan said that the hostile atmosphere at the university has gotten worse since February 2018, when her father spoke on campus and SJP set up mock checkpoints nearby to intimidate those in attendance.

A month later, SJP members shouted “terrorist” at her as she handed out literature for “Hebrew Liberation Week.”

An administrator told SSI at a subsequent meeting that the school could not do anything without proof of anti-Semitism.

“I thought the university would protect me, but they didn’t do anything when [protesters] called me a terrorist,” Dayan concluded. “The school stands by as I’m harassed.”