UC Berkeley protest against war in Gaza peaceful and growing
(BCN) — The sound of buzzing surveillance drones over Gaza played from a loudspeaker on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, on the very spot where Mario Salvo rallied for free speech in the 1960s. A student encampment of about 40 tents at the campus on Tuesday, up from 12 the night before, spanned the landing and sprawled onto the grass.
“Many of the students here have a sense that something is wrong, but they don’t know all the history,” said Ussama Makdisi, a UC Berkeley professor of history with a specialty in the Middle East and a chancellor’s chair, which is a high rank given to professors who have demonstrated unusual academic merit.
Makdisi stood in the plaza, holding an electric bike, consumed in the scene. Students were manning a food table, talking in pairs, studying for finals wrapped in sleeping bags.
“Things have changed. The students are much more serious that something is wrong. And they’re much more eager to know about the details of the history,” he said, highlighting the diversity in his class of 91 students and those at the encampment. “There’s an incredible, incredible thirst for knowledge about Palestinian history. And now here we see Muslim and Jewish students, Christian students, Hindu students, it’s an incredible array of students.”
In a week that saw the intensification of protests over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza on college campuses across the country, including arrests at New York University, Yale University and Columbia University, the scene in Berkeley was contemplative. So far, there have been no police clearing the area and no arrests.
The Berkeley student camp-in was called by a coalition of groups, including the Black Student Union, the Jewish Voice for Peace at UC Berkeley and the Indigenous Graduate Student Association.
In an online statement, they are demanding: “an immediate end to the Zionist colonization of Arab lands, including the genocidal siege of Gaza; full freedom and equality for Palestinians, from the river to the sea; and the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes and properties.”
They are also asking the University of California to boycott, divest and sanction “from all companies profiting from the colonization of Palestine.”
The statement mentioned large asset managers like BlackRock and weapons manufacturers Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric.
“What these students are doing is that they are actually taking seriously all of the discourse of the university,” Makdisi said, referring to UC Berkeley’s brand as a legacy defender of civil rights. “They are reckoning with a past of slavery and injustice and genocide. And they’re taking those lessons, they are taking the discourse of the university literally.”
Sitting beneath the ionic columns of the Sproul building was graduate student Malak Afaneh, the co-president of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine. A friend approached and delivered her graduation regalia. She gazed for a long while at the silk hood embroidered with the name of her Arabic association and with the text “By the Grace of the Almighty.”
After graduation, she will work at a law firm that does class-action civil rights employment litigation.
“Pro-Palestinian students on this campus experience numerous amounts of repression, censorship, silence, threats of disciplinary and criminal proceedings,” said Afaneh. “And in my case, it escalated to physical violence.”
On April 9, Afaneh protested with her student group at a dinner in the home of law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky, which ended in a confrontation with the dean and his wife. As she prepares to graduate in May, she sees a future for herself doing legal work and eventually transitioning into academia.
“I think that people with the most privilege and economic power and professional power refused to make a statement, while others with much less, including students like here, are able to,” Afaneh said, referring to what she saw as the university holding back on speaking out against the violence in Palestine.
Makdisi also said he was disturbed by what he saw as “craven” testimony by university presidents in Congressional hearings. He said university administrations condemned the violence of Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, “but they’ve said nothing, not even a word, about the destruction of every single university in Gaza. Educators have been killed. Students have been murdered.”
He was also concerned that administrations are framing Arab students as dangerous and “doxxing” them. Doxxing is a form of cyberbullying in which personal information about a person is shared with the public, making them vulnerable to harassment.
“They’re being framed by what they are not,” he said of the protesters. ‘They are being framed in extraordinary ways that’s incredibly hostile to what they’re actually advocating, which is justice and equality.”
What did he think of the university’s role in the balance between free speech and safety?
“Well, the safety for whom? The three students that have been shot in this country have been Palestinian schools in Vermont. Right? A student at Stanford was run over. There was a Palestinian boy who was stabbed to death in Chicago. The doxxing is overwhelmingly Palestinian of allies, including Jewish students who are out there,” he said.
Born in Palestine, Afaneh’s family moved to Massachusetts one month after Sept. 11, 2001. She remembers her mother feeling a lot of pressure to assimilate to the narrative of a good Muslim.
“What that means is that you are someone that is palatable to American standards, that you put your head down and you work in the hopes that you can make something for your family,” she said. “Because of her efforts, I had the privilege of then being able to go on to institutions like Berkeley Law, right, and be able to speak my mind.”
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