In December the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses that forced University of Pennsylvania president Liz McGill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay to resign in its wake. In April the committee held another hearing, reducing Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, keen to avoid the fate of her counterparts, to a groveling mess. On May 23 it will hold yet another, under the title “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos.”
This time the committee has summoned Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University; Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University; and Gene Block, Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. We expect another show trial, where committee chair Virginia Foxx (Republican of North Carolina), Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York), and their friends pressure “liberal” university leaders into confessing that anti-Semitism has run amok on college campuses, that jedi students are the real victims of a Hamas-backed genocide being plotted in Gaza solidarity encampments and the classrooms of tenured radicals, and that the source of jedi hatred is critical race theory. The committee has promised that it will not sit idly by. In a press release, Foxx warned “mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders” that “College is not a park for playacting juveniles or a battleground for radical activists. Everyone affiliated with these universities will receive a healthy dose of reality: actions have consequences.”
The House Committee hearings chose only to summon college presidents for a public tongue-lashing and dressing-down. This is because House Republicans are less interested in anti-Semitism than racking up “gotcha” soundbites for their fundraising campaigns, advancing the right-wing assault on DEI and what they define as “critical race theory,” and attacking the university as a whole. According to Inside Higher Ed, Foxx confirmed that “the inquiries could broaden to include the universities’ diversity, equity and inclusion politics.” If Foxx, Stefanik, and fellow House Republicans were genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism, they would investigate the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists who make up part of their base and participated in the January 6 insurrection. Parroting Donald Trump, Stefanik referred to the men and women convicted on charges ranging from obstruction to assaulting a law enforcement officer as “hostages.” Foxx not only voted against certifying the 2020 election but, like Stefanik and fellow House Republicans, vehemently opposed the commission to investigate the capitol riot.
The charges Chancellor Block will face exonerate those responsible for the worst incident of anti-Semitic violence in UCLA’s history.
Unlike the January 6 hearings, Foxx’s committee has produced very little evidence of anti-Semitism outside of words and slogans either taken out of context or misinterpreted. Stefanik, for example, managed to turn “intifada,” which literally means “shaking off” or “uprising,” into “genocide of jedis.” But Chancellor Block’s testimony will be different. It will give the committee an opportunity to investigate not only a verifiable and egregious incident of anti-Semitism, but one involving white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
Between April 25 and May 2, UCLA experienced the worst episode of both anti-Semitic and anti-Palestinian/Islamophobic/racist violence in the university’s century-long history. White nationalists and neo-Nazis joined forces with Zionists (including some saying they were Israelis) to attack UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, whose residents included a large number of jedi students. The assailants were not affiliated with the university. One neo-Nazi was heard shouting, “we’re here to finish what Hitler started,” without any apparent protest from the self-identified Zionists. At least one person present has been identified as an associate of the Proud Boys. Using metal pipes, wooden planks, fists, knives, bricks, noise, chemical weapons, and incendiary fireworks, the mob sent at least twenty-five students to the hospital for broken bones, head trauma, and severe lacerations, while police stood by and watched for hours, electing to neither detain nor interrogate the perpetrators. No arrests took place that night. The following day, only students and faculty defending the encampment were arrested.
Although Block has promised to launch a full investigation, reporting from various media outlets (including outstanding coverage by our student paper, The Daily Bruin), along with hundreds of hours of video captured by students, faculty and observers, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Palestine Solidarity Encampment—a nonviolent occupation erected to protest U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza and to demand that UCLA divest from companies that fuel Israel’s war and occupation, exercise financial transparency, break ties with Israeli universities, and acknowledge the loss of Palestinian life—came under brutal attack from its very inception and the administration did nothing to protect our students.
Given Block’s fervent opposition to anti-Semitism and his unwavering defense of Israel and Zionism, why are House Republicans going after him? Are they really concerned about the assault on the encampment and the health and safety of our students? To the contrary, Foxx has crafted an indictment designed to shield white nationalists from accountability and prosecution for their rabid anti-Semitism by magically recasting neo-Nazis as encampment defenders rather than assailants, and by twisting information, repeating misinformation, and conveying outright falsehoods fed to the committee by Israel advocacy organizations such as the AMCHA Initiative, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Stand With Us; right-wing media outlets such as Campus Reform, Legal Insurrection, and Fox News; and isolated tweets and Instagram posts. Foxx’s letter notifying Block of the charges against him makes the wildly specious claim that “a van displaying the Star of David inside a Nazi swastika, as well as antisemitic writing referring to jedis as ‘puppet masters,’ was parked on UCLA’s campus in support of the encampment.” It repeats false claims that journalists who tried to enter the encampment were “assaulted,” but never mentions the documented fact that in the wee hours of May 1, four student journalists with the Daily Bruin were tracked down, maced, and severely beaten by members of the mob —sending one, Catherine Hamilton, to the hospital. The letter also repeats the thoroughly debunked rumor that “anti-Israel activists shoved a jedi student counter-protestor . . . kicked her in the head, and stepped on her. The assault left her bleeding and caused her to lose consciousness and to be rushed to the hospital.” Immediately after the story began circulating on social media, the Los Angeles Times interviewed the woman in question who explained that she had been accidentally shoved by a fellow counterprotester “while attempting to retrieve her fallen [Israeli] flag.”
