College students choose protests over politics
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have little faith that voting can create change quickly or at all
One reason that pro-Palestinian demonstrators are pitching tents at UC Berkeley and campuses elsewhere, shutting down freeways and interrupting social gatherings, is the same reason that only 16% of young people voted in the California primary: They don’t trust politicians to get anything done quickly — or at all.
The quicker way to get attention and jolt the system into action, they feel, is to put their body on the line, consequences be damned. And this week on the UC Berkeley campus, it is coming in the form of dozens of tents springing up in the middle of campus, with demonstrators calling for the university to divest from companies with connections to Israel and rallygoers chanting, “We don’t want no Zionists here! Say it loud and say it clear!”
Demonstrations were so intense at Cal Poly Humboldt this week that officials shut down the campus after demonstrators took over an administrative building. The campus will be closed through the weekend.
“When people voted against the Vietnam War, it didn’t achieve anything. But when we saw protests erupting for divesting from apartheid South Africa, or against the Vietnam War, that was what achieved power,” Malak Afaneh, a thirdyear law student at UC Berkeley, said as she stood near tents pitched on the university’s Sproul Plaza after a pro-Pales
tinian rally this week.
Afaneh is unafraid to take unconventional actions to amplify her support of Palestine. Earlier this month she was one of 60 students attending a dinner at the home of the law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, to celebrate soon-to-be graduating students. Afaneh stood in the couple’s backyard and started reading a speech when Fisk tried to take the mic from her and Chemerinsky asked her to leave.
Video of the incident went viral, exposing the issue to far more than the few dozen people in the dean’s backyard.
Afaneh, leader of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, voted “uncommitted” in her home state of Illinois’ primary this year, something that has been done by tens of thousands of other Democratic primary voters opposed to President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel, whose relentless attacks on Gaza have killed more than 34,000 people since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.
This week, Biden condemned “antisemitic protests” on campuses but also “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” While Biden has expressed concern that Israel was losing international support after its “indiscriminate bombing,” he is poised to sign a bill that would send $26.4 billion in aid to Israel that the Senate passed Tuesday.
When a voter selects “uncommitted” on their ballot, it implies that while they are casting a vote on their party’s ballot, they are not committed to any of the candidates listed. That option is not available in California.
Afaneh, who spoke at a rally Monday at Sproul Plaza calling for divestment, noted that “a lot of us do not play into the illusion of electoral politics. I can say if anyone did vote, I can most likely assure you that they voted ‘uncommitted,’ ” she said.
So what is the “illusion of electoral politics”?
To Afaneh, it involves the continuing disappointment in elected leaders who she believes don’t deliver on their promises, even if they are members of underrepresented groups. She noted that the president of Columbia University, the epicenter of pro-Palestinian campus activism, is an Egyptian-born woman, Nemat Shafik. She is under fire for calling in the New York police in response to scores of students pitching tents on campus to protest the war in Gaza and the school’s connections to Israel, which has led to more than 100 students being arrested.
The university is in New York City, where Afaneh noted, the mayor, Eric Adams, is Black and Edward Caban is the city’s first Latino police commissioner.
They “are the ones that are displacing and suspending and expelling and arresting students,” Afaneh said. “So to us, representation does not free us, but struggle does. So even though we can elect someone that may promise us these illusions of a free Palestine or are supporting liberation, time and time again, we see how that does not come to fruition.”
She’s not alone in her attitude toward electoral politics. An NBC News poll this week shows that interest in this year’s presidential election is at a 20-year low among registered voters and that respondents under 35 were roughly split between Biden (44%) and Donald Trump (43%).
Young voter interest is low even in the college student portions of Berkeley. This month, turnout was only 17% for a special election to fill a seat on the Berkeley City Council in a seat that encompasses the university campus, even though the only candidates were students. The winner was UC Berkeley senior Cecilia Lunaparra, a self-described “queer Mexican-American woman” who will be the first undergraduate student to serve on the City Council. The runner-up was James Chang, a graduate student.
The two candidates took different positions on whether the council should take up a resolution on the war in the Middle East. Chang told Berkeleyside that he is “categorically opposed to the city council taking ANY position regarding this conflict.”
Lunaparra wants the council to “pass a resolution that calls for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza, (affirm) our support for our Palestinian and Jewish residents, and unequivocally (condemn) the use of our tax dollars to fund oppression and human rights violations.”
Another attendee at Monday’s rally was a graduate student who gave her name only as Banan, fearing reprisals from the university or others.
She said she casts ballots only in local races, not for federal officials who have a say in directing foreign aid dollars overseas that could be used for war.
She forfeits her say in choosing the federal officeholders deciding to fund the attacks in Gaza because she said she would “never be comfortable voting for any person that will greenlight wars.”
“I have seen how policy is swayed by power over values. So I know that change will only come through people,” Banan said. “Every right that we have gotten in the U.S. is by people putting their bodies and lives at stake.”
But frustrations are growing, even among potential allies, about how these demonstrations affect others.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is considering filing charges against 26 people arrested during a proPalestinian demonstration that stopped and blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge earlier this month. Gov. Gavin Newsom said he “certainly respect(s) the cause around the cease-fire” but thinks there’s a better way “of expressing it than denying people the ability to get to work, someone in an emergency that can’t get to their destination.”
He also said that “people need to be held to account for their actions.” That day may be coming. This week, four Democrats joined four Republicans in advancing a bill, AB2472, out of the Assembly Transportation Committee that would double fines for people who block traffic on a highway, even during a protest.
“We need to send a signal that these dangerous highway blockings will no longer be tolerated,” the author of the measure, Assembly Member Kate Sanchez, an Orange County Republican, wrote on X. “Enough is enough.”
Banan said, “I hear what they are saying. And I know that there are probably material consequences to people who are stuck in traffic.”
But everybody sitting in that traffic jam is complicit, Banan said, by the mere fact that they pay taxes to a U.S. government that is funding the Israeli war effort. Banan conceded that included her, too, through the taxes and tuition she pays.
“I am complicit in the murder of my own people. And that is something that keeps me up at night,” Banan said. “We are all complicit.”