Pro-Palestine Groups Host Speakers and Organize Vigils to Mark Oct. 7

What you need to know about Tuesday’s 5C events.

Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine vigil. 

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, students and faculty across the Claremont Colleges participated in pro-Palestine events, including vigils and speaker events, to mark two years of conflict between Israel and Hamas. On this day in 2023, Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on the country’s southern border and took 251 hostages, which sparked Israel’s siege in Gaza that has killed over 67,000 Palestinians and displaced most of the territory’s population. 

On their Instagram, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) shared a lineup of events to take place during the week. The first event was a vigil organized by the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, hosted outside the Honnold Mudd Library on Oct. 6. 

Multiple events took place on Oct. 7, with a "Strike for Gaza" promoted by the SJP, Claremont Undercurrents, Claremont Graduate University Intifada, and various other affinity and activist groups across the Colleges."No work! No spending," the groups urged, as they requested students and faculty to "not attend classes or work."

An email template was circulated by SJP group leaders, giving students a format to explain the reason for their absence in class, while urging their professors to “acknowledge the genocide” and “atrocities occurring in Gaza.” The template concludes with student participants encouraging their professors to “let me know if there is anything I can do to support you in confronting this in class. I’d love to be a resource for you in this.” 

SJP also hosted a vigil at the Pitzer clocktower between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., giving students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to place flowers and notes beneath a banner that read “Honor the Martyrs.” A portable speaker played audio that read aloud names of Palestinians killed in the conflict. At 12:15 p.m., speeches began as organizers delivered poems and works of Palestinian writers. A native Gazan shared his poem about the destruction of Palestine. Attendees then had an opportunity to read a piece or share their own words.

At 3 p.m., the Southwest Asian North Africa Club co-hosted a speaker event with the 5C Prison Abolition Collective at Scripps’s Motley Coffeehouse. The groups invited activist Shaheen Nassar, a member of the “Irvine 11.” In 2011, Nassar and ten other students at the University of California, Irvine were arrested and convicted for disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, the former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. 

Outside the Motley, students set up a market with pro-Palestine prints and stickers. Customers were told that proceeds would go to The People’s Fund, a student-led mutual aid organization that has raised nearly $56,000 for relief groups in Sudan, Congo, and Palestine through their donation site. The Motley event organizers said that they had raised $1,000 that evening alone. 

Fundraiser for The People’s Fund at the Motley.

At 5:30 p.m., the Muslim Students Association organized a vigil titled “In Remembrance of the Martyrs of Palestine,” on the Scripps Bowling Green Lawn. Student leaders read aloud prayers and called for an end to the violence. 

Many groups shared their reservations about organizing demonstrations during the second Trump administration. On Oct. 7 of last year, around 100 students occupied Carnegie Hall for five hours, with some vandalizing the interior with graffiti and breaking AV equipment. Ten were suspended for the semester. On March 27, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Pomona requiring that the college produce disciplinary records of students involved in “antisemitic incidents” since 2023, particularly of those involved in the occupation. 

This year’s organizers also expressed fear for their undocumented peers, concerned that demonstrations would catch the attention of federal law enforcement agencies like ICE. “We knew that it would be too much of a risk for our members,” an SJP organizer stated, “We have a lot of folks within our community that organize with us that are undocumented or don’t have legal [status]... It is not a good time for us to escalate.”

When asked what “white allies” could do to help at the Motley, Nassar responded, “If there’s more brazen forms of disruption, agitation, and protest, maybe some of our white counterparts who are less likely to receive the brunt of [law enforcement] force could step up to those levels.”

Students gather on Scripps Bowling Green Lawn for Muslim Student Association vigil. 

Even so, many participants did not wear masks during the events—a noticeable difference from last year’s Carnegie Hall occupation. The SJP organizer said that it was more “powerful” to show their faces, particularly at a nondisruptive event like a vigil, where attendees could reflect and share in “collective identity and grief.” 

A point of contention is the decision to host these events on Oct. 7, the day when Israel experienced Hamas’s ambush and had not yet begun its offensive into Gaza. One of Claremont’s Jewish life groups, Hillel, denounced the chosen date, stating: 

“Commemorating Palestinian ‘martyrs’ on October 7th—the day when 1,200 people…were massacred, and 251 Jews and non-Jews were abducted—is deeply painful to many in our community. Choosing that date to center Palestinian suffering does not come across as mourning Palestinian civilians; it reads as honoring those who carried out the attack.”

At the Motley speaker event, when one organizer was asked why the event was held on Oct. 7, they did not have an answer and were unsure if anyone else at the event would be able to provide one.

The Claremont Muslim Student Association did not respond to a request for comment.

When asked over direct message, an SJP organizer said that their “vigil was about grieving the collective life lost in the past two years due to colonial and state violence, this includes all Israeli fatalities from Hamas’ [sic] attack on the Nova festival.”

Another vigil, which was hosted that same day at CMC’s Bauer Center “to honor the lives lost on October 7th and throughout the ongoing conflict in Palestine,” memorializing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, was poorly attended. The event, beginning at 7 p.m., saw not more than ten people trickle in and out. 

This event was referred to as “Zionist-facing” by the SJP organizer for “not directly exposing the reality of colonial violence on the ground” and “describing things as ‘the conflict’ [instead of] calling the situation in Gaza a genocide.” 

The peaceful nature of the pro-Palestine events also contrasted with the language used in various Instagram posts uploaded that morning, including one from the SJP:

“Today and everyday until the zionist regime falls, we grieve and honor the martyrs, while remaining steadfast in organizing for those who are still enduring a brutal reality.”

The post goes on, adding, “While the US/israeli [sic] war machine continues to devastate Palestine, the US government continues its colonial legacy by building cop cities and detention centers, conducting mass deportations without due process, and cracking down on dissent and free speech in violent ways.” 

A few days later, on Oct. 9, Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire that would require Hamas to release all Israeli hostages and partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

The Claremont Colleges’ McAlister Center for Spiritual Life and Claremont Hillel will be hosting a memorial service and speaker event with Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga on Wednesday, Oct. 17. On Oct. 7, there were no public on-campus vigils held exclusively for victims of Oct. 7, 2023.

This article was published in conjunction with the Claremont Independent.

Andrew Nelson, Andrew Lu, Arjun Vohra, and Greta Long contributed reporting.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect SJP's status as one of several groups promoting the "Strike for Gaza." The original version referred to SJP as the sole organizer of the strike.