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California College Campuses Convulsed in Protest During Israel-Hamas War 

NY Times, Soumya Karlamangla, 11-7-23

Two U.C. Berkeley professors who disagree on Israel and Palestine came together to encourage peace on campus. 

Tensions have been especially high on university campuses since the war between Israel and Hamas began a month ago. 

The police were called to a U.C. Davis student Senate meeting after students supporting Israel and Palestine began shouting at one another. Stanford Law School moved classes online for a day because of students’ concerns about their safety. On Friday, an Arab Muslim student at Stanford University was hurt in a hit-and-run crash that’s being investigated as a hate crime. 

Some have compared the scale of campus protests to demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but there’s a key difference. This time, there are deeper divisions among students, as the conflict has widened a yawning gulf between those supporting Israel and Palestine. 

Many students disagree about how to even talk about the violence, and feelings are heightened by grief as deaths continue to mount in the Middle East. Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 killed 1,400 people, and the Israeli government has since unleashed a devastating barrage of airstrikes against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where health officials say more than 10,000 people are now dead. You can follow the latest Times coverage of the war here. 

At U.C. Berkeley, a campus famous for its political activism, students on both sides have reported that they’ve been threatened and doxxed. Many wear masks to protests for fear of being identified and harassed on social media. 

The debate has been polarizing. A Berkeley law professor wrote an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal calling for firms not to hire his “antisemitic law students.” A group of 300 U.C. faculty members, including many at U.C. Berkeley, wrote a letter condemning the university system’s use of the word “terrorism” to describe Hamas’s attacks on Israel. 

After a conflict on U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza between Jewish students and students opposed to Israel’s actions, in which a campus rabbi even took a few blows, Ron Hassner, a professor of Israel studies, had an idea to try to encourage peace at the university. He emailed Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in Middle Eastern languages and cultures and Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, to ask if he would want to co-write a statement calling for students to treat one another with dignity and respect. 

The two men teach in the same building and are cordial to each other, but they disagree vehemently on Israel and Palestine. They share no common ground — and that was exactly the point of coming together to collaborate, they told me. 

U.C. Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, emailed their joint statement to the student body. It reads, in part: “We will not tolerate our students harming one another. Disagreement and differing points of view are an essential part of campus life, and we expect that you treat one another with the same respect and dignity that we are modeling here.” 

The statement is spare, in part because there is so little the men agree on, including the language to characterize the violence in the Middle East. When I contacted them about a joint phone interview last week, they each said they preferred to speak separately with me.       

“The wounds are open, and we are grieving,” Hassner told me by email. “The significance of the letter, in my mind, is not that we are friendly colleagues who joined forces for peace but rather that we are not. Writing that letter together was very hard for both of us.” 

Bazian told me that their statement wasn’t meant to change people’s minds about the conflict, but to dissuade students from resorting to violence. “With the type of intensity of what is taking place in Gaza, I think the temperature of the campus is at a high critical level,” he said. “We want to make sure that everyone has the space to express themselves without actually crossing any boundaries that they would regret.” 

Hassner said he was clinging to the statement as a sliver of optimism in a dark time. He said he had been moved to tears when Bazian agreed to write it with him. 

He told me: “It seemed to me like a moment of hope for academia — that there’s something that can be saved if two professors who disagree about everything can agree that academia is sacred. Then at least we’re standing on a solid foundation. And that gives me a lot of hope.” 

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/us/california-campus-israel-hamas.html.

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Below is the joint statement:

To our students, We are two professors on this campus who disagree, vehemently. But we have always treated one another with respect and dignity. We love this campus with its diverse communities and all of our students and are heartbroken to hear of incidents of near violence between students in recent days. We will not tolerate our students harming one another. Disagreement and differing points of view are an essential part of campus life, and we expect that you treat one another with the same respect and dignity that we are modeling here.

Dr. Hatem Bazian (Lecturer of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies); Dr. Ron Hassner (Professor of Israel Studies)

Source: https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/12/a-call-for-community-on-campus.