Tulane Student Criticizes School after Being Assaulted While Preventing Israeli Flag Burning: ‘Just Unthinkable’

On Thursday, anti-Israel protests turned violent at Tulane University in New Orleans.

In a video that has since gone viral on social media, a group of agitators can be seen driving down a New Orleans street that divided pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters. One man, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, waves a Palestinian flag as another lifts Israel’s, holding it up in front of the crowd.

The second man can be seen taking a lighter out of his pocket, flicking it, and raising it to the Star of David, when a student — carrying his own Israeli flag — emerges from the throng. He grabs the flag from the protester in the nick of time, saving it from immolation, as the keffiyeh wearer hits him over the head with a flagpole.

That student, Nathaniel Miller, is a sophomore at Tulane, where he serves as president of the university’s Israel Public Affairs Committee. In an interview with National Review, the first Miller’s given since the incident, he explained the lead-up to the events shown in the video, beginning with the organizing of what he called “an antisemitic march to the most Jewish part of Louisiana,” one that “ended up with Jewish blood being spilled on the street.”

The story began just after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Miller said, when a new campus group appeared.

“This new student organization that called itself ‘Tulane for Palestine’ suddenly surfaced on Instagram,” he told NR. “It had never previously existed but suddenly popped up in the aftermath of the attack.”

Tulane for Palestine organized its first-ever rally after Hamas massacred over 1,400 Israelis for Thursday, October 26. The group, which is not recognized as an official student organization, exploited a loophole in the university’s policies, Miller explained.

“Because the school doesn’t recognize them,” he said, “they’re not allowed to rally on campus. So, they rally on the street in between Quad A and Quad B.”

That street is technically outside Tulane’s jurisdiction, though it cuts between two areas of campus and, Miller told NR, students who need to travel from one quad to the other to get from dorms to classes have to walk across that road. The pro-Palestinian protesters lined up on one side, and as Miller noticed, very few of them appeared to be classmates of his.

“A lot of them were men and women in their 20s and 30s who had seemed to come from all over Louisiana, from community colleges, from Loyola [University New Orleans], from other schools,” he said, “particularly to our neighborhood because it’s the most dense Jewish neighborhood in Louisiana.”

Miller noted that, despite the heavy outsider presence at the rally, the Tulane Police Department was “caught flat-footed” and what officers were there were not watching closely as the rally escalated and the men in the truck appeared.

“Each time they drove by, they would face the pro-Israeli counter-protesters, wave the Palestinian flag, and scream things like ‘intifada’ to rile up their side,” Miller told NR. “On their third lap around, back toward the protest, one of the men — the one in the mask — lifted up an Israeli flag and attempted to burn it.”

Miller, seeing what was about to happen, stepped in.

“I chose to charge at the truck, I grabbed the flag, I got battered over the head with a flagpole,” he recounted. “I got hit in the back of the head with a megaphone. Several Tulane students jumped in to protect me and were also beaten; my friend Dylan [Mann] was beaten very badly — he had a broken nose, he was bleeding.”

Eventually, Miller said, police officers made “a couple arrests,” but some of the people who assaulted him and the other students were able to disappear into the crowd, shielding their faces with masks and keffiyehs.

“The people who jumped in to protect me and others were not police. They were Tulane students,” he told NR. Miller went on to describe the reaction from his classmates at the university.

“In the aftermath, I received a lot of support, both in person and on social media, but I also received negative, hateful, and even threatening messages,” Miller said. “People made burner accounts just to send those kinds of messages.”

In a letter to the editor published in Tulane’s campus newspaper, Miller explained why he grabbed the flag from the protester before it could be set aflame. While there is room for debate about Middle East policy, he wrote, “calling for the destruction of Jews is not engaging in political dialogue.”

Despite the up-and-downs of social media after the rally, Miller said his fellow Jewish Tulane students stuck by him.

“It’s amazing how the Jewish community really looks out for each other,” he told NR. “I had hundreds of people reaching out to me telling me they support me or asking me if they could buy me a beer.”

But that response only goes so far. Miller told NR he was “not exactly impressed” by Tulane’s response to heightened antisemitism on college campuses nationwide. The university issued a statement after the October 7 attack that Miller saw as lukewarm at best, and despite its reaction to the protest and his assault — a response he saw as an improvement over the university’s initial message — words are not enough.

“In the first place, Jewish students need to be more protected,” he said. “We have a 44% Jewish student body, and to allow outsiders to parade through our campus calling for the deaths of Jews and then to eventually spill Jewish blood is just unthinkable.”