Eilon Presman was about 100 toes from the UCLA Palestinian solidarity encampment when he heard the screams: “Zionist! Zionist!”
The 20-year-old junior, who’s Israeli, realized the activists had been pointing at him.
“Human chain!” they cried.
A line of protesters linked arms and marched towards him, Presman mentioned, blocking him from accessing the center of UCLA’s campus. Different activists, he mentioned, unfurled kaffiyeh scarves to dam his view of the camp.
“Each step again that I took, they took a step ahead,” Presman mentioned. “I used to be simply pressured to stroll away.”
It’s been per week since police swarmed the UCLA campus and tore down the pro-Palestinian camp, arresting greater than 200 folks. However the legacy of the encampment stays a problem of a lot debate, notably amongst Jewish college students, who make up practically 8% of the college’s 32,000 undergraduates.
Within the days main as much as April 30 — when pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked the camp with fists, bats and chemical spray, and police took hours to stop the violence — frustration had swelled amongst many Jews: Viral videos confirmed activists proscribing the passage of scholars they focused as Zionists.
Some Jewish college students mentioned they felt intimidated as protesters scrawled graffiti — “Dying 2 Zionism” and “Child Killers” — on campus buildings and blocked entry with wood pallets, plywood, metallic barricades and human partitions.
The professional-Palestinian scholar motion contains numerous strains of activism, together with requires a cease-fire in Gaza, assist for Hamas and calls for that universities divest from companies doing enterprise with Israel. However on campuses throughout the nation, no phrase has turn out to be extra charged than “Zionist.”
In its most elementary definition, a Zionist is someone who believes that the Jewish folks have a proper to statehood of their ancestral homeland as a spot of refuge from centuries of persecution — in different phrases, that Israel, established as a Jewish state within the wake of the Holocaust, has a proper to exist.
Utilizing that definition, the Anti-Defamation League considers anti-Zionism a type of antisemitism. However protesters — together with many Jews — draw a pointy distinction, arguing that it’s Zionism that fuels Israel’s right-wing authorities and the assault on Gaza that they are saying quantities to genocide towards Palestinians.
A number of the Jewish college students who took half within the encampment performed a task in excluding Zionists.
Members of Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA, a small however quickly rising group on campus, argue that they had an ethical accountability to stress college officers to divest from Israel.
The camp and its checkpoints, they mentioned, weren’t hostile to Jews. Proscribing fellow college students from getting into was only a pragmatic transfer to guard protesters inside from bodily, verbal or emotional abuse.
“We’re dedicated to protecting one another secure,” mentioned Agnes Lin, 22, a fourth-year artwork and artwork historical past scholar and member of Jewish Voice for Peace. Anybody who agreed to the UC Divest Coalition’s calls for and group tips, she mentioned, was welcome.
“What isn’t welcome is Zionism,” she added. “Or anybody who actively adheres to a really violent, genocidal political ideology that’s actively endangering folks in Gaza proper now.”
In observe, college students who supported the existence of Israel had been stored out — even when they opposed Israel’s right-wing authorities and its bombardment of Gaza.
Senior Adam Thaw, 21, mentioned activists blocked him and others from accessing a public walkway to Powell Library.
After telling him they weren’t letting anybody by way of, a male activist eyed his Star of David necklace: “In case you’re right here to espouse that that is antisemitism, then you’ll be able to depart.”
“Who’re you to inform me the place I can and can’t go?” mentioned Thaw, who’s on UCLA’s scholar board of Hillel, the biggest Jewish campus group on the earth.
As complaints from Jewish college students mounted, UCLA declared the encampment “illegal.” In an April 30 statement, Chancellor Gene Block mentioned most activists had been peaceable, however the ways of some had been “surprising and shameful.”
“College students on their technique to class,” he mentioned, “have been bodily blocked from accessing components of the campus.”
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The campus was darkish and hushed when Sabrina Ellis joined dozens of activists at 4 a.m. to arrange the encampment on the garden of Dickson Courtroom.
After pitching tents and erecting barricades of wood pallets and sheets of plywood, Ellis, a 21-year-old worldwide scholar from Brazil, took shifts guarding the doorway.
Ellis didn’t name it a checkpoint. The purpose was to exclude and bodily block “agitators” — anybody who is perhaps violent, report college students or disagree with the trigger.
“Our high precedence isn’t folks’s freedom of motion,” Ellis mentioned. “It’s protecting folks in our encampments bodily and emotionally secure.”
The longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace — who wore a big Star of David over her T-shirt and a kaffiyeh wrapped round her shoulders — mentioned the camp “was not profiling primarily based on faith.”
However as activists blocked Zionist college students from public campus area, they confronted prices that they engaged in viewpoint discrimination.
