From the UCLA campus, where encampments of student protestors against the war in Gaza are facing police action and removal, Professor Dov Waxman writes that he supports the rights of students to peacefully protest and that — as a Jew — he does not feel threatened by the students occupying the campus.
Waxman understands the frustration of students who, he says, are “horrified by the mass killing and near-famine in Gaza and want it to end.”
Waxman counts himself among those who want the violence to end, but Waxman says that while he too is against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and other aspects of Israeli policy that the students object to, he cannot join the campus protest movement, citing two main reasons.
First, part of the student demands include the discontinuation of the university’s relationship with Israeli academic institutions and the shuttering of UCLA’s Nazarian Center, which Waxman directs.
Second, Waxman points out that the protests are being run in large part by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and that the SJP supports Hamas, which Waxman says is unacceptable. (Hamas, he reminds, is not synonymous with the Palestinian people and indeed is very often the enemy of those people it purports to lead and represent — “willing to sacrifice countless Palestinian lives—’martyrs’—for their cause, which is the ultimate eradication of Israel.”)
I’m a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a longtime advocate for peace and for Palestinian rights. I have publicly opposed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and its blockade and now destruction of Gaza. I support the rights of students and faculty to peacefully…
— Dov Waxman (@DovWaxman) April 28, 2024
[Waxman writes: “I know that many people in the pro-Palestinian movement don’t support Hamas and don’t praise the October 7 massacre, but groups like SJP lead the movement on many college campuses, exploiting the sympathy that many students rightly feel for the suffering of Palestinians. Students and faculty demonstrating in support of Palestinians shouldn’t ignore the fact that the organizers of these demonstrations are, in many cases, ideologically committed to eradicating Israel and expelling Israeli Jews.”]
Waxman shared the student list (shown below) of five demands: Divest, Disclose, Abolish Policing (of pro-Palestinian advocacy), End The Silence, Boycott. The latter concerns the Nazarian Center and calls to sever “all UC-wide connections to Israeli universities.”
These demands were posted on the Instagram of UCLA’s SJP chapter: https://t.co/TZ9EFmfckj pic.twitter.com/T1ZGZZoiNN
— Dov Waxman (@DovWaxman) April 30, 2024