For the first time, a US judge has ruled against a university over the pro-Palestinian protests that took place on college campuses early this year.
Judge Mark Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction ordering that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) cannot allow anti-Israel protesters to block Jewish students from accessing classes and other parts of the campus. He prohibited the university from providing classes and access to buildings on campus if Jewish students are blocked from accessing them. He had earlier ordered UCLA to create a plan to protect Jewish students.
He had been hearing a lawsuit filed in June by three Jewish UCLA students: Yitzchok Frankel, Joshua Ghayoum and Eden Shemuelian. They alleged that they had experienced discrimination on campus at the height of the protests because of their ethnicity and faith and that the university had failed to ensure free access on campus for all Jewish students.
The judge said that pro-Palestinian activists had set up an encampment with “established checkpoints which required passers-by to wear a specific wristband to cross them,” and blocking “people who supported the existence of the state of Israel” from entering the encampment and other areas of the campus.
In their complaint, the Jewish students called the encampment and the surrounding area the Jew Exclusion Zone and claimed they were often asked if they were Zionist and were denied passage for wearing a Star of David necklace. Mr. Ghayoum was denied entrance to a building because he was not wearing a red wristband, which demonstrators handed out to identify students they allowed in.
Judge Scarsi said constitutional protections for religious freedom prohibited the university from allowing such encampments to stand if they prevented the campus from being “fully and equally accessible to Jewish students.”
“Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating,” said the judge.
The university had argued that it “has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.” But the judge said it did not matter who blocked the students.
Lawyers for the Jewish students said the injunction was the first in the nation against what they called an anti-Semitic encampment. “A public university is not allowed to have facilities and parts of the campus that are closed off to Jews,” said lawyer Mark Rienzi.
Law student Yitzchok Frankel hailed the judge’s decision: “No student should ever have to fear being blocked from their campus because they are Jewish. I am grateful that the court has ordered UCLA to put a stop to this shameful anti-Jewish conduct.”
UCLA said that since the protests, it had taken remedial actions for students’ safety, such as creating a new Office of Campus Safety, according to court papers. Judge Scarsi was sceptical that those measures were enough to prevent similar blockades, as students and faculty are set to return to campus next month.
He noted that the constitutional problems would arise if the university again allowed protests that blocked parts of the campus for Jewish students. “Given the risk that protests will return in the fall that will again restrict certain Jewish students’ access to ordinarily available programs, activities and campus areas, the court finds that plaintiffs are likely to suffer an irreparable injury absent a preliminary injunction,” his order declared.
