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Divided by Israel-Hamas war, Bay Area college students fear for their safety — and
Pretty fascinating with each side claiming they fear for their safety and need more mental health support along with fears of being doxxed.
Divided by Israel-Hamas war, Bay Area college students fear for their safety — and mental health
Joseph Kalan stood on a hill last week watching hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza as they chanted “Free Palestine,” and, to his ear, called for the dissolution of the Israeli state. He’s a freshman. He held an Israeli flag in his hands.
“Where do Israelis go if there’s no Israel?” he said. “What they’re saying means they hate Jews. I don’t feel safe here.”
On the other side of the plaza, Haleema Bahroocha yelled with the crowd, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the phrase that frightened Kalan. Most Jewish organizations consider the slogan antisemitic, even as many who use it defend it as a call for Palestinian freedom from decades of oppression.
Bahroocha is a graduate student. She wore a surgical mask.
“So many of us have to wear masks when we’re out here, to hide our identities,” she said. “Why do we have to do that? Because if you support Palestine, we are being doxxed, being harassed. We don’t feel safe.”
One campus. Two groups of students disagreeing not only about a bitter conflict but the very language used in the debate. And one thing in common: They are living in a moment not seen since the Vietnam War, with campuses convulsed in protests. But this time, there are painful divisions as students stage diametrically opposite protest rallies and proclaim that each is afraid of the other side.
It’s not just a fear of physical violence, though that possibility exists and universities have bulked up security measures as protesters confront each other on campuses across the state and nation. Many students say they want a different kind of protection, one not dressed in a police uniform, much less riot gear.
“We want mental health therapists — to listen to the grief that students are holding at this time,” said Celene Aridin, president of the statewide UC Student Association. The UC Davis senior is partly of Palestinian descent and is majoring in international relations and minoring in Arabic and history. “Students are not sleeping very well. You have family back home and you’re expected to go into class and act as if everything is OK.”
At a recent UC Davis student Senate meeting, students declaring allegiance to both sides of the issue yelled at each other, and someone called the police. For that reason, said Aridin, who was there, “pro-Palestinian students remained on the third floor. They didn’t feel comfortable going downstairs.”
If students on opposing sides of the debate attend a rally and don’t wear a mask, they are likely to find themselves identified and targeted on social media, she said.
Aridin said the UC systemwide student government is preparing to ask the regents for protection in the form of emotional safety — campus therapists — as well as training against doxxing, which she said has been weaponized by students on both sides. They also want the regents to issue a statement similar to one posted by UC President Michael Drake and Regents Chair Richard Leib on Oct. 9, but acknowledging “that there’s pain and suffering on both sides.”
Asked to respond, a UC spokesperson emphasized that campus safety is “of paramount concern” to Drake, the regents and campus chancellors. The university is already providing “resources to impacted students dealing with mental health and other concerns,” said the spokesperson, Ryan King, who pointed to messages sent out by UC Berkeley and UC Davis as examples.
“Our thoughts are with our students, especially at this incredibly difficult time,” he said. “We encourage students in need to seek out the appropriate support services on their campus should they be struggling.”
Navigating the Israel-Hamas war and the inflamed passions from students, faculty and alumni has been difficult for universities, many of whom have drawn searing criticism as their communications and actions risk alienating one group or another. Many universities, often led by faculty or student leaders, have sought to foster dialogue between people with opposing views, but it hasn’t been easy.
“There needs to be a real space and place to have a real conversation,” said john powell, director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, who lower-cases his name as a symbol of oneness with others. “Protest is not that. It’s theater where people deliberately try to dehumanize and polarize.”
Social media has made trolling and hate messages easier than ever to spread, and with masses dead on both sides of the Israeli-Hamas war — and Israeli troops pushing into Gaza this weekend after days of airstrikes that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack — significant moves or statements of passion often become incendiary.
At Harvard, students have been publicly shamed on websites and billboards for criticizing Israel. A New York University law student lost a job offer because she wrote an essay blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. At Stanford, a lecturer was suspended after Jewish students said he singled them out and called them “colonizers.”
“I haven’t seen anything of this scale since the 1960s,” said Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “Yes, we’ve had the George Floyd protests, Trump protests and more. But the two sides squaring off like this? No.
“What I worry about is violence,” he said. “And I worry about the fact that there seems to be no space for dialogue.”
