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Tower Magazine: Pro-Israel Students at UCLA “Attacked, Singled Out and Targeted”

In Why Are Student Leaders and Jewish Bruins Under Attack at UCLA?, which appears in the June 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, UCLA student Tessa Nath gives an in-person account of the ways that anti-Israel activists contributed to a destructive campus atmosphere.

She describes how she felt as she waited to speak at a recent Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) meeting about divesting from Israel, preparing “to carve out a place for myself in a university that was threatening to stifle not only my voice, but also my identity and my connection to the Jewish homeland.”  A pro-Israel student leader was quoted lamenting that he “felt personally attacked, singled-out and targeted because of my views.” While the vote on the divestment resolution failed despite the intimidation of the anti-Israel activists, their attacks have an effect on the UCLA student body, as Nath writes towards the end of her essay.

With that, we arrive at the current state of affairs at UCLA. We are making local, national, and international news—something that is usually a cause for celebration. But in this case, it is a cause for self-evaluation and peacemaking between campus communities. The current situation is, quite simply, intolerable. UCLA has turned into a microcosm of world politics, with all sides speaking past each other in an attempt to be heard, confusing and exasperating unaffiliated onlookers. For myself and other Jewish and pro-Israel students, the atmosphere is poisonous. We feel attacked, ostracized, and threatened. Our identities are being rejected and our right to express our beliefs endangered. Our academic performance is being harmed unjustly; and our supporters are now targets of hate campaigns, baseless accusations, and unfair political and social retaliation.

The hateful intimidation that marked the UCLA divestment fight has been apparent at other institutions. In Staring Down the Devil at the University of Michigan, which appeared in the April 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Molly Rosen reported that “[s]tudents who opposed the boycott efforts were targeted—subject to derogatory tweets, targeted with slanderous names, and abused for how they express their personal and even religious beliefs.” And as Howard Wohl, president of Brooklyn College Hillel, observed in Why Liberals Must Repudiate the BDS Movement, which was published in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine: “On the BDS issue, for example, many critics of Israel who are not political extremists feel suffocated and abused by their more extreme colleagues.” [Photo: Alton / WikiCommons ]