Some students said that the aggressive demonstration backfired. “They were shoving guns in my face—I found it aggressive and annoying,” said first-year Alexander Nemser. “It didn’t send me any political message.”

A similar demonstration took place in Harvard Square last February, when activists dressed in military fatigues re-enacted an Israeli checkpoint to protest Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Some students have also questioned the credibility of Swenson, the spokesperson for the pro-divestment campaign.

Swenson, who graduated from Yale’s architecture school in 1969, founded both The Plasmatics, a punk rock band, and a live sex show in Times Square, according to the band’s website.

Articles about Swenson’s background have appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, after a Yale undergraduate forwarded them to the newspaper.

Reached last night, Swenson had not yet seen the Journal’s article, but he said that although he was involved in erotic theatre 25 years ago, he is best known today for his theoretical papers on planetary evolution.

“Ad hominems are exactly the techniques a person uses when they don’t want to cite real arguments,” Swenson said. “What is relevant here is what I want to do about war crimes, not what I did a long time ago.”

Yale’s pro-divestment petition was drafted by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is said to have begun the divestment movement in November 2000 with a speech at Illinois State University. Boyle served as a lawyer for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, according to Dershowitz.

“Boyle initiated this divestment movement at the request of the PLO—they are using him as their puppet,” Dershowitz added.