200 march at Berkeley after speaker incident
About 200 students, faculty and other supporters marched at UC Berkeley on Monday to highlight concerns about antisemitism on campus following a violent incident that canceled a speech by a prominent Israeli lawyer last month.
The group met in front of Zellerbach Hall around midday, before marching across campus, where they held a rally in front of one of the university’s oldest buildings, California Hall.
Attendees held signs with slogans such as “Jewish lives matter,” and “Believe Jews,” while speakers, including a UC Berkeley professor who is holding a continuous protest from his campus office, spoke about the dangers of antisemitism on campus and the United States. Instead of passing through the university’s famed Sather Gate entrance, where a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had stretched a long banner that blocked the central portal, the marchers chose to walk into the main part of campus by crossing a nearby stream.
About a dozen, yellowjacketed personnel from a private staffing company that Berkeley hires for sporting events stood nearby after being called in as security.
The protest was the latest sign of tension over the war in Gaza, a conflict that has divided campuses and communities around the country. But at Berkeley, with its proud history of free speech activism and status as a bellwether for the progressive movement, these debates have taken on a particular weight and emotion. Federal authorities are now investigating the school, along with many others, in a sweeping probe of campus discrimination related to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Students who attended the anti-antisemitism march Tuesday said they were galvanized by two events. On Feb. 26, a group of hundreds of proPalestine demonstrators shut down a talk to be given by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a lawyer and a director at a conservative Israeli think tank, with some people breaking windows and a door at the school’s Zellerbach Playhouse, authorities said.
Some students said the university’s carefully worded Feb. 27 response to the incident, which restated its commitment to free expression and rejection of violence, and a follow-up letter a week later about plans to investigate the incident and beef up security, fell short of reassuring Jewish students who felt unsafe on campus.
The second issue students pointed to was the stretching of a pro-Palestinian banner across Sather Gate. On Tuesday, the banner noted the beginning of Ramadan, and said that “Israel and the US are starving 2.2 million. Gazans have nothing to break their fast with.”
“The blocking of Sather Gate symbolizes the schools’ lack of action and protection for Jewish students against antisemitism,” said Dylan Sacks, 19, a second-year undergraduate.
The protesters intentionally avoided going through the gate, even though two portals are open on each side of the main opening, opting for the stream crossing to underscore concerns about the banner.
By midafternoon, someone had ripped the banner in half.
A spokesperson with Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, who was on scene at the banner on Tuesday, declined to speak with the Chronicle, as did other pro-Palestine demonstrators at the banner.
Claude Fischer, a professor of the graduate school in sociology who joined the Jewish demonstrators, said he had heard stories about students being harassed or subjected to antisemitic slurs. Fischer said he believed that the administration is sympathetic to the concerned students “but is not acting firmly on that concern.”
Dan Mogulof, a UC Berkeley spokesperson, said that the university was working hard to draw a line between respecting students’ rights to free speech and avoiding conflict and escalation.
For more than four months after the crisis began on Oct. 7, Mogulof said that administrators had received only two reports of person-on-person violence — a student being hit with a water bottle, and another who was pushed — after dozens of heated protests, rallies, speakers, prayer circles and other events at the campus of more than 45,000 students.
But he said the violence that greeted the Israeli speaker’s planned appearance in February had changed the dynamic — increasing the potential for confrontation and violence. In addition to the property damage, two students reported minor injuries, Mogulof said.
“It’s something without recent precedent,” he said. “We sent every available police officer we had and never expected to be confronted with a mob of 200 people seeking to shut the event down.”
He said the school was in the process of changing its safety protocols to prevent further issues.
“We are now proceeding on the assumption that every rally, every speaker, connected to the Gaza conflict has that potential,” he said. “We’re committed to one essential idea — every single student has a right to feel safe and respected on campus regardless of who they are and what they believe.”He said that police, finding themselves outnumbered that day, prioritized defusing the situation safely for the students inside the building instead of making arrests, but that the case was still under investigation.