So far, campus violence between the two sides in the Bay Area has been limited. At least two pro-Israeli protesters — including Kalan at UC Berkeley — were attacked by opponents trying to wrench their Israeli flags away from them, and at Stanford, campus police are looking into whether pro-Israel students shoved pro-Palestinian students taking down posters of kidnapped Israelis. The hostility has mostly been confined to yelling, doxxing, name-calling and hate online.
“I’m never against passion, and I have to say, we’ve lived through eras where students never seemed to get excited about anything, and that was disturbing to me,” said Heider. “But this is too much.
“Students are under so much academic pressure anyway,” he said. “To add the feeling that they can’t go on campus without feeling threatened, that just adds to the pressure. It makes the stress we had around COVID (conducting classes remotely) look simple.”
Ariel Mizrahi, a Jewish member of UC Berkeley’s student Senate, was videotaped being blocked by protesters from going to class through Sather Gate and called “a notorious Zionist” at an Oct. 16 pro-Palestinian rally. She showed the Chronicle hateful messages sent to her Instagram account including one reading, “Good thing half of y’all got wiped out by Hitler.”
“There is so much hostility making us feel uncomfortable on campus,” she said. “My community is already in mourning. The other side — they say they’re being harassed? What about us? A lot of Jewish people are liberal, but we feel lost and alone right now.”
Bahroocha, who helped organize Wednesday’s pro-Palestinian rally, occasionally shows her face at events but often shields it to keep photos of her from going online.
“We try hard to make sure, if we can, that most people’s names are not associated with any group, because their email, name, and address, anything public, gets leaked and people get harassed,” she said. “People show up to your house, talk to your employer, hassle you online. Even me — I’m a pretty public person, but I’m taking down my student profile on the graduate directory and all my social media.
“This isn’t about Muslims or being anti-Jewish,” she said, pointing out that members of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, have joined her cause’s protests. “We need to dispel the narrative that it’s us against them. It’s about stopping the killing.”
Yet that’s not how many Jewish students watching the Wednesday rally heard it. A 23-year-old American-Israeli UC Berkeley student who just finished a special forces hitch in the Israeli army said she was disturbed to hear two students at the podium refer to their Palestinian ancestors as “freedom fighters.”
“It feels like a lot of people here are calling for my death,” said the student, who asked to withhold her name out of fear for her safety. “I can’t believe these will be my classmates. There is a difference between regular Palestinians and the terrorists, but I don’t think everyone understands that either. I feel unsafe as a Jew here.”
Sarah, a pro-Palestinian graduate student who also didn’t want her full name to be printed out of concern for her safety, said she has been at a lot of protests over the years, “but I’ve never seen this kind of venom and anger before.”
“People at protests have been coming right up to our faces and taking close pictures of us,” she said. “That’s scary, horrifying, makes most students feel the need to be masked, afraid for themselves and their families. Once you label people as being outside the law and humanity, they’re no longer human and you deem them killable. That’s how it feels.”
Demonstrations like Wednesday’s are drawing bigger crowds than the pro-Israeli rallies, but security has been heavy at all of them, with uniformed campus officers augmented by private guards and plainclothes police. On Friday, a pro-Israel protest drew more than a hundred people to Sproul Plaza who displayed pictures of hostages being held in Gaza and yelled slogans like “they don’t want a two state, they want to eliminate.”
Passersby occasionally yelled “Free Palestine” or flipped off the crowd, but there was no organized counter-protest.
“I don’t know why our crowds are smaller, and why a lot of the other groups on campus don’t join us,” said freshman Shea Claridy, sitting next to a sign reading, “Our love is stronger than ur hate.” “I think a lot of kids my age jump on the bandwagon but they don’t know what they’re yelling for.
“I support the Palestinian people but I’m not for Hamas,” Claridy said. “A lot of people don’t realize the difference.”
It’s lamentable but not surprising that the disagreements are so inflamed, said powell, of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Not only does the extremism of American politics today model hostility toward compromise, but there’s a particularly anguished history to the Israeli-Palestinian divide of opinions.
“You have two groups who are frequently othered and marginalized anyway, and they are both acutely aware of the hurt and danger for their group, and less so of the other group,” he said. “There are a lot of people critical of the Jewish government, but not necessarily critical of the Jewish people. And if you’re critical of Hamas, you are not necessarily critical of the Palestinians.”
Referring to the way these complex subjects have spilled into tense stand-offs on campus, he said, “That’s not how people come together. You need to hear each other’s suffering and story.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/israel-hamas-college-student-18446004.php
Pretty fascinating with each side claiming they fear for their safety and need more mental health support along with fears of being doxxed.
