CBN News profiled Stanford University student Taryn Thomas, who described a shift from pro-Palestine activism to advocating for Israel after Oct. 7, 2023. CBN News set her account in the context of heightened rhetoric following what it reported as a Hamas invasion of Israel that killed close to 1,200 people.
‘Our liberation is bound to theirs’
Thomas told CBN News her involvement began during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, where she saw Palestinian flags. At age 16, she recalled asking organizers why. “They would say, ‘Our liberation is bound to theirs. No one is free until Palestine is free.’ And so it felt like you needed to be a part of and support as a part of intersectionality.”
Encampment and a turning point
Thomas said that after Oct. 7 her social media “blew up” with Palestinian flags and that she initially believed “Palestine had gotten attacked” before learning otherwise. She told CBN News that by October 20, 2023, an encampment formed at Stanford to “stop the ‘genocide.’” In her telling, “There’s no time for mourning… this is also a week before a single soldier even crossed into Gaza, that we were labeling a genocide.”
Describing one protest, Thomas said it “got out of hand,” alleging participants broke into the Stanford University president’s office and spray-painted phrases including “Death to America, Death to Israel” and “Pigs taste best when dead.” She said the moment left her asking, “Where was Palestine in any of those words?”
CBN News reported that authorities charged 12 students with felonies and that the university suspended other students. Thomas said this prompted her to step back and ask “at what point did the pro-Palestine movement become an anti-Israel one, an anti-American one?”
‘I didn’t find propaganda’
Thomas told CBN News she received an October 2024 email inviting non-Jewish students to the Nova Music Festival exhibit in Los Angeles. Still “very pro-Palestine,” she said she expected “Zionist propaganda.” “I went, and I didn’t find any,” she said. “I found phones and half-read messages… it was just grotesque how Hamas brutally murdered people my age.”
Travel to Israel and a missile scare
Thomas said she then spent 10 days in Israel. “I didn’t realize… for the over the two years I was protesting, I’d never spoken to an Israeli,” she told CBN News. She recounted that on the fourth day of the trip, “we had a missile [that landed in Israel],” adding that she found it “ironic” after calling for divestment from systems she was then “praying for to protect me.” She dated that trip to March 2025 and said CBN News met her during her third visit to Israel in 2025 with IsraelAmbassadors.com.
Thomas and the group visited the Nova Music Festival site, where CBN News noted Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis and others. “To see the names, the faces… They all look like people I knew… It could have been me,” Thomas said.
What she says changed her mind
Thomas argued that conversation, not confrontation, moved her. “If you want people to change and have an advocate, we have to build off-ramps off of radicalization, so we don’t shame them into silence.” She urged peers to “slow down and listen to people’s stories,” saying debates and history weren’t what shifted her view.
