For the past several months, university campuses across the United States have been experiencing an upsurge in pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activity in the form of rallies, teach-ins, protests, and divestment campaigns. 

Most recently on the divestment front, the JTA reported this week that students and faculty at Harvard and MIT have been working hard to combat the divestment campaign that was introduced onto their campuses by 118 faculty members from both universities.  Over 4,000 Harvard and MIT students, alumni and faculty members signed petitions condemning the campaign.  Harvard University President Lawrence Summers recently spoke out against divestment from Israel as well.  Harvard and MIT alumni can sign the petition by going to the following link: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hsi/links.html.  We will keep you updated on this issue as it continues.

Below are materials relating to two incidents which have recently occurred on campuses in Northern California. 

An Israel Solidarity rally at San Francisco State University on May 6th drew threatening and hostile pro-Palestinian counter protesters who were so intimidating that the University sent in police to protect the Hillel students and escort them out of the rally site.

At the University of California at Berkley, a course entitled, " The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" was offered to students for the Fall 2002 semester.  The course was based on the claim that, "The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people."

In both of these incidents, community response was strong, and both University administrations responded to the vigorous criticism.  At SFSU, the University President issued a strong statement, repudiating the tactics of the counter protesters.  In Berkley the administration apologized for the wording of the course description and promised to monitor the class for any violation of conduct codes.  Below are the University statements issued in response to community action.

Additionally, we have included an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "A Diverse Pro-Palestinian Movement Emerges on College Campuses" for background on the growing movement.  The ADL has also published a report on anti-Israel events that can be found http://www.adl.org/campus/campus_incidents.asp.

E-mail from San Francisco State University President Robert A. Corrigan to the faculty at SFSU:

In my 14 years as president of this university, I have never been as deeply distressed and angered by something that happened on this campus as I am by the events of last week. On Tuesday, a pro-Israel peace rally, thoughtfully organized and carefully carried out by SFSU Hillel members, drawing some 400 participants from both campus and community, evoked strong opinions and strong speech -- some from the free speech platform, much from the nearby pro-Palestinian counter-demonstration.  But strong, even provocative, speech is not the problem, nor are strongly held opinions on highly-charged topics. Rather, it was the lack of civility and decency on the part of a very few demonstrators at points during the rally, and much more markedly after it, when rhetoric and behavior escalated beyond what this campus will tolerate.

For the most part, the most objectionable behavior occurred after the rally's organizers brought it to a formal close and a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who, in keeping with our student event policy, had been held back by barricades and campus police, moved onto the event site, where a few dozen organizers remained. There, some of the demonstrators behaved in a manner that completely violated the values of this institution and of most of you who are reading this message.

Thankfully, I am not speaking about physical violence. The monitoring by University staff throughout the event and the significant police presence we had arranged to have on hand ensured the safety of all involved.  Unfortunately, we were not equally able to ensure civil discourse and maintain the sense of security to which every member of this campus is entitled. A small but terribly destructive number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom were not SFSU students, abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements too hate-filled to repeat. This group became so threatening in gesture and hostile in language that we interposed a police line between the groups and eventually escorted the Hillel students, and the faculty with them, from the plaza.  No one was physically assaulted, but that encounter puts at risk all that we value and represent as a university community.

The demonstrators' behavior is not passing unchallenged. The University's code of student discipline and event policy allow for individual and group sanctions ranging from warning to suspension to expulsion for certain violations, and some of what took place on Tuesday may well fall within that area. Our videotaped record of the event is being reviewed now by SFSU Public Safety to note violations and identify violators so that the University's disciplinary procedures can begin. In one instance, that of a protestor who seized and stamped on an Israeli flag, the case has already gone forward.  I fully expect to see other cases presented. If we identify violations of public law, we will refer cases to the District Attorney, with our strong recommendation for full prosecution. We have requested that the District Attorney assign a member of the hate crime unit to work with us, and our Department of Public Safety is contacting individuals who have reported behavior at the rally which would warrant legal action on our part.

I hope you will agree that no love of homeland, no fear or grief for loved ones in the actual area of Middle East conflict, excuses the behavior that has been reported.  This is not a war zone.  It is a campus, a place where all must feel physically protected even as we engage in the disputation that is part of a teaching and learning environment. But when disputation degenerates into bigotry and hate, we must -- and do -- act. We did so in the case of the "blood libel" flyer (as I reported several weeks ago), and we are doing so now.  The anguish and fear that the May 7th events have caused for members of our community can only intensify our active commitment to making this campus a hate-free zone.

