UCLA ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» Students, Alum: Pro-Palestinian Encampment Turned Campus Into “War Zone” (2024)

• By Aaron Bandler
• Published May 7, 2024

Two UCLA ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students and an alumnus described how the pro-Palestinian encampment turned the campus into a “war zone” in interviews with the Journal, with one student claiming they were assaulted by members of the encampment.

Kian Kohanteb, co-president of Bruins for Israel Public Affairs Committee (BIPAC), told the Journal in a May 3 phone interview that “it’s been definitely a very hostile campus for ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students on campus” since Oct. 7. “All the rallies, students have been ostracized from their clubs, students have been walking to classes through protests with antisemitic slogans such as ‘from the river to the sea,’ and ‘intifada, intifada’… but it really picked up this past week with the encampment,” he said. “Before, it was just a couple rallies a week for a couple hours. Once the encampment came, it was legitimately 24 hours a day for the past five days. And it was in the right middle of campus, so there was no avoiding it.”

Kohanteb doesn’t think the encampment would have let him enter through the space because, as an Orthodox Jew, he wears a kippah on his head; he is also a Zionist. This is “insane,” Kohanteb said, given that he is a student on a public campus.

Additionally, the encampment “just caused a lot more intensity throughout the campus,” he contended, “as there were counterprotests, protests, as there were random community members who would come and protest against Israel, which caused violence on our campus.

“It essentially created a war zone in Westwood.”

Alexi Aloni, a recent UCLA graduate and a board member of the university’s Hillel, told the Journal that even before the encampment was built at UCLA, she and others spoke with friends at USC who were dealing with their encampment that preceded the UCLA version and they “could feel their anxiety.” And once the UCLA encampment was built, “it was just constant texting back and forth of antisemitic things that were being said, whether it was of video being captured of whispers in the encampment or actual signage that was being posted up, one of them comparing Jews to Nazis … getting flipped off by students who are covering their faces, just extreme fear and discomfort being on our own campus.”

Aloni recounted an instance of graffiti inside the encampment of a Star of David and the words “step here” with arrows pointing at it as well as “a girl with a taser run up to a man masked up… she continuously displayed her taser, and no one took it away from her.”

When students were trying to just simply walk on campus, Aloni said, “they were just completely denied access to certain routes that are on campus … The people that were gating it were not security hire[s], they were students that got their own orange vests, put them on, covered their faces, and just made human blockades — which is wrap their arms around each other and just make it so ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students couldn’t pass.”

One ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» student who wished to remain anonymous told the Journal on May 4 that it is discriminatory for the encampment to not allow people with opposing views to enter the space and converse with others. This student actually did enter the encampment for a few hours when it was first constructed on April 25; they recalled seeing “community guidelines” inside specifying that “you can’t talk, you have to wear a mask.” The encampment members would justify it to those on the outside as being a precaution for COVID-19, “but it’s not really. Under their guidelines, it’s for them to hide their identities.”

Additionally, the encampment would “scan” people to determine if they were part of the “ops,” meaning that “they’re not on our side … and they’re not allowed in,” the student said. “And then it started really becoming hostile when they started barricading the whole of the school around Royce [Quad] and people couldn’t go to class normally, people couldn’t access their normal routine routes without having to have an argument or saying, ‘you can’t go here’ for no reason.” This is unlawful, the student contended, because it restricts freedom of movement guaranteed under the First Amendment. “That was definitely taken away from us in one way or another, whether you were a ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» student or not.”

The student did, however, talk to some of the members of the encampment. “There was some very pro-Hamas people, some people that completely didn’t believe in the fact that there were rapes, murders of the children and the women and the men from the Nova festival,” the student said, whereas others in the encampment said they’re “advocating for the people of Palestine and for the war to stop” and those members of the encampment claimed not to support Hamas.

The student also believes that the majority of the protesters in the encampment were not students. “So probably out of let’s say 30 people, 25 of them were not students,” the student said, alleging that when the encampment first started, the non-students were the “slight majority,” but as the encampment grew, the outsiders became the majority, including “families with their babies.” Aloni claimed that “other people got bused from USC to UCLA when their encampment got closed down.”

Eventually, the encampment members did identify the student as being part of the “ops,” as the student believes they “probably got snitched on.” The student claimed they were then “harassed and assaulted and pushed out of this encampment forcibly … Three or four of these people in fluorescent kind of visors came” –– which the student described as being the encampment’s security guards, which they believe to be mostly students –– and “they basically started pushing me out.” At first they refused to leave and sat down, prompting the “security guards” to try and push them back up. They did decide to leave on their own accord and “did everything to avoid their touch, and they still touched me” and “one of them very much pushed his body onto me several times.” The student plans to file a report about the incident in the coming week.

Kohanteb claimed that a lot of his friends completely avoided campus during the past week as a result of the encampment. “It has just been an unlivable campus for ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students.”

Kohanteb is also a member of UCLA’s Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) chapter; he claimed that since the encampment was erected, the fraternity has received “threats to our house, we’ve had people [direct messaging] us on Instagram saying they’re going to come get us, and because of that we’ve had to hire private security to come protect the house for the past two nights … we’ve had ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students in the house who did not feel comfortable to live in the house” and went home as a result.

Additionally, the encampment had an adverse effect on students’ coursework, as the student who wished to remain anonymous said that they have four exams this week, rather than having them spread out, because the encampment resulted in her tests being postponed. “We missed a whole week of proper learning.”

