May 5, 2024: Professor Dov Waxman's opinion piece is published by Haaretz.

Click Here to read Professor Waxman's article on Haaretz.com.

"How did it come to this," I asked myself, as I ran between two large, seething crowds, one pro-Palestinian, the other pro-Israel, on the UCLA campus last Sunday. For hours I tried to separate them even as they lurched towards one another.

The trauma of October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza hung heavily over us. I saw Jewish teenagers screaming, "Bring back our hostages" and pro-Palestinian protesters, their faces masked by kaffiyehs, chanting "One, two three, four, we don't want your dirty war. Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state." The anger was palpable, the animosity visceral, as protesters and counter-protesters yelled insults and taunts at each other.

I wasn't trained for this, I'm a professor. I'm supposed to be teaching students and doing research, not doing crowd control, I thought as I tried to prevent the mounting tensions from escalating into physical violence.

I was heartbroken and appalled when that was precisely what happened two days later.

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 protest against Israel, including by establishing protest encampments, such as the one that UCLA students erected (albeit without the university's authorization and in violation of its rules).

I didn't want their protest encampment to be forcefully dismantled by the police, whose propensity for excessive force is well-established.

I also didn't want the students—some of whom I had taught —to be arrested. I knew many protesting were there because they were horrified by the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which they considered to be a genocide. I share their horror at the carnage in Gaza, but not their characterization of it as genocide. I, too, want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but unlike them, I don't hold Israel solely responsible for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. I also blame Hamas. The protesters, not only refuse to hold Hamas accountable in any way, some of their chants implicitly endorse or at least condone Hamas's terrorism. In fact, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), one of the student organizations leading the protest at UCLA and on other American campuses, even celebrated the October 7 massacre.

SJP was exploiting the sympathy that many students rightly feel for the suffering of Palestinians to advance their radical agenda, which goes well beyond saving Palestinian lives and stopping the war in Gaza. They don't simply want to end the war. They want to eradicate Israel and possibly even expel Israeli Jews. For them, Israel is a racist, fundamentally illegitimate product of settler-colonialism, against which, they believe, "resistance by all means necessary" is legitimate, even if that means violence against Israeli civilians.

To my dismay, the student protesters were either unaware of SJP's extremism, willing to overlook it, or embraced it themselves. Far from supporting Palestinians, this only helps those seeking to portray the entire pro-Palestinian movement as pro-Hamas and thereby discredits all activism in support of Palestinian rights.

By allowing themselves to be led by such radical groups, and adopting their maximalist and belligerent rhetoric, the students were unwittingly alienating potential allies among the growing number of Americans who oppose Israel's war in Gaza and are horrified at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there.

I also took issue with the far-reaching demands of the protest organizers, which included severing "all UC-wide connections to Israeli universities, including study abroad programs, fellowships, seminars, and research collaborations, and UCLA's Nazarian Center."

As the director of the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, which is solely devoted to the academic study of Israel and has no ties to the Israeli government, I found this demand especially egregious. I also oppose boycotting Israeli academic institutions, and academic boycotts in general because they violate academic freedom. UCLA has many ties with Israeli universities. These ties facilitate faculty research and enable our students to study in Israel.

Severing these ties would only jeopardize this research and limit students' learning opportunities, not advance the Palestinian cause. In any case, this demand was bound to be rejected by UCLA's leadership. Similarly, their demand for the university to divest from Israel appeared unattainable, given how university endowments operate and how many companies do business in Israel or rely on its products, especially technology.

I also feared the encampment would exacerbate the insecurity and anxiety felt by many Jewish students and faculty at UCLA since October 7. Some students have told me how frightened they are to express support for Israel or even identify as Jewish publicly. I've listened to numerous complaints of harassment, intimidation, and bullying (I've also heard how Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students have been harassed and doxed).

To be sure, not all Jewish students at UCLA felt this way. Some took part in the encampment – primarily, members of Jewish Voice for Peace. This doesn't negate the insecurity other Jewish students felt, but it challenges the simplistic narrative some Jewish advocacy groups presented depicting student protesters as an antisemitic mob. The reality, as always, is more complex.

Those I met were not motivated by antisemitism and were not specifically targeting Jewish students. Still, the protesters did vilify "Zionists," exclude them from their encampment, and even occasionally prevent those they identified as Zionists from just walking past their encampment to get to class. Since most Jewish students identify to some extent as Zionists, or at least have an attachment to Israel, this amounts to de facto discrimination against them (albeit not simply because they are Jewish).

It was supposedly concern for the safety of Jewish students that prompted the Israeli-American Council and Los Angeles Jewish Federation to organize a counter-demonstration last Sunday, directly opposite the protest encampment. It was this event that brought more than 1,000 people who were not members of the UCLA community to campus, significantly heightening tensions. And it was there that I had been frantically trying to keep the sides apart.

University security ignored the warning signs of looming violence and late Tuesday night stood by while a group of mostly masked men wielding sticks, and launching fireworks, attacked the protest encampment, beating protesters as well as student journalists. For hours, they laid siege, terrorizing the students huddled behind their makeshift barricades. This assault, perpetrated most likely by outside "pro-Israel" agitators, shocked everyone at UCLA, whatever their views about the encampment.

After this attack, which resulted in massive media attention and political pressure, UCLA's administration requested police clear the encampment, when students refused to leave. Another night of unprecedented violence followed when local law enforcement officers in full riot gear, eventually stormed the encampment, reportedly firing stun grenades and rubber bullets. Numerous protesters were injured, over 200 were arrested.

This was the outcome I had feared.

Now, the UCLA encampment is gone, the debris cleared. But it will take time for the climate on campus to improve. No one has a clear plan for repairing the damage that has been done, to heal the trauma of students who endured the violence, or to bridge the divide that is now wider than ever between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students. Whatever healing and reconciliation is possible is unlikely to happen while the war in Gaza continues.

I fear more universities and colleges will become sites of conflict and violence, to the glee of rightwing politicians and media who seize upon this turmoil to fear-monger for political gain and smear higher education as a hotbed of leftwing extremism and antisemitism to advance their own reactionary agenda.

Outside pro-Israel groups will likely also continue to use these unruly student-led protests to call for harsh crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses, ostensibly to fight antisemitism, while pro-Palestinian groups like SJP will recruit and potentially radicalize more students. Students and faculty will suffer the consequences of this intensifying proxy war on campus, while the actual war in Gaza—the truly deadly and destructive one—will grind on, unaffected by the campus tumult thousands of miles away.

We too need a truce. We need pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students to engage in respectful dialogue, to have nuanced discussions, and to learn more about the history and complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which defies simplistic slogans and easy solutions. And we need to ensure that all students are safe, irrespective of their beliefs and identities. Their fears must be alleviated and their needs prioritized, not politicized by external actors with their own agendas.

Dov Waxman is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies and the director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His most recent book is The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). On Twitter: @DovWaxman