Issue 9: Solidarity with Students for Justice in Palestine
Rank and File for a Democratic Union condemns yesterday’s interim suspension of UCLA’s undergraduate and graduate chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. As the University of California administration grows increasingly detached from its ostensible goal of educating the student body, and increasingly invested in extracting profits from the students and workers of this institution, we are witnessing an alarming expansion in both the administration’s use of violent force, and its manipulation of truth to justify these repressive tactics. The administration’s decision to suspend the SJP and Grad SJP is a clear indication of this trend.
UC students have long protested the University of California Regents (the unelected body of businessmen that manage the university’s investments and, as recently as 2017, have been caught skimming university funds) because they invest a portion of the UC’s multi-billion dollar investment portfolio into weapons and surveillance corporations that provide material support for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. In the 1980s, UC students protested the regents until they divested from material support for the South African apartheid regime. In 2020, the UC divested its holdings in fossil fuel corporations, after an eight-year campaign by students and workers across the UC. Protesting outside the homes of political and corporate leaders is a common tactic. As recently as 2022, the graduate student workers’ union, UAW 4811 (then UAW 2865), protested outside of Regent Jay Sures’s Brentwood home.
This was one of the many tactics that our union employed during the strike to force the UC administration and the regents to bargain, and concede massive wage increases to their graduate workers. This protest did not result in any of the performative outrage and disciplinary measures we see today. So what changed?
In April 2024, the administration watched as Zionist agitators attacked the pro-Palestinian student encampment three nights in a row. It is fortunate that the students were willing to and capable of defending themselves, and the Zionists were forced to retreat every night. After the third night of attacks, the UC administration ordered a massive police response: They deployed ~300 city and state police to the campus, fired off bean bag rounds and percussive grenades, and arrested over 200 pro-Palestinian protestors. California Highway Patrol officers beat students with batons, and fired “less-than-lethal” rounds into the crowd. Multiple students sustained severe injuries after being struck in the head, while another student had their finger completely blown off.
After this violent repression of peaceful pro-Palestinian anti-genocide demonstrators, the UC did everything in its power to prevent further protests. The UC instituted a new, harsh curfew and a strict Time/Place/Manner policy that relegated legal protests to a tiny sliver of land amounting to <3% of campus, which they ironically named the “Free Speech Zone.”
Anti-genocide protestors continued to try their peaceful tactics on campus and were met, again and again, by a rapid and violent response from the UC administration and their police. Notably, the anti-genocide students’ attempt to celebrate Sukkot (a Jewish harvest festival) on October 21, 2024 resulted in the deployment of every single UCPD officer on payroll, who–if not foiled by the quick evacuation of the students–would surely have attempted to arrest and beat the demonstrators.
The UC has successfully criminalized peaceful protest on campus. In these circumstances, it is only logical that anti-genocide student groups chose to avoid campus, and hold a demonstration outside campus property. Faced with this circumvention, the UC now seeks to abolish the student groups themselves.
The UC has deployed hundreds of police to campus, again and again, in an attempt to maim, injure, and arrest its own students. Are we to believe the students are violent? The UC has condemned peaceful protests as violence, while standing firm by their own commitment to police brutality. Are we to believe anything they say? Finally, we ask if the UC truly believes that the Time/Place/Manner policies and suspensions of SJP and GSJP will put an end to the protests. Are we to believe that students will fear a little more repression? Are we to believe that, faced with the impossibility of peaceful demonstrations, the students will not turn to more aggressive tactics?
The UC’s latest claims are no more than a pretext for a ban on the SJP that they have long been planning. Just as their demonization of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment laid the groundwork for violently dismantling it, their attempt to paint the SJP as violent is again laying the groundwork for more repression. The actions by the UC administration play directly into the hands of the far-right Trump regime, which aims to criminalize protest and crush the anti-genocide movement with police violence.
Rank and File for a Democratic Union (UAW 4811) stands with Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, and stands with their commitment to material divestment from arms, occupation, and apartheid. To the university administration, and the unelected regents, who everyday exploit their UAW, AFSCME, UPTE, AFT, Teamsters, and unaffiliated workers and deny them fair pay, who everyday seek to extract more wealth from their students while providing as little education, food, and housing as they can in return, who everyday hide behind police as their institution rots from within: We wish you best of luck; your tenure will soon end.