BERKELEY, CA — As the fate of Palestinians remains uncertain, UC Berkeley students are reiterating their protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
After the movement that started with an encampment of approximately 200 tents in front of Sproul Hall last April won some concessions in negotiations with the university, including the establishment of a Palestinian studies program, activists say the fight for complete divestment is not finished.
During the protests, the four main demands of the University from the pro-Palestine camp were written on a banner hung over the Savio steps.
Activists demanded an end to the silence regarding the genocide in Gaza; an academic boycott; an end to the repression of Palestinian students and their allies; and financial divestment from companies tied to the Israeli occupation.
Today’s organizers are making a point of building on Berkeley’s 60 year history of political organizing and civil dissent born of a sense of anger at global injustice among students.
Zaid Yousef, a law student at Berkeley and member of the Muslim Student Association, was part of the original encampment last spring.
He said discussion of past movements was “undoubtedly” a common theme within the encampment programming.
“We’re recognizing a history of activism in California, in the Bay, on the UC Berkeley campus, and even in the exact spot where we had the encampments,” Yousef explained.
“Sproul Plaza, beginning with the Free Speech movement, going to the anti-apartheid encampments and then the Occupy movement — there’s a continuity there,” he continued. “It’s the idea of students pushing back against injustice. And honestly, it’s a continuity of students being eventually vindicated for their stance.”
Yousef pointed out Mario Savio, the iconic leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement who was arrested with 800 others on the Sproul Hall steps that now bear his name on a plaque.
The anti-Vietnam war protests, the Third World Liberation Front strikes and the anti-South Africa apartheid movement all similarly bore police resistance while being later celebrated by the university.
While the Board of Regents, the UC system’s governing body, have not yet wholly embraced the pro-Palestinian activists’ demands, the Associated Student Body and the Graduate Assembly both voted unanimously to divest from Israel last fall.
Similar to present demands, students protesting the South African apartheid in 1985 also demanded that the UC Regents divest billions from an apartheid government.
While the University of California eventually voted in favor of divestment in 1986 — at the time, the largest such decision from a university in the U.S. — this came only after police arrested 158 protestors amid massive class walkouts.
Last year’s pro-Palestine camp was largely left alone by law enforcement.
The only associated arrests involved 12 students who occupied UC Berkeley’s abandoned Anna Head Hall in May, one day after protesters voluntarily dismantled the Sproul Hall encampment.
Yousef said the nonviolent nature of this movement surrounding the Berkeley encampment owed both to veterans of past movements and to experienced community members and faculty who advised them on de-escalation techniques.
“How do you manage an encampment of several hundred people, in terms of food, in terms of sanitation, in terms of all of these things? This all came from people with previous movement experience at Berkeley, at nearby People’s Park, more recently Occupy and Black Lives Matter,” said Yousef.
The University’s lightness in student suppression stood in stark contrast to most other American universities with pro-Palestinian encampments last year, including UCLA, UC Irvine and Columbia, all of which saw heavy police aggression and violent standoffs.
UC Berkeley’s then-Chancellor Carol Christ was one of the few major college leaders in the country able to hold face-to-face negotiations with the students at the encampment. Although contentious, they were ultimately productive.
Christ acknowledged the horrors in Gaza during the school-wide commencement in May, called for a ceasefire and, in a May 14 letter to the encampment, encouraged exploring possible divestments — a drastic difference from the many college leaders that were fired or pressured to resign in the wake of campus protests.
UC Berkeley law professor Richard Buxbaum, a defense attorney for the Free Speech Movement’s defense team and a witness to the Gaza protests, described a history of university leadership being “a day late and a dollar short throughout history.”
“If they lurch into a response, often they have to backtrack, as has happened recently, and as in the Free Speech days,” said Buxbaum. “They were always taking a hard line, and then having to collapse that line, taking the second-hardest line and having to collapse that, and so on. It’s a question of how the university administration can respond appropriately and timely.”
Christ retired in June 2024.
That August, UC President Michael Drake issued a UC system-wide statement that undid any goodwill the retired Berkeley chancellor may have garnered with student protestors.
Drake directed all UC chancellors to form policies banning encampments and overnight demonstrations. Included in that statement was a masking ban, in which anybody wearing a face cover near a protest was prohibited from refusing to show identification to university officials.
To Yousef and many other activists, Drake’s directive exemplified the UC forgetting its own history, replacing overt violence with the suppression of freedom of speech.
“Berkeley is well aware of its brand, of its status as the supposed bastion of free speech and of protest in general,” said Yousef. “The administration under Christ recognized the bad PR that would come about by siccing police officers against an encampment literally established on the Mario Salvio steps.
Yusuf saw himself and peers today as just the latest in this history of civil dissent. Like the older activists who advised these current demonstrations, he anticipated helping future student protestors.
“There’s no end to the fight for justice. There’s no pause, even. There’s generations that come and go,” he explained. “But I do see the continuity between anti-apartheid in the 1980s to the Palestinians of today. And I always hope for a world where everyone lives in peace.”
“The next generation will always have causes to fight for, and they will look to us for inspiration.We hope to be the inspiration for them by succeeding,” he added.
“In 1964, institutional responses were clumsy. Clumsy responses are unfortunately a given, no matter what the provocation that causes them, ” said Buxbaum, contrasting this with Christ: “She was able to get out in front and actually speak with students about this. Very few of the other leaders did.”
Echoing the ‘60’s with a smile, he paraphrased Frank Zappa to sum up his view: “If you understand the significance of something you’re in the middle of, then you’re not experiencing it.”