Divided by Israel-Hamas war, Bay Area college students fear for their safety — and mental health
Joseph Kalan stood on a hill last week watching hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza as they chanted “Free Palestine,” and, to his ear, called for the dissolution of the Israeli state. He’s a freshman. He held an Israeli flag in his hands.
“Where do Israelis go if there’s no Israel?” he said. “What they’re saying means they hate Jews. I don’t feel safe here.”
On the other side of the plaza, Haleema Bahroocha yelled with the crowd, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the phrase that frightened Kalan. Most Jewish organizations consider the slogan antisemitic, even as many who use it defend it as a call for Palestinian freedom from decades of oppression.
Bahroocha is a graduate student. She wore a surgical mask.
“So many of us have to wear masks when we’re out here, to hide our identities,” she said. “Why do we have to do that? Because if you support Palestine, we are being doxxed, being harassed. We don’t feel safe.”
One campus. Two groups of students disagreeing not only about a bitter conflict but the very language used in the debate. And one thing in common: They are living in a moment not seen since the Vietnam War, with campuses convulsed in protests. But this time, there are painful divisions as students stage diametrically opposite protest rallies and proclaim that each is afraid of the other side.
It’s not just a fear of physical violence, though that possibility exists and universities have bulked up security measures as protesters confront each other on campuses across the state and nation. Many students say they want a different kind of protection, one not dressed in a police uniform, much less riot gear.
“We want mental health therapists — to listen to the grief that students are holding at this time,” said Celene Aridin, president of the statewide UC Student Association. The UC Davis senior is partly of Palestinian descent and is majoring in international relations and minoring in Arabic and history. “Students are not sleeping very well. You have family back home and you’re expected to go into class and act as if everything is OK.”
At a recent UC Davis student Senate meeting, students declaring allegiance to both sides of the issue yelled at each other, and someone called the police. For that reason, said Aridin, who was there, “pro-Palestinian students remained on the third floor. They didn’t feel comfortable going downstairs.”
If students on opposing sides of the debate attend a rally and don’t wear a mask, they are likely to find themselves identified and targeted on social media, she said.
Aridin said the UC systemwide student government is preparing to ask the regents for protection in the form of emotional safety — campus therapists — as well as training against doxxing, which she said has been weaponized by students on both sides. They also want the regents to issue a statement similar to one posted by UC President Michael Drake and Regents Chair Richard Leib on Oct. 9, but acknowledging “that there’s pain and suffering on both sides.”
Asked to respond, a UC spokesperson emphasized that campus safety is “of paramount concern” to Drake, the regents and campus chancellors. The university is already providing “resources to impacted students dealing with mental health and other concerns,” said the spokesperson, Ryan King, who pointed to messages sent out by UC Berkeley and UC Davis as examples.
“Our thoughts are with our students, especially at this incredibly difficult time,” he said. “We encourage students in need to seek out the appropriate support services on their campus should they be struggling.”
Navigating the Israel-Hamas war and the inflamed passions from students, faculty and alumni has been difficult for universities, many of whom have drawn searing criticism as their communications and actions risk alienating one group or another. Many universities, often led by faculty or student leaders, have sought to foster dialogue between people with opposing views, but it hasn’t been easy.
“There needs to be a real space and place to have a real conversation,” said john powell, director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, who lower-cases his name as a symbol of oneness with others. “Protest is not that. It’s theater where people deliberately try to dehumanize and polarize.”
Social media has made trolling and hate messages easier than ever to spread, and with masses dead on both sides of the Israeli-Hamas war — and Israeli troops pushing into Gaza this weekend after days of airstrikes that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack — significant moves or statements of passion often become incendiary.
At Harvard, students have been publicly shamed on websites and billboards for criticizing Israel. A New York University law student lost a job offer because she wrote an essay blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks. At Stanford, a lecturer was suspended after Jewish students said he singled them out and called them “colonizers.”
“I haven’t seen anything of this scale since the 1960s,” said Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “Yes, we’ve had the George Floyd protests, Trump protests and more. But the two sides squaring off like this? No.
“What I worry about is violence,” he said. “And I worry about the fact that there seems to be no space for dialogue.”