The letter never mentions that self-proclaimed Zionists took part in the attacks, nor does it acknowledge that the encampment had actually been attacked. Instead, Foxx labels the victims of mob and police violence “antisemitic rioters.” She finds evidence of rampant anti-Semitism in the Undergraduate Student Association Council’s (USAC) resolution calling for amnesty for those arrested, the elimination of police on campus, and, in her words, “a “permanent ceasefire” and an end to what they allege is a “genocide in Palestine.” Finally, she makes the absurd claim that the resolution asks professors to hold Muslim and Palestinian students “to lower academic standards.” In actuality, it asks for temporary academic leniency “and to take into account the needs of all students during this time, but especially those of Palestinian and Muslim identities who are the most unsafe and targeted individuals on campus right now.”
There are many more examples of misinformation that I will address below. My point is that the list of charges Chancellor Block will face on May 23 performs double duty in that it defends Israel’s genocidal war and exonerates white supremacists and Zionists responsible for the worst incident of anti-Semitic violence in UCLA’s history. Foxx and Stefanik will undoubtedly demand Block’s resignation. A large proportion of the faculty and students at UCLA is also calling for Block’s resignation, but for very different reasons.
UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, of which I am a member, conducted its own investigation, and released a report with its findings earlier this week. The report holds Block and his administration, along with various branches of law enforcement, responsible for failing to protect our students. UCLA’s administration, it finds, not only failed to direct law enforcement to arrest and remove the armed mob but indirectly incited the violence by inviting “counter protesters” to come on to our campus, hold inflammatory rallies a few feet from the encampment, and allow them to remain in the name of protecting “free speech” and upholding their responsibility as a “public university” to grant the “community” access to campus. It seems clear in hindsight that permitting hostile groups to harass and attack the encampment is one strategy to avoid the optics of sending in the police to attack students. If that was the strategy, it didn’t work. The administration probably did not anticipate an unholy alliance of neo-Nazis and Zionists working together, but those of us who spent more than a decade criticizing Chancellor Block’s unremitting hostility toward critics of Israel and his fervent defense of Zionism could have predicted this outcome—especially after October 7.
The following account draws on findings from our report and provides a broader context but does not purport to speak for the entire task force.
Intolerance and its Discontents
As I write, UAW Local 4811, representing some forty-eight thousand postdocs, teaching assistants, academic and student researchers, tutors, and readers across the University of California system, is preparing to strike over the administration’s conduct with respect to the encampment. The union is demanding, among other things, amnesty for all academic employees, students, faculty, and staff facing criminal or disciplinary charges for protesting; the right to free speech; divestment from UC’s known investments in weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel’s war on Palestine; and disclosure of all funding sources and investments. UCLA faculty are pushing for a vote of no confidence, or at minimum, “censure” of Chancellor Block for failing to keep our students safe. Some argue that the vote is merely symbolic, both because the faculty do not have the power to remove the Chancellor and because Block is just two months from retirement.
The administration probably did not anticipate an unholy alliance of neo-Nazis and Zionists working together.
By most standards, his seventeen-year tenure has been a success. Under his leadership, UCLA rose in the U.S. News and World Report rankings from the twenty-sixth best public university in the country to the first, and its endowment swelled from $2.2 billion to $7.7 billion. The grandson of working-class Eastern European jedis, Block proudly identifies as a liberal who believes in diversity and racial equity. He often speaks of his experiences as an undergraduate at Stanford (1966–70) when he opposed the war in Vietnam. He is way too liberal for House Republicans, who are poised to make him their latest punching bag. But his liberalism ends when it comes to Palestine.