We have reviewed, and will continue to review, the policies and procedures that guided our responses during the May 7 event. We may well adjust them. Certainly, we will take steps to ensure that encounters like those I have described will not recur. Nothing justifies such acts of overt hostility, or even the implied threat of physical assault.  Such behavior is not an expression of free speech.

The vast majority of this campus community would condemn the hateful speech and threatening behavior we saw last Tuesday. It is a very few individuals who are fomenting this discord.  Yet, as we see, their impact can be profound -- if we allow it to be.  Despite the claims of some, this is not an anti-Semitic campus. But as history shows us, silence and passivity can at times of crisis be very little different from complicity.  All of us -- and I would say especially members of the faculty, who have the greatest opportunity to educate and influence our students -- have a responsibility to help maintain this as a safe and sustaining environment for the expression and exploration of opposing views.

Many of our best faculty are doing exactly that, consciously and powerfully, every day.  We need now to find ways to bring good colleagues together to shape a collective effort. The CUSP II strategic planning process offers us one opportunity; I am looking for others and welcome your thoughts.  We need to make what has happened on our campus an occasion for learning, for reflection, for growth.

As you know, since the terrorist attacks on September 11th, I have sent frequent messages to the entire University community calling for peace and tolerance and many of you have responded marvelously, both in words and action; I take great pride in the hundreds of very positive e-mail and letters I have received.  But now, as the actions of a small band of bigots threaten to tarnish the reputation of the University as a whole and to discredit all our students, I ask you to join me in speaking out for this University's true values. Show in actions well as words that you believe not only that "Love is Stronger Than Hate" but that hateful actions, threats of violence, outrageous slurs and bigoted statements are rejected and contemned by our entire campus community.

                                          -- Robert A. Corrigan, President

From the Berkeley Online Course Catalogue:

The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance
Course Number: English R1A LEC 4 Units
Semester and Year: fall 2002
Instructor: Shingavi, Snehal

"Course Description: Since the inception of the Intifada in September of 2000, Palestinians have been fighting for their right to exist. The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people. And yet, from under the brutal weight of the occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance. This class will examine the history of the Palestinian resistance and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians in order to produce an understanding of the Intifada and to develop a coherent political analysis of the situation. This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections."

University Statement Regarding Scheduled Fall 2002 Class Titled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestine Resistance" (from University of California Department of Media Relations)
10 May 2002

The following is a statement addressing questions raised about a course scheduled for the fall 2002 semester titled, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestine Resistance."
There was a failure of oversight on the part of the English Department in reviewing course proposal descriptions for the reading and composition sections. This failure is in the process of being addressed. Structures will be put in place to ensure all course descriptions will be developed in accord with the Faculty Code of Conduct, specifically that courses not exclude or discourage qualified students on grounds other than lack of preparation.
In this particular case, the English Department will immediately revise the course description to ensure open access. In addition, the department chair will provide oversight for this class to ensure that it is conducted in accordance with the Faculty Code of Conduct. Among the code's requirements is that there be no "discrimination, including harassment, against a student on political grounds, or for the reasons of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, national origin...."
Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl stated: "I am concerned that this failure of oversight has occurred and I am pleased that the English Department is acting immediately to remedy it. Universities should not avoid presenting controversial material, and we do not. It is imperative that our classrooms be free of indoctrination - indoctrination is not education. Classrooms must be places in which an open environment prevails and where students are free to express their views."

The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 17, 2002

A Diverse Pro-Palestinian Movement Emerges on College Campuses

By ERIC HOOVER
 
A stream of Palestinian flags is flowing down a four-lane avenue.  On a Monday evening in April, several thousand demonstrators, including college students from across the nation, have gathered outside the Washington Hilton, where a pro-Israel lobbying group is holding a conference. As the crowd jostles behind barricades, chanting "Free, free Palestine!" television helicopters swoop low.
 
This is a prime-time protest, and many students here understand their roles: If they cannot make enough noise to disrupt the conference itself, they must do something creative to broadcast their message. As cameramen weave through the crowd, George Washington University students chalk anti-Israel messages on the pavement. A half-dozen others, hoisting pompoms in the air, lead a mock cheer ("One, two, three, four, we don't need no Mideast war!"). Several students from Georgetown University don cardboard versions of Israeli tanks bearing the slogan, "Brought to You by the American Tax-Payer."
 