Regarding the night of violence on April 30 when pro-Israel counterprotesters arrived on campus and attempted to tear down the encampment, Kohanteb condemned “the violence that happened. The encampment was wrong and it shouldn’t have been there, but there’s no need for a violent attack on it.” Kohanteb doesn’t know a single student that was there and thinks that the counterprotesters were “mainly outside people.”

Aloni was on campus on the evening of April 30 when the counterprotesters first arrived, describing them as wearing “all black and wearing masks. They were clearly not students. They made us feel uncomfortable.” She recalled “seeing a couple of fireworks go off” and that she was disheartened by what happened because she had put “in so much work into not being reactionary over the past week, and then all of my work just went away in a second, and that’s how so many other ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students felt.”

The anonymous student similarly doesn’t think the counterprotesters that came that night were UCLA students and posited that “some of them were from the Persian community. They don’t joke with anyone in their community being aggressed.” The student was referencing a young ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» woman who was reportedly assaulted by pro-Palestinian protesters during a pro-Israel rally next to the encampment on April 28. “You’re screaming to divest UCPD on school campuses and screaming to divest the LAPD and calling the LAPD KKK so that you can have this so-called peaceful encampment and then of course you have agitators that come and do cause trouble and do put people at risk of hurting them, and then you start crying for the release, when they weren’t there because of your quest,” the student said. “I think that’s hypocritical, in my opinion … it wouldn’t have happened if the police was there from the start.”

Aloni walked by the area the encampment stood on May 2 as it was being cleaned up. “I saw trash floating around a little bit, there’s graffiti just everywhere,” she recalled. Royce Hall, to the right of the encampment, was “the most desired place to take your graduation photos and that is just destroyed. There’s graffiti everywhere… they just ruined our campus.”

When the encampment was cleared in the early morning hours of May 2 after a tense standoff between police and protesters, “ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students felt a sigh of relief,” Kohanteb said. “We feel that we can go back onto our campus, we appreciate the administration taking that step to remove the encampment and make the campus feel safer for us at the time being. So right now, there is that hope where school can just go back to normality … and we hope that the administration will take efforts to prevent a future encampment.”

However, the anonymous student posited that “it’s far from being over. They have stated they will come back and they’re highly targeting ÖÐÎÄ×ÖÄ» students.” Through various group chats, this student claimed to have seen what the members of the encampment have been saying and “the antisemitism is at [its] peak,” as “they use ‘Zionism’ like its terrorism.” “So there’s definitely this fear of, we don’t know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen.”

Aloni similarly doesn’t think the protest will fizzle out right away, as she’s seen posts on Instagram of students claiming they don’t want it to end; additionally, UCLA’s on the quarter system, meaning that school doesn’t end until June, whereas other campuses end in May. Ergo, “we’re at a higher risk for prolonged protesting.”

The student argued the administration handled the matter “poorly,” as they believe the protesters were given too much “leeway … It wasn’t dealt with quick enough in my opinion, just in regards to seeing what every other campus was going through, what Columbia had just gone through several days before that, I think the lesson should have learned from the start,” the student said.

Chancellor Gene Block is scheduled to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on May 23. If Aloni were a member of Congress questioning Block, she would ask him how long the university would have allowed for the encampment to remain on campus had it not been for the violence on the night of April 30. She would also ask Block if the university regrets not shutting down the encampment earlier. “There were cases and instances with the taser, somebody had gotten battered on the head, the violence was there. Did it really need to get to the point before the encampment was finally taken down by police?” Aloni said. “In a way, it kind of seems like a waiting game and the lack of communication was definitely disheartening.”

The anonymous student, if they were a member of Congress, would ask Block about why it took so long for the university to take action and understand “where the issue of timing and decision-making intersected with one another” and “if it was truly [Block] who was able to make these final decisions on his own, because UCLA is part of the UC general board, so how was that influential in the decision making?” The student claimed to have spoken to some Beverly Hills policemen on the night of May 1, when police arrived to clear the encampment, “and they said, we couldn’t come out today until UCPD gave us the signal of, okay we need you guys. So, it’s kind of the distinguishment too of understanding why is there such a huge lack of cooperation between LAPD in general and the UCPDs when dealing with such emergency situations.”

The Los Angeles Times spoke to three sources in a May 3 who claimed that the university asked UCLA Police Chief John Thomas to develop a plan to keep the campus community safe, but he failed to do so; Thomas disputed the allegation, telling the Times that he did in fact come up with a plan where he was forced to lean on private security because the university initially didn’t want police involved in his security plan, as UC policy states that police can only be used as a “last resort,” per the Times. When the university did eventually allow for police to be involved, Thomas claimed that “the LAPD told him there was a problem with the payment system between the city and state, so the arrangements ‘couldn’t be done by the time of the attack,’” the Times reported. LAPD sources accused Thomas of “lack of planning and poor communication” in a May 5 Times , alleging that “they had to scramble for officers and wait until enough could be assembled to safely intervene at about 1:40 a.m.” on May 1.

Block announced on May 5 the creation of the Office of Campus Safety, which will be headed by former Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel.

The university did not immediately respond to the Journal’s request for comment.

Aloni believes that “in the future, students should definitely continue with activism, and continue to find their meaning and find their place and find community on college campus … but coming back to campus, just be mindful of how the other students around you may be feeling” and encouraged students “to keep an open mind and listen to everyone.”