Berkeley Students Don't Have to Host Zionists
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PHOTO OF UC BERKELEY STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE
Update (12/16/2022): The Department of Education has reportedly opened an investigation into the complaint.
An Israeli government-funded law firm has partnered with a Florida lawyer to demand a federal investigation into University of California, Berkeley, alleging that the university’s recognition of the First Amendment rights of students who stand in solidarity with Palestine violates civil rights laws.
The International Legal Forum and Florida lawyer Gabriel Groisman, who have no apparent ties to the UC Berkeley community and do not claim to represent any individual students on campus, have filed a complaint demanding that the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights investigate UC Berkeley under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The complaint claims that decisions by at least nine student organizations at Berkeley Law to adopt a bylaw stating that they “will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine” were a violation of the law.
Title VI is a federal law designed to protect people from discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance, like universities. The law regulates the institutions that receive the funding and cannot be used directly against students or faculty. Israel advocacy groups have long attempted to abuse this law to force universities to silence and punish student advocacy for Palestinian liberation. These efforts have often failed, with the government finding that the First Amendment protects speech critical of the state of Israel and that such speech does not constitute a civil rights violation.
More recently, a number of universities have entered into agreements with Israel advocacy groups to drop Title VI complaints in exchange for adjustments to or reaffirmations of their anti-discrimination policies, which pro-Israel groups have then attempted to use to their advantage in later complaints against Palestine activism.
Background on the bylaw
In August 2022, Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) invited several other law student clubs to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and adopt a policy against inviting speakers who have expressed anti-Palestinian views. Since then, LSJP and allies who added the policy to their bylaws have been under relentless attack, facing personal threats and being smeared on the national stage after a pro-Israel crusader published an article accusing the university of creating “Jewish free zones.”
As a result of this misleading characterization—further fueled by comments published by UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky that mischaracterized the bylaw, implying that it might exclude Jewish students from campus activities—Palestinian students and their allies began facing harassment and threats on and around campus, with a truck featuring imagery of Hitler driving around the campus and another with a digital billboard doxxing the students whose clubs adopted the solidarity bylaw and calling them antisemites. Students also faced public demands that they be prevented from getting jobs or even being licensed to practice law, all because of their solidarity with Palestinians.
Though both university administrators and Israel advocates have attempted to describe the bylaw in a way that runs afoul of freedom of speech or anti-discrimination policies, administrators and even the attorneys who filed the Title VI complaint have admitted that forcing student groups to invite pro-Israel speakers would be a violation of the First Amendment. Instead, the lawyers who filed the complaint are pushing for the university to adopt a distorted definition of antisemitism that would mischaracterize Palestine solidarity efforts like the bylaw as a form of anti-Jewish discrimination.
The complaint is an attempt to intimidate and silence Palestinian students and their allies and to pressure the university to adopt pro-Israel policies and training programs—on top of programming it has already implemented in partnership with anti-Palestinian groups. It is also a distraction, taking time and resources away from educating and supporting students to protect the public image of the Israeli government.
UC Berkeley has a legal responsibility to vigorously defend the right of its students to engage in principled activism. The university also has a responsibility to take action to protect students against groups like the International Legal Forum that are trying to bully them into silence and to deny Palestinians students and their allies equal access to educational opportunities, simply because of their identities and their political views.