Earlier than permitting anybody in, Ellis mentioned, a protester learn the demands of the encampment, which included calling for UC and UCLA to divest all funds from firms “complicit within the Israeli occupation,” boycott all connections with Israeli universities, sever ties with the Los Angeles Police Division and demand a everlasting cease-fire.
Then, activists ran by way of their safety guidelines: Ask earlier than taking a photograph or video; put on a masks to restrict the unfold of COVID; don’t submit figuring out info or images; and no engagement with counterprotesters.
If college students didn’t agree, “we’d simply kindly inform them that they’re not allowed to come back in,” Ellis mentioned.
Some Jewish college students had been shaken by the expertise, arriving at Hillel upset and even crying.
“They had been genuinely going about their day and couldn’t get entry as protesters requested them, ‘Are you a Zionist?’ or checked out their necklace,” mentioned Daniel Gold, govt director of Hillel at UCLA.
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For professional-Palestinian activists who’re Jewish, the camp was a peaceable area to advertise justice, a welcoming interfaith group with therapist-led processing circles and candlelit prayer companies.
Blue tarps and blankets had been put down in the course of the garden for Islamic prayers and a Passover Seder and a Shabbat service.
On the primary night, about 100 activists, many Jewish, sat in a circle to wish, sing, drink grape juice and eat matzo ball soup, matzo crackers and watermelon.
“It was actually lovely,” mentioned Lin, the artwork main. “We had been attempting to carry these areas to point out that Judaism goes past Zionism.”
Different Jewish college students had been extra cautious as they navigated the camp.
Presman, who moved to the U.S. when he was 12 and identifies as a Zionist, was alarmed when he scanned the quad on the primary day. He noticed indicators saying “Israelis are native 2 HELL,” he mentioned, and banners and graffiti exhibiting inverted purple triangles, a logo utilized in Hamas propaganda movies to point a army goal.
“Do folks know what which means?” he puzzled.
Tucking his Star of David beneath his T-shirt, Presman mentioned, he entered and approached activists, introducing himself as an Israeli citizen.
“Possibly we will discover frequent floor,” he mentioned, asking, “one human being to the opposite?”
Some college students put their arms up, he mentioned, blocking him as they walked away. Others handled the dialog as a joke. One protester, he mentioned, instructed him that all the pieces Hamas did was justified.
Presman mentioned he had one good dialog: An activist who recognized as anti-Zionist admitted not being 100% educated on what Zionism was, however agreed that Israel ought to exist. They got here to the conclusion the activist was a Zionist.
However most of Presman’s exchanges, he mentioned, ended negatively when activists realized he was defending Zionism. He mentioned he was referred to as a “soiled Jew” and “white colonizer.”
Different college students — even those that didn’t absolutely assist the encampment — mentioned they didn’t expertise such slurs.
Rachel Burnett, a senior who described herself as a non-Zionist Jew, disagreed with the decision for divestment and educational boycotts, particularly of UCLA’s Nazarian Heart, an academic middle for the examine of Israeli historical past, politics and tradition.
Getting into the camp after a classmate vouched for her, Burnett was disturbed by anti-Israeli indicators and graffiti that named Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for the army wing of Hamas. However she additionally bonded with protesters, together with a girl in a hijab.
“In fact, some protesters deny Oct. 7 or condone violence so long as it may be put beneath the guise of decolonial resistance, which is clearly horrific,” Burnett mentioned. “However that’s not the case of many college students contained in the encampment.”
Burnett contrasted what she noticed as a peaceable, pleasant temper contained in the camp with the pro-Israel counterprotests the place folks held up benign slogans, reminiscent of “Convey the Hostages House,” however engaged in hostile conduct.
As counterprotesters converged for a Sunday rally, she mentioned, a pro-Israel activist spat on her and instructed she ought to have been slaughtered within the kibbutzim on Oct. 7.
Simply as some pro-Palestinian activists demonized all Zionists as evil and pro-genocide — ignoring the wide selection of viewpoints throughout the Zionist group — Burnett thought some pro-Israel counterprotesters had been dehumanizing scholar activists within the encampment and spreading a “mass hysteria narrative.”
Because the encampment expanded — and organizers arrange entrance factors close to Royce Corridor and Powell Library — some Jewish college students took movies that swiftly went viral.
“It’s time to go,” a protester carrying a yellow security vest and kaffiyeh instructed a scholar in a single video as he guarded an entrance close to Powell Library. “You don’t have a wristband.”
A standoff ensued.
“Are you a Zionist?” the protester requested.
“In fact I’m Zionist,” the scholar replied.
“Yeah, we don’t let Zionists inside.”