The teenagers gathered outside Teaneck High School on a chilly Friday afternoon in February, watched by a heavy police escort and an NBC news crew. They unfurled a banner bearing the Palestinian flag and marched around the streets of suburban Teaneck, New Jersey. The protest was part of a statewide “day of action” for Palestine.
Two students, Maryam Marey and Amar Halak, began the march by calling on their elected representatives to support a ceasefire in Gaza. Then they marched toward a nearby municipal park and led a group of around 40 high schoolers, college students, and other adults in chants. “No more hiding, no more fear. Genocide is crystal clear,” they yelled. “Stop the killing, stop the slaughter. Gaza has no food or water.”
They encountered a single counterprotester at the park, an elderly man carrying a handwritten sign: “Free the hostages. Stop killing and hating Jews. Stop sacrificing your own people.” Two local politicians, township council member Hillary Goldberg and former council member Keith Kaplan, stood across the street silently filming the high schoolers. A pair of women stood with them, also filming and smirking. The group refused to speak with The Intercept.
The demonstration was just the latest student-led protest against decisions the Teaneck town council made last October when it voted for a resolution in support of Israel and against one expressing sympathy with Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Marey had stood outside the council meeting and watched her mother, Reem Fakhry, lead chants of “Free Palestine.”
The war had come home, so to speak. Israel’s siege of Gaza was no longer a violent tragedy happening to Muslims in another land, but something that leaders in Teaneck actively supported — and something that the best friends could fight back against personally.
“She realized that our town had taken this unilateral, one-sided stance where they decided that our town was basically part of Israel, without looking at the fact that we were part of this town as well,” Fakhry, Marey’s mom, said of her daughter. Halak told The Intercept that the town council resolution “was really unfair and it dehumanized the Palestinians who are under siege.”
The girls organized a teach-in and walkout at their high school in November. It led to an unexpected flood of backlash from the town’s adults, including elected officials; a deluge of violent threats; a campaign organized by a new pro-Israel, Jewish lobbying group; and intervention by the federal government.
Members of the town council were key instigators — and they found a willing audience in a sitting member of Congress. Within hours of the November protest, council member Karen Orgen emailed videos of it to nearly two dozen people, among them Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., according to emails The Intercept obtained under the New Jersey public records law. Gottheimer did not respond to that thread, but three hours later, fellow council member Goldberg wrote an email thanking him and other officials for their “hard work.” Soon after, Gottheimer issued a statement condemning the Teaneck school district’s “decision allowing an antisemitic, anti-Israel protest during school hours.”
Gottheimer has become fixated with Teaneck’s high schoolers. At his urging, the U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights probe into discrimination at Teaneck High. After the school district announced that it would partner with two Jewish and Muslim civil rights organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American Islamic Relations, respectively — Gottheimer publicly accused the Muslim organization of glorifying terrorism and demanded Teaneck cut ties with it. CAIR’s New Jersey chapter denounced Gottheimer’s “defamatory attacks” in a written statement.
Across the country, students protesting against the war in Gaza have been met with intense scrutiny from older politicians, who often accuse the youth dissenters of antisemitism. Gottheimer, considered the most conservative Democrat in Congress, is well-poised to take up the issue. He has made attacks on the left and hawkish pro-Israel politics part of his personal brand.
His decision to intervene in Teaneck, however, is somewhat unusual. While many members of Congress have gone to bat against protesters on college campuses — even holding hearings on the issue — Gottheimer’s nemeses here are teenage high schoolers. Yet the girls who sparked Teaneck’s protest movement are unbowed: a reminder that anti-Palestinian repression has failed to intimidate the younger generation.
“It is just another level to the disappointment I feel with our representatives,” Marey told The Intercept. “It’s just disappointing that these are the people that we not only have to live and work with, but these are the people who run everything we do.”