What’s New
A series of confrontations between pro-Palestinian students and Jewish speakers and students within the span of about a week has left three public universities scrambling to defuse campus tensions as Israel’s war in Gaza stretches into its sixth month.
The incidents in California — including reports of a melee between a professor and pro-Palestinian protesters outside of a Jewish professor’s talk at San José State University, a violent protest at the University of California at Berkeley that halted an event featuring an Israeli lawyer, and the posting of signs targeting a Jewish student leader at UC-Santa Barbara’s multicultural center — have also prompted fraught questions about campus speech.
Activists trying to call attention to the plight of the Palestinians have communicated, in their protests and on social media, that Zionists, who believe in a Jewish homeland, are not welcome on their campuses. The protest at San José State included a flier that read “Show SJSU that Zionists are not welcome here.” UC-Berkeley’s Bears for Palestine student organization, on its Instagram page, called on students to shut down the Israeli lawyer’s planned speech, demanding “genocidal murderers out of Berkeley.” And outside UCSB’s multicultural center, one of the signs read “Zionist (sic) not allowed.”
For pro-Palestinian campus activists, the messages reflect opposition to a political agenda that they have every right to protest under the First Amendment. But others feel that the rhetoric disproportionately targets Jewish students, many of whom consider themselves Zionist, and silences their speech.
The Details
The first incident happened on February 19, when the Jewish studies director at California State University at Long Beach, Jeffrey Blutinger, was invited to San José State to give a talk on “how to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters showed up outside the classroom. A San José State history professor and supporter of Israel, Jonathan Roth, got into an altercation with some of them, grabbing a person’s hand after they tried to block him from recording with his phone. Blutinger was escorted out of the classroom by police.
A spokeswoman for San José State referred The Chronicle to an email the university’s president sent to the community on Thursday, which stated that the university was investigating the incident. Neither Blutinger nor Roth responded to requests for comments from The Chronicle. Roth has been placed on leave, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The next weekend, signs were found on the walls of UCSB’s multicultural center attacking the student-body president, Tessa Veksler, who is Jewish. The signs said, among other things: “You can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler,” “Tessa Veksler supports genocide! You cannot hide,” and “Zionists are not welcomed!”
The signs were removed, and the multicultural center is temporarily closed. Attempts to reach Veksler and the multicultural center were unsuccessful. In an email statement to The Chronicle, a spokeswoman said the university is completing a “bias incident review and investigating the reports.”
On February 26, a UC-Berkeley talk by an Israeli lawyer and think-tank executive, Ran Bar-Yoshafat, was disrupted by protesters, who broke two windows and a door. Bar-Yoshafat had been invited by several Jewish student organizations, including pro-Israel groups. Police officers had to evacuate the event’s speaker and attendees, several of whom reported being injured in clashes with protesters.
Dan Mogulof, a UC-Berkeley spokesman, told The Chronicle in an interview that the university arranged for “every available police officer” to be at the event after learning of a social-media post calling for protesters to shut it down on Sunday.
“Based on everything that we have seen and confronted and experienced on the campus, there was no reason to believe that we had insufficient police force there,” he said. “But that is exactly what proved to be the case, due to the size and the nature of the crowd. It was a mob.”
Bears for Palestine, which called for action against the speaking event on Instagram, did not respond to a request for comment. In a Wednesday statement on its Instagram, the group condemned the university’s “militarized” police response to the protest and its lack of support for Palestinian students.
“In the name of free speech, this institution seeks to legitimize a settler-colonial ideology that is reliant on Palestinian death and necessitates the denial of their own Palestinian students’ humanity,” the statement read.
The Backdrop
Colleges have been hotbeds of activism since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that precipitated the war in Gaza. Tensions on campus have ignited debates over free speech, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and institutional neutrality.
Many pro-Palestinian students and faculty have felt that their speech has been stifled, pointing to the removal of pro-Palestinian student groups’ university recognition and the cancellation of events featuring pro-Palestinian speakers. They have argued that Zionism is a dominant narrative on campuses, supported by administrations wary of upsetting pro-Israel donors, and it needs to be met with an equal and opposite force.
The Stakes
Meanwhile, students and faculty who support Israel have started to wonder whether such fervent pushback to Zionist speech means that it’s not welcome on campuses anymore.
To that question, Mogulof had a clear answer: “Is pro-Zionist expression protected and supported by the administration of UC-Berkeley? You better believe it,” he said. “All constitutionally protected expression is welcomed and supported by the administration of UC-Berkeley. … It is clear from Monday night that that is not the case for a certain portion of our community, and that’s why we have our work cut out for us.”
The pro-Palestinian activists don’t see pushing back against speech they disagree with as impinging on others’ free-speech rights. Sang Hea Kil, a professor of justice studies and the faculty adviser for Students for Justice in Palestine at San José State, told The Chronicle that she saw students’ protest of the Jewish professor’s speech on February 19 as a form of “good speech” countering “bad speech.”
“I’m not into banning people from ever coming,” she said. “But I think that if they come and they want to say their bad speech, then it’s totally acceptable for students, faculty, staff, community members on that campus to fight that bad speech with good speech. If good speech is protest, if it’s a shout down, if it’s a disruption, then that’s all good to me.”
