Editor’s Note: The following post includes statements issued by UC Berkeley Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine and Faculty and Staff for Justice In Palestine at UC Berkeley. Both were issued following the university’s response to a protest of an event featuring Ran Bar-Yoshafat on February 26 and the subsequent statement issued by University Chancellor Carol Christ condemning the protest.
UC Berkeley Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine Statement: No ‘time, place, manner’ for genocide
March 4th, 2024
On Thursday, the 146th day of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, as the Palestinian death toll surpassed 35,000 martyrs, we woke to videos of corpses piled on wagons meant for food aid. This was the food aid promised to Palestinians starving under the Israeli military blockade, the aid whose entry into Gaza has been held up for months by a second, civilian blockade enforced by Israeli settlers. These settlers physically block food trucks from entering, cheer on the bombs, and chant, “Dead, dead, dead Arabs.”
Israeli troops claim that they felt threatened by the starving crowd and opened fire, killing more than 100 Palestinians. But the real root of the massacre lies in the chants of the settlers. With every “Dead Arab,” we see what is truly at play: to Israel and its supporters in the United States, Palestinian lives are disposable, worth less than the bags of flour they were murdered over.
People in Gaza have already named it “The Flour Massacre.” But Israelis, 72 percent of whom support halting aid to starving Gazans, have taken to calling it something else: “The Blessed Massacre.” On social media, they gloated that “we must starve them until the long-awaited cannibalism.”
Thursday’s massacre casts into sharp relief both the horrors of Israeli colonialism and the selective empathy of a university administration hell-bent on averting their eyes from this hideous reality. Chancellor Christ’s statement on Tuesday, which refused to mention Palestinians, confirmed just how little value this university places on Palestinian humanity. It was only the latest starkly racialized lesson in how the discomfort of some matters more than the deaths of others.
We saw it in October, when the Palestinian death toll stood at 6,000 martyrs. Thousands of Berkeley students walked out to protest UC complicity in the genocide – only to be criminalized with a campus-wide WarnMe alert.
But there was no crime alert two weeks prior, when a Zionist protester shoved a pro-Palestine student and called him a “rapist.”
There was no crime alert when Zionist protesters yelled at a Muslim student that “he looks like ISIS” for dressing in a traditional thobe and should dress “normal because he is in America now.”
Instead, in the midst of the historic October walkout, the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor sent a letter admonishing those who participated and encouraged their students to do the same. This flies in the face of a September 18th, 2019 letter from the same office, which actually encouraged class cancellations so students could participate in a walkout for climate change. A burning planet is worthy of protest. Burning Palestinians, apparently, are not.
We saw this insidious racism again last month when the Palestinian death toll stood at 20,000 martyrs. That time, doxxing trucks freely circled our campus, flashing the names and photos of Palestinians and their allies for daring to protest the genocide.
Again, no community safety alerts were issued. No campus emails denounced these threats as violating our values. There were no promises of an official investigation or increased security. Just the steady drumbeat of UC-funded bombs, Palestinian death, and cold, bureaucratic indifference.
The double standard speaks for itself. Under a framework that has coded all opposition to Israeli settler-colonialism as antisemitism, Palestinian students, faculty, and staff are rendered invisible. Their safety, their comfort, their feelings, their very existence does not register. They are illegible to the official mind.
When Zionist comfort is threatened, it is a crisis. When Palestinians die, it is business as usual, and Palestinians must accept it in the name of dialogue.
Only in such a zone of imagined Palestinian non-existence could Zionist groups have dared to invite Ran Bar-Yoshafat to speak on campus Monday night. An Israeli soldier fresh from Gaza’s killing fields, he has voiced his support for the genocide because “every school, mosque, hospital, kindergarten – all – without exception- is a terror camp.” He blissfully declares how the extermination of up to 1,500,000 Palestinians would “certainly solve the demographic problem.”
This is the genocidaire whom Chancellor Christ whitewashed as a mere “speaker from Israel” rather than an active participant in the slaughter.
This is the genocidaire whose right to incite violence against the Palestinian people was deemed to outweigh our community’s collective grief and rage.
This is the genocidaire whose no-platforming by the wider Berkeley community was denounced as violating those “most fundamental values” of academic freedom and the right to protest.
By contrast, every single university in Gaza has been destroyed. Every single hospital has been bombed. Entire regions have been flattened, with thousands unaccounted for under the rubble.
Yet this administration continues to hide behind the repressive tolerance of liberal values and “dialogue” on their terms. The insistence that Palestinians treat the annihilation of their people as a subject of polite discussion is simply a call for a “conversation between the sword and the neck,” as Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani tells us.
History teaches us what Gaza has laid bare in real time: genocides do not happen overnight, nor do their perpetrators work alone. Genocide is denied even while it is carried out. This erasure has its practical technicians: from those who fund the systems of annihilation to those who keep silent, to those who police any resistance by imposing regulations on “time, place and manner.”
To those who walk past us daily at the GSJP blockade of Sather Gate – we see your glances, usually sympathetic, sometimes annoyed. We’ve overheard some students mock the voices of people who look and sound like us streaming from the speakers. Voices overshadowed by the buzz of the drone, always the drone – just like in Gaza. The drone that reminds you, even if for a fraction of a second on your way to class, that you are not so far removed from these horrors. None of us are. Our taxes and tuition pay for this genocide, and we must do all we can to end it.