This night is the culmination of a weekend-long show of strength by the pro-Palestinian movement. The previous Saturday, an estimated 75,000 people marched here to protest U.S. military aid to Israel and denounce Israeli military strikes against Palestinians. Some students traveled by bus for days to attend, including those from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California at Berkeley.
 
"The weekend was a moment of truth for the Palestinian cause in America," says Shadi Hamid, a freshman and a member of the Muslim Student Association at Georgetown. "We want the average American watching TV to see that there is a different side to the story."
 
Picking Up the Flag
 
As violence in the Middle East has escalated in recent weeks, pro-Palestinian groups at many colleges have increased their efforts to promote their cause, organizing demonstrations and national campaigns to condemn U.S. policy toward Israel. The groups have generated far greater support than antiwar activists were able to drum up during the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan last fall. Even some students who were uncomfortable denouncing the United States after September 11 are now picking up the flag for Palestine on dozens of campuses, staging sit-in protests, setting up information tables, and helping to organize a movement that aims to force colleges to stop investing in corporations that do business with Israel.

Pro-Palestinian groups have marched to the forefront of the hodgepodge parade of campus causes by depicting their movement as a struggle for human rights. It is a theme that resonates with many activists who have supported affirmative action, condemned sweatshops, and denounced corporate globalization in recent years. A T-shirt that reads "We are all Palestinians" -- now ubiquitous on college campuses -- attempts to universalize the cause.
 
The movement has heightened tension at many colleges. Some Jewish students view elements of the pro-Palestinian campaign as anti-Semitic and say that they -- much like Arab and Muslim students after September 11 -- are being treated as scapegoats on their campuses. Pro-Israel students, who usually enjoy mainstream support for their politics, find themselves on the defensive against charges that they support racism and terrorism.
 
At the Washington Hilton demonstration, the tortuous dynamics of the conflict are on display: At the very moment that some Jewish students are joining hands with pro-Palestinian students to condemn Israeli incursions on the West Bank, a handful of Muslim students nearby are shouting, "How many of your relatives died at Auschwitz?" in the face of a Jewish man.
 
Diverse Crowd
 
Most of the exchanges here are not so highly charged, in part because many of the students have no personal ties to the Middle East. But their showing up to join the cause is encouraging to long-term supporters of Palestinians.
 
When Mr. Hamid attended a rally in support of the Palestinian cause, a year and a half ago, nearly all of the students were Muslim Arabs. Now they appear to make up less than half of the protesters. Many of those rallying tonight are white students from elite colleges who have been highly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the past and who now view Israel as, in the words of one demonstrator, "a tool of U.S. imperialism." They explain their newfound passion for the Palestinian cause as a natural progression of their own politics, which supports perceived victims generally and opposes U.S.-supported military action almost anywhere.
 
Immediately after September 11, "there was an upsurge of activism to protect Arab and Muslim students, but the quick U.S. military victory [in Afghanistan] seemed to demoralize the antiwar cause," says Peter Lamphere, a senior at Columbia University, who grew up in New Mexico and had only a passing interest in the Middle East when he came to college. His passion was socialism and working on the student-led campaign against sweatshops.
 
Now he has found a common thread in the plight of Palestinians. "Once we started seeing horrible images on television of violence in the Middle East," he says, "I had a gut reaction. I started thinking, Hey, it can't be as simple as Palestinian people are terrorists and religious fanatics.'  There had to be an explanation."
 
Mr. Lamphere came to believe that U.S. foreign policy is responsible for the Palestinians' oppression, and he helped to organize the pro-Palestinian campaign at Columbia. Tonight, a black-and-white kafiyah, the traditional Palestinian scarf, covers his blond hair as he walks through the crowd selling issues of Socialist Worker for $1 a copy.
 
Change of Strategy
 
The commingling of the Palestinian movement with other causes is a significant shift from last fall. After September 11, many Arab and Muslim students dropped plans to hold anti-Israel demonstrations and conferences. Fearful of the verbal and physical assaults endured by some, they generally kept a low profile.
 
But the events that temporarily silenced those students eventually helped them find a new voice. Mr. Hamid, the Georgetown student, says the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington prompted many college students to examine the roots of anti-Americanism, leading them to more carefully consider the Arab-Muslim perspective on the Middle East.
 
"September 11 showed us that the world is a crazy, unstable place," Mr. Hamid says. "It also forced many of us to ask ourselves how something so terrible and tragic could happen ... and many students began to realize that September 11 didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened partly because of America's unjust foreign policy in the Middle East."
 
