Continuing impact of the Israel-Hamas war on American college campuses

The new semester is due to start in just a week, and in addition to the usual anxieties about beginning classes (getting my syllabi finished, figuring out what the assignments should be, thinking about the effects of AI on my students' learning and writing....), I'm also worried about the continuing impact of the Israel-Hamas war on the campus atmosphere and experience. One of the two (at least) pro-Palestinian groups at my college has just announced on their Instagram page that they're back, "stand[ing] alongside over 300 chapters at colleges and universities across the country fighting for Palestinian liberation." Based on what they wrote on social media and said at various protests in the last academic year, their vision for Palestinian liberation leaves no room for the continued existence of the state of Israel, which makes me wonder what they think will happen to the seven million Jewish citizens of Israel if their vision is fulfilled.

While the pro-Palestinian groups at my college tried to disrupt accepted students' day activities in the spring semester, held a few meetings and a public rally, their activities paled in comparison to what happened at many other universities across the US. 

Three Jewish students at UCLA sued the university because, they contend, it did not protect their right to freely move on campus and engage in activities like going to the library to study. In the spring semester, pro-Palestinian students set up encampments that they refused to let Jewish students pass through on their way to the library and other places. The Jewish students claim that they would have had to renounce their support for Israel in order to be able to pass. 

The New York Times article on the suit gives these details on how the Jewish students were treated:

The complaint against U.C.L.A., filed by Yitzchok Frankel, Joshua Ghayoum and Eden Shemuelian, detailed what the students experienced during the spring protests. Calling the encampment and the surrounding area “the Jew Exclusion Zone,” the complaint said students were often asked if they were Zionist and were denied passage for wearing a Star of David necklace. The complaint also described Mr. Ghayoum being denied entrance to a building because he was not wearing a red wristband, which demonstrators handed out to identify students they allowed in.

David Lat, who writes the Substack newsletter "Original Jurisdiction" reports today that Judge Mark Scarsi's preliminary injunction (issued on August 13), "prohibits the university 'from knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities, and campus areas.'" 

This is the first paragraph of the decision:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion. 

The whole decision is available here: Judge Scarsi's decision

Lat continues:

Considering the circumstances described by Judge Scarsi, you’d think that UCLA wouldn’t have fought this. But apparently it did, with a university spokesperson telling the New York Times that the injunction “is improper and would hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground”—because UCLA needs the freedom to knowingly allow or facilitate the exclusion of Jewish students from parts of campus.