Frantz Fanon reminds us, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
Christ can keep her values. We will continue living ours. Join us at Sather Gate.
Check out our toolkit to take action: docs.google.com/document/d/1YbGqSFYsHLNrp7fIX3WSXveF_4V6Ona_bcHqM9uUEws/edit
EMAIL THE UC REGENTS: tinyurl.com/UCDivestNow24
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GSJP is a graduate student-led collective supporting Palestinian self-determination and their Resistance against annexation and annihilation. We firmly oppose attempts to normalize or reduce this genocide and its crimes against the Palestinians. Our goal is to combat anti-Palestinian narratives in American politics and academia, stop our university’s funding of such crimes, and strengthen bonds with other social justice movements.
Faculty and Staff for Justice In Palestine (FSJP) UC Berkeley statement, March 5, 2024
We, the Faculty and Staff for Justice In Palestine (FSJP) at UC Berkeley, express deep concern for students and student groups who have become the targets of administrative, police, and media scrutiny following the protest of an event featuring Ran Bar-Yoshafat on the night of February 26. We are troubled by the lack of context offered by Chancellor Carol T. Christ’s statement, “Upholding our Values,” and her silence on the trauma caused to Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students by hosting Bar-Yoshafat, an active member of the Israeli military, who participated in the invasion of Gaza in October 2023, and whose public statements have cast all Palestinian civilians, including children, as terrorists. A follow-up message sent by the Office of the Chancellor on March 4, 2023, “Responding to the events of February 26,” only deepens our concern.
The violent and hateful nature of Bar-Yoshafat’s views was raised by the Council of American-Islamic Relations of the San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA), which commended an area school for deciding to cancel a previous speaking engagement that was to have taken place mere days before his event at UC Berkeley. CAIR-SFBA noted that Bar-Yoshafat has made the following statements:
“Every school mosque, hospital, kindergarten – all – without exception – is a terror camp. There is no exception. There is not even one exception.” (Facebook Post | January 7, 2024);
“The blood ratio is about 1:1000. Allegedly, the revenge for the massacre on us should have been 1,500,000 people. Certainly could solve the demographic problems.” (Facebook Post | January 7, 2024).
The administration’s reference to Bar-Yoshafat as merely a “speaker from Israel” entirely obscures these facts, which should be at the center of any consideration of the boundaries between free speech and hate speech on campus. While FSJP recognizes and supports the principle of free speech on campus for all student groups, we note with deep concern that the co-sponsorship of the event includes not only student groups, but also the Israeli Consulate to the Pacific Northwest, which is attempting to drum up support for this deeply unpopular, genocidal war. The Chancellor’s reiterated support for a speaker who bears direct responsibility in the genocide of Palestinians, subtended by the message’s characterization of pro-Palestinian student protestors as violent, is irresponsible and inflammatory. It reveals the administration’s central role in protecting and validating those complicit in settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. The decision to increase a militarized police presence on February 26 in anticipation of protesters resulted in the predictable use of excessive force when the police “threw a woman to the ground.”
In the days since the protest, the administration has continued their irresponsible and widely refuted conflation of anti-Zionist activism with antisemitic expression. The “Responding to the events of February 26” campus communication appears to condemn those political protests as a whole, asserting (prior to the conclusion of the promised investigation) that they were “not peaceful civil disobedience,” and that they fail to accord with a tolerable model of nonviolent political protest. Communications of this type, which conflate a protest against the Israeli military as it perpetrates a genocide with an expression of antisemitic sentiments, endangers Palestinian and Arab students and faculty on campus and emboldens and justifies attacks on Palestine solidarity protesters broadly. What is more, we fear communications such as these only contribute to the current rise in actual antisemitism. To tie Judaism to Zionism and Israel’s existence, an ideology and state based on the eradication and erasure of an indigenous people, is to create the conditions for people to assume all Jewish people support the vile and abhorrent crimes committed in the name of Israel. We know that in times of heightened violence and fear, we must be even more diligent in not falling back on oppressive frameworks to achieve justice. We commend organizers and community members who resist using anti-Arab, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and otherwise racist and sexist language in their critiques of Zionism and Western military powers’ support of genocide. Chancellor Christ’s message, by contrast, rushes to characterize protest as an exclusionary and threatening event, thereby failing to uphold UC Berkeley’s oft-proclaimed commitment to free speech values.Known worldwide as a cradle of the anti-war movement, UC Berkeley is presently home to pro-Palestinian protesters who model an ethical and moral courage that the Chancellor should commend and follow, rather than vilify and punish.
As we witness Israel’s relentless concentration and slaughter of Gazans, most recently its deadly attacks on civilians seeking aid in northern Gaza on February 29, and the increase in settler violence in the West Bank, we consider this sequence of events — along with the recently announced initiation of criminal investigations on students — to be an utter failure to Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. Indeed, the University is failing all students, faculty, and staff who, carrying the legacy of the Berkeley’s anti-war movement, stand in solidarity with Palestine.
We call on the university to cease criminal investigations into its students, and any plans of disciplinary measures against student groups. Beyond this, we call on UC Berkeley to change course entirely: to create a genuinely safe and supportive campus for all students, faculty, and staff — especially our Palestinian community members experiencing the daily pain of seeing their loved ones fight to survive under Israeli bombardment, forced relocation, and forced starvation.