So far, campus violence between the two sides in the Bay Area has been limited. At least two pro-Israeli protesters — including Kalan at UC Berkeley — were attacked by opponents trying to wrench their Israeli flags away from them, and at Stanford, campus police are looking into whether pro-Israel students shoved pro-Palestinian students taking down posters of kidnapped Israelis. The hostility has mostly been confined to yelling, doxxing, name-calling and hate online.
“I’m never against passion, and I have to say, we’ve lived through eras where students never seemed to get excited about anything, and that was disturbing to me,” said Heider. “But this is too much.
“Students are under so much academic pressure anyway,” he said. “To add the feeling that they can’t go on campus without feeling threatened, that just adds to the pressure. It makes the stress we had around COVID (conducting classes remotely) look simple.”
Ariel Mizrahi, a Jewish member of UC Berkeley’s student Senate, was videotaped being blocked by protesters from going to class through Sather Gate and called “a notorious Zionist” at an Oct. 16 pro-Palestinian rally. She showed the Chronicle hateful messages sent to her Instagram account including one reading, “Good thing half of y’all got wiped out by Hitler.”
“There is so much hostility making us feel uncomfortable on campus,” she said. “My community is already in mourning. The other side — they say they’re being harassed? What about us? A lot of Jewish people are liberal, but we feel lost and alone right now.”
Bahroocha, who helped organize Wednesday’s pro-Palestinian rally, occasionally shows her face at events but often shields it to keep photos of her from going online.
“We try hard to make sure, if we can, that most people’s names are not associated with any group, because their email, name, and address, anything public, gets leaked and people get harassed,” she said. “People show up to your house, talk to your employer, hassle you online. Even me — I’m a pretty public person, but I’m taking down my student profile on the graduate directory and all my social media.
“This isn’t about Muslims or being anti-Jewish,” she said, pointing out that members of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, have joined her cause’s protests. “We need to dispel the narrative that it’s us against them. It’s about stopping the killing.”
Yet that’s not how many Jewish students watching the Wednesday rally heard it. A 23-year-old American-Israeli UC Berkeley student who just finished a special forces hitch in the Israeli army said she was disturbed to hear two students at the podium refer to their Palestinian ancestors as “freedom fighters.”
“It feels like a lot of people here are calling for my death,” said the student, who asked to withhold her name out of fear for her safety. “I can’t believe these will be my classmates. There is a difference between regular Palestinians and the terrorists, but I don’t think everyone understands that either. I feel unsafe as a Jew here.”
Sarah, a pro-Palestinian graduate student who also didn’t want her full name to be printed out of concern for her safety, said she has been at a lot of protests over the years, “but I’ve never seen this kind of venom and anger before.”
“People at protests have been coming right up to our faces and taking close pictures of us,” she said. “That’s scary, horrifying, makes most students feel the need to be masked, afraid for themselves and their families. Once you label people as being outside the law and humanity, they’re no longer human and you deem them killable. That’s how it feels.”
Demonstrations like Wednesday’s are drawing bigger crowds than the pro-Israeli rallies, but security has been heavy at all of them, with uniformed campus officers augmented by private guards and plainclothes police. On Friday, a pro-Israel protest drew more than a hundred people to Sproul Plaza who displayed pictures of hostages being held in Gaza and yelled slogans like “they don’t want a two state, they want to eliminate.”
Passersby occasionally yelled “Free Palestine” or flipped off the crowd, but there was no organized counter-protest.
“I don’t know why our crowds are smaller, and why a lot of the other groups on campus don’t join us,” said freshman Shea Claridy, sitting next to a sign reading, “Our love is stronger than ur hate.” “I think a lot of kids my age jump on the bandwagon but they don’t know what they’re yelling for.
“I support the Palestinian people but I’m not for Hamas,” Claridy said. “A lot of people don’t realize the difference.”
It’s lamentable but not surprising that the disagreements are so inflamed, said powell, of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Not only does the extremism of American politics today model hostility toward compromise, but there’s a particularly anguished history to the Israeli-Palestinian divide of opinions.
“You have two groups who are frequently othered and marginalized anyway, and they are both acutely aware of the hurt and danger for their group, and less so of the other group,” he said. “There are a lot of people critical of the Jewish government, but not necessarily critical of the Jewish people. And if you’re critical of Hamas, you are not necessarily critical of the Palestinians.”
Referring to the way these complex subjects have spilled into tense stand-offs on campus, he said, “That’s not how people come together. You need to hear each other’s suffering and story.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/israel-hamas-college-student-18446004.php