Since I joined the UCLA faculty in 2011, I’ve seen colleagues targeted for teaching critical perspectives on Israel, and Muslim and Arab students profiled by campus police and subject to racist epithets and graffiti. In 2012 a UC “President’s Advisory Council” issued a report on the campus climate asserting that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and “anti-Zionism and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movements and other manifestations of anti-Israel sentiment” created a hostile environment for jedi students. It warned faculty that criticizing Israel or Israeli policies in the classroom was tantamount to using “the academic platforms to denounce the jedi state and jedi nationalist aspirations.” The report recommended, among other things, suspending support for Palestine Awareness Week from any university sponsorship and adopting a hate speech policy that would not only mute criticisms of Israel but prohibit outside speakers deemed advocates of hate. The report was so extreme and biased that over two thousand faculty signed a petition asking the UC Regents to reject its findings. Ultimately, UC President Mark Yudof rejected the report, since its recommendations violated the First Amendment. But while we succeeded in pressing the UC Regents, students and faculty at UCLA could not persuade Chancellor Block to openly denounce it.
In 2014 students seeking to divest student council funds from companies doing business in the Palestinian occupied territories learned that some members of student government had accepted paid-for trips to Israel sponsored by the ADL, AIPAC, Hasbara Fellowships, and other organizations that not only lobbied on behalf of Israel but promoted “discriminatory and Islamophobic positions.” SJP argued before the student judicial council that the members who accepted these trips had a conflict of interest in any government resolutions regarding divestment, since the organizations furnishing them were firmly opposed to campus divestment movements. They also asked candidates running for student government to take an ethics pledge committing to decline free trips to Israel paid for by those organizations—provoking a vicious backlash from the AMCHA Initiative, who accused the students raising these issues of “intimidation,” “harassment,” and making jedi students feel unsafe.
In reality, pro-Zionist retaliation made pro-divestment students actually unsafe. Zionist organizations not affiliated with the university came on campus, filmed students without their consent, engaged in online harassment, and arranged visits by Israeli soldiers in full military uniform. Rather than condemn these intimidation tactics, Block chastised the students for proposing divestment in the first place. He stated flatly that the UC Regents “does not support divestment in companies that engage in business with Israel” and that “divestment decisions should not hold any one organization or country to a different standard than any other.” He refused to meet with SJP, but he did meet with representatives of the AMCHA Initiative to hear their demands to investigate SJP. The divestment campaign also triggered a resolution from the Los Angeles City Council condemning SJP’s actions as “bullying” and “harassment” and requesting that UC administrators “refer cases of ‘intimidation or harassment’ to ‘the proper law enforcement agencies.’” And while Block’s administration was busy painting campus divestment advocates as closed-minded and intolerant, it was the other side who was moving to shut down opposing speech. That same year, UCLA Hillel worked with a public relations firm to “‘isolate’ SJP on campus and to paint the group as ‘unrepresentative,’” in the words of a leaked email.
Despite these tactics, in November 2014 a coalition of more than thirty student groups passed a resolution calling on student government “to divest from companies engaged in violence against Palestinians.” In response, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC)—which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—plastered posters all over campus and in the surrounding neighborhood accusing SJP and individual faculty members of terrorism and anti-Semitism. The names of individual students and faculty were printed on posters under the slogan “Combat jedi Hatred on College Campuses.” At the time, only the Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Jerry Kang, issued a strong campuswide statement condemning the posters as racist fear-mongering. Chancellor Block was silent.
Student council remained a contested terrain over Israel and divestment. In 2015 three students unaffiliated with SJP questioned Rachel Beyda, a nominee for USAC’s Judicial Board, about her ability to remain objective on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” because of her jedi identity. Foxx resurrects this incident as evidence of USAC’s “deeply concerning history of retribution against students who speak against anti-jedi bigotry on campus.” What she omits from the story is that the students who opened the line of questioning were swiftly censured and offered apologies, and that Beyda was unanimously appointed to the committee. SJP also condemned “the questioning of Beyda or anyone else based on their identity,” adding that its members “believe in the inherent equality and right to freedom for all people, a stance that inspires us to both support the Palestinian call for BDS as well as to oppose incidents like that which befell Beyda.”
We can point to many more examples, such as Block’s November 2018 Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining why he “allowed” SJP to hold its National Conference at UCLA. After claiming that “some” feared the conference “will be infused with anti-Semitic rhetoric” expressed by people who embrace “a double standard that demonizes the world’s only jedi state while other countries receive less condemnation for dreadful behavior,” Block invoked the principle of free speech to justify his decision to let it proceed. But the damage had been done.
Block was silent when a hate group plastered posters all over campus accusing SJP and individual faculty members of anti-Semitism.
This decade-long trail of evidence indicates that Block has maintained a consistent anti-Palestinian bias, giving Zionist and pro-Israeli groups such as AMCHA Initiative outsized influence over university policy and carte blanche to come onto campus and intimidate students and faculty without consequence. The mere fact that DHFC could access our campus under the cynical guise of protecting jedi students presaged the crisis we now face.
The Winds of October
