This spring, we watched with disgust as radical anti-Israel protesters set up camp and wreaked havoc at one elite university after another. They made life miserable not only for Jewish students, but for everyone else on campus: Classes were forced online, graduation ceremonies were canceled. At Columbia, even the janitors couldn’t escape the mob of “smarmy, sort of entitled, spoiled, bratty occupiers.”
It was frustrating to see these once-esteemed institutions descend into chaos while school administrators sat on their hands.
UCLA was one of the worst offenders. For days on end, the school stood by while its Jewish students were harassed, assaulted, and intimidated by pro-Hamas agitators camped out in a major thoroughfare on school grounds in late April. There was no response from “any kind of authority or law enforcement”:
The school leadership could have shut it all down on day one but refused to take responsibility.
But now, finally, in a hard-hitting lawsuit filed by Becket Law and superstar lawyers Paul D. Clement and Erin E. Murphy, three Jewish students are asking a federal court to hold UCLA to account. Their complaint alleges a barrage of constitutional and civil rights violations by the school administrators.
Months before the encampments started, the school signaled its willingness to accede to the pro-Hamas agitators, according to the lawsuit. It was already clear on October 8 that, rather than elicit sympathy, the barbaric attack in southern Israel the day before unleashed rabid, pent-up Jew hatred at UCLA, as on other college campuses. And at UCLA, the school did nothing to stop it, the complaint says:
Instead, UCLA officials routinely turned their backs on Jewish students, aiding and abetting a culture that has allowed calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people, Nazi symbolism, and religious slurs to go unchecked.
Things went from bad to worse after anti-Israel activists set up an encampment at Columbia University on April 17, 2024. As if on cue, students and outside agitators at other elite schools, including UCLA, set up their own copycat “tentifadas.”
On April 25th, the lawsuit says, UCLA allowed activists to set up an encampment with metal barricades in the center of campus where protesters chanted antisemitic threats like “death to the Jews,” “death to Israel,” and “intifada revolution.”
UCLA’s tolerance emboldened the pro-Hamas mob even further, according to the complaint. With the school looking on, and even facilitating them, the activists created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” that effectively barred both students and faculty from going to their classes, offices, and the library.
To get by the encampment, you had to pass a loyalty test—and disavow Israel—the complaint says:
To enter the Jew Exclusion Zone, a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ views and have someone within the encampment “vouch” for the individual’s fidelity to the activists’ cause. … [T]he practical effect was to deny the overwhelming majority of Jews access to the heart of the campus.
And yet, the school directed campus security not to intervene. Instead, they became part of the problem, according to the lawsuit:
Campus security staff, acting as agents of Defendants, directed students away from the encampment and, in some cases, stated that they needed permission from the activists to access the encampment, essentially acting as force multipliers to the activists manning the barricades.
The complaint says the school did not step in until violence escalated between the encampment and counter-protesters. Even then, it allowed the encampment to stay in place for days.
The Jewish students—two in the law school and one undergraduate—describe how UCLA’s refusal to remove the faculty-supported, school-facilitated “Jew Exclusion Zone” made it impossible for them to study, go to class, or simply meet with friends on campus.
As one of the law students put it, that’s not what they came to UCLA for:
I chose to attend this university to receive an education. If I had known I would be faced with extreme antisemitism on a daily basis, I would have committed elsewhere. I have not been able to sit in class and learn for the past 34 days, especially when these students sit behind me in my classes four days a week with their Palestinian resistance/terrorist scarves (and only seconds before class is to begin, they are chanting for the genocide of my people).
The students are asking the court to declare that UCLA violated their constitutional rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and the California Constitution; and their statutory civil rights under Title VI, Sections 1983, 1985, and 1986 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, the California Education Code, the Ralph Civil Rights Act of 1976, and the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act. And they request an injunction to prohibit the school from doing so again.
“If masked agitators had excluded any other marginalized group at UCLA, Governor Newsom rightly would have sent in the National Guard immediately,” said Becket President Mark Rienzi in a statement. “But UCLA instead caved to the antisemitic activists and allowed its Jewish students to be segregated from the heart of their own campus.”
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