NYPD is investigating claims that the chemical unleashed on these students is “skunk”, an agent developed in Israel and used as a crowd control weapon, most commonly in the occupied West Bank. SJP said the chemicals were sprayed by two students who are former Israeli soldiers, who mixed in with the crowd by wearing Palestinian keffiyehs. The Guardian could not verify this claim, and the NYPD and Columbia did not directly respond to questions about the identity of the perpetrators. According to a statement from Columbia, “the alleged perpetrators of the attack have been identified and immediately banned from campus while law enforcement’s investigation proceeds”.
If it ends up being true that the perpetrators were IDF veterans. . . were they so used to doing this bullshit with impunity back in Palestine that they thought they could just get away with this scot free?
I understand where you're coming from, but I think this ignores the fact that Israel's dehumanization and brutalization of Palestinians is a systematic one. It's not just that there are good and bad humans in the IDF as much as it is that negative behavior is encouraged, often unpunished, and rewarded even, whereas positive behavior is disparaged. This has been the case for a long time where soldiers who would try to stop or hold their peers accountable for murders, tortures, and rapes were often turned into pariahs and be given death threats and the like.
With that said, I do wholeheartedly agree with everything else that you have said. You raise some really good questions.