Julia Wax Vanderwiel was shocked when she found out that Georgetown Law Students for Justice in Palestine scheduled a Feb. 11 event headlined by a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She expressed her dismay to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The second-year Georgetown law student initially did some research, enlisting friends who are fluent in Hebrew to peruse Israeli media. They found that Ribhi Karajah, a U.S. citizen, spent three and a half years in Israeli prison for his prior knowledge of a 2019 West Bank bombing that killed 17-year-old Israeli Rina Shnerb and injured her father and brother.
According to Jewish Insider, Karajah had been informed about the attack by fellow members of the PFLP — a leftist party that has an armed wing per the Associated Press — and did nothing to prevent it from happening.
Described as a “student activist and former prisoner,” Karajah had been scheduled to speak to students about “arrest, detention and torture in the Israeli military judicial system,” according to a flier posted on LSJP’s social media page.
“It was jarring to me,” Wax Vanderwiel told Washington Jewish Week. “My heart fell out of my chest a little bit because I thought the university would have done their due diligence before approving this event and searched this guy up.”
‘Poison in the Academic Arena’
Wax Vanderwiel wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Community members and both Georgetown and non-Georgetown University students approached Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch, who oversees the Chabad operations across Washington, D.C., with their dismay.
Wax Vanderwiel said she was put into contact with the attorney who prosecuted Shnerb’s murder case and gained access to sentencing documents that revealed more about Karajah.
“He’s stipulated to be a member of the PFLP and he had fail[ed] to report [his knowledge of the 2019 West Bank bombing],” Wax Vanderwiel recalled. “[From] what I gathered from the articles, [Karajah] was asked at some point to build the bombs. I don’t know if they have enough to say that he did build the bombs from the articles; it looks like he was asked to.”
She said Karajah was allegedly paid 70,000 shekels — the equivalent of nearly $20,000 — as part of what she called the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” policy, which financially supports Palestinians and their families if they’re wounded, imprisoned or killed while carrying out violent acts against Israel.
Karajah has been arrested previously for his “involvement in terrorism and terror-related groups, including a 2017 arrest as a student at Birzeit University. The Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association claims this arrest was on “multiple charges of student activism.”
“His involvement, I think, goes deeper than the plea bargain,” Wax Vanderwiel said.
She emailed the Office of the Dean of Students and other Georgetown Law administrators and received a reply after two days claiming that the administration was “still looking into” the matter.
On Feb. 9, Georgetown University Law Center administrators informed LSJP that its event featuring Karajah would be postponed so that administrators could “conduct a serious investigation,” according to Jewish Insider.
That day, LSJP announced on its Instagram Story that the Feb. 11 event would no longer occur as scheduled “due to inclement weather.”
On Feb. 10, Wax Vanderwiel received a screenshot of a university official announcing that the LSJP event had been postponed due to “safety considerations.” She emailed GULC administrators again, asking why LSJP’s event had been postponed, but received no response as of Feb. 13, other than their repeated statement.
“They did not respond to me about that issue at all,” Wax Vanderwiel said. “There’s only that lead statement and they just [cited] safety concerns. They didn’t say he was a terrorist; they did not say that they were condemning the event. They just said it was postponed.”
Wax Vanderwiel said administrators hadn’t released a public statement addressing the matter.
“As the student who’s been heading this charge and who’s been on the forefront of this, I’ve heard absolutely nothing,” she said. “It was just a little concerning.”
“On the afternoon of February 9, the Law Center conveyed to the student organization Law Students for Justice in Palestine that their event scheduled for February 11 would have to be postponed so that the University could conduct a thorough investigation into serious safety and security concerns that had arisen in connection with the event,” a spokesperson for GULC wrote in a statement emailed to Washington Jewish Week on Feb. 14.
LSJP did not respond to our request for comment.
‘We Need to Use Our Voices’
Wax Vanderwiel, the founder and president of Georgetown Law Zionists, was one of about 30 Jewish college students and recent graduates to attend a Feb. 7 roundtable discussion with Netanyahu. Closing out his week in D.C., the Israeli prime minister met with them to hear their concerns about antisemitism on their campuses.
Wax Vanderwiel addressed Netanyahu in a two-minute speech opposing Karajah’s speaking engagement on Georgetown’s campus, claiming that students could learn about prisons and torture without bringing in a “convicted terrorist.”
“I had begged and pleaded with the [GULC] administration for over a year now for actual change on our campuses to help protect our students, for policy implementation, and they weren’t listening,” Wax Vanderwiel said. “When this opportunity [to address Netanyahu] was presented to me, I don’t know who else and who better to listen to get change to actually occur.”
She asked Netanyahu for his help in removing the speaker event, during which the prime minister was “viscerally moved.”
“He knew who Rina Shnerb was; he said that he met her family after she died,” Wax Vanderwiel said. “He said, ‘You have to stay strong and fight back against the administration. You have to stand up for what you believe in.’”
She said she felt a need to advocate for herself and her community: “We need to use our voices to step up. If the [university] administration is going to hide behind an email or hide behind pushing things off in bureaucracy, we can’t let that slide. We need to go to our government officials; we need to go to those in power.”
Netanyahu’s condemnation of the LSJP event played a large role in getting the event postponed, Wax Vanderwiel said: “There’s a lot more that came out of it.” But she doesn’t think her speech should have been necessary.
“It should not take a law student pleading with the leader of a sovereign nation to get attention to this,” Wax Vanderwiel said. “It shouldn’t be pleading with the prime minister of Israel to get my university to understand that Jewish students need change to occur on campus and we need them to take our safety seriously.”
She added that she felt Jewish students would be at risk had Karajah spoken on Georgetown’s campus due to his ties to the PFLP.
“We’re five blocks from the Capitol,” Wax Vanderwiel said. “Who’s to say that he wasn’t going to plan something that would be a danger to us all? Who’s to say what he was going to say in that meeting? … Who’s to say [he] wasn’t going to be recruiting students?”
“Jewish students should not have to endure the presence of sorry and despicable characters like [Karajah],” Shemtov told Washington Jewish Week. “We’ve got to draw the line somewhere; there’s academic debate and then there’s the fomenting of hate, and the university administration should be wise enough to know the difference and enforce an absolute blockade of this poison in the academic arena.”