Then, as gruesome video footage of Palestinian casualties reached American televisions this spring, more students started questioning the status quo. By early April, large pro-Palestinian protests were sweeping college campuses. That month, students at Berkeley held a sit-in for Palestinian statehood on an interstate-highway ramp, snarling traffic for miles. At a number of institutions, including Pennsylvania State University, Palestinian supporters wearing military garb and brandishing toy machine guns, staged mock Israeli checkpoints on campus, demanding to see students' IDs. Protesters at Ann Arbor had themselves bound and gagged to dramatize the Israeli army's detaining of Palestinians.
 
Although those recent protests have not approached the size of the largest pro-affirmative-action rallies on campuses in California and Texas, the cause is gaining momentum. Chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, which began at Berkeley, have spread to dozens of campuses.
 
Elsewhere, college groups have tried to transcend politics: At Wesleyan University, members of a group called Students For Palestine put up rows of paper flags -- nearly 2,000 of them -- to commemorate every Israeli and Palestinian death in the preceding 18 months and to show that "all deaths are equally tragic, regardless of nationality or religion," according to a sophomore, Shireen Tawil.
 
Such messages of inclusion are rare, however. The longstanding debates between Jewish and Arab students -- suspended for a time in mutual horror after September 11 --  have turned into fierce battles, waged on opinion pages of the campus newspaper and, sometimes, face-to-face on the quad.
 
Eric Bukstein, a senior and chairman of the Ann Arbor chapter of Hillel, a nationwide Jewish student group, says pro-Palestinian students have made "scary comparisons" in the past two months.
 
Crossing the Line
 
"It's scary that the other side has convinced so many students that Israel is an apartheid government, an evil government, especially when those students who are suddenly saying they support Palestine don't know anything about Israel," Mr. Bukstein says. "There's a very fine line between anti-Israel and anti-Semitism, and that line is getting crossed occasionally."
 
Jewish student organizations, which on many campuses are larger than Arab and Muslim student groups, are trying to counter the pro-Palestinian surge with their own rallies and information campaigns, flooding student newspapers with letters to the editor, holding pro-Israel rallies, and handing out fliers that challenge the other side's arguments point by point. Many of the groups also try to account for dissenting opinions among Jewish students themselves. Hillel's Ann Arbor chapter, for example, recently adopted the slogan, "Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel," to affirm the message that its members could still be pro-Israel even if they didn't support all of Israel's policies.
 
"Whereas the pro-Palestinian side has one, singular message, our slogan is intentionally vague," Mr. Bukstein says. "That vagueness is both a strength and a weakness, however, since it's not as succinct as the other side's message."
 
Some Jewish students hope that the anti-Israel movement loses its intensity, but they fear that pro-Palestinian groups are fueling hatred and misunderstanding. In April, a rabbi's son was beaten not far from the Berkeley campus (although police investigators won't say if they are investigating the attack as a hate crime). In an apparently unrelated incident, the front door of the campus Hillel office was smashed and an anti-Semitic message scrawled on the building. The epithet "Zionazis" appeared on sidewalks at the University of Colorado at Boulder during Holocaust Awareness Week. Jewish and Arab students alike have reported receiving death threats on many campuses.
 
Some Jewish students condemn the protest movement's most ambitious strategy -- the divestiture campaign -- as thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Last month, pro-Palestinian students at more than 30 colleges, including Georgetown and Columbia, held rallies in support of a national push to persuade universities to divest themselves of stock in corporations that do business with Israel. The nascent movement is based on the successful divestiture campaigns of the 1980s, in which many colleges, under pressure from anti-apartheid activists, pulled their investments in companies that were operating in South Africa.
 
It remains to be seen whether equating Zionism with racism will sway anyone besides sympathetic protesters or will backfire by breeding resentment for the Palestinian cause. Some students involved in the movement acknowledge privately that anti-Semitic overtones are detrimental to their campaign.  But in this season of emotional demonstrations, it seems that anything goes.
 
At the Washington Hilton rally, a student wearing a "Free Palestine" button is handing out fliers when he sees several protesters across the street carrying a huge poster of Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, with a swastika painted on his forehead. Another demonstrator follows, carrying a boar's head emblazoned with swastikas.
 
"Damn it, we've got to do something about those swastikas," the student says to a group of colleagues standing around him.  "That isn't helping us."
 
"C'mon," he says, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He dashes off after the parade of signs, his kafiyah trailing behind him, but nobody follows.
 

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This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i36/36a04101.htm