April 27, 2024 - Democrats for Israel - Los Angeles (DFI-LA) condemns the level of vicious anti-Jewish hate being promoted by anti-Israel tent “encampments” on a growing number of American college campuses, including UCLA.
Led by college radicals and outside supporters, the demonstrators are spewing hate messages such as “by any means necessary”, “intifada resistance”, “from the river to the sea”, “ashkenormativity”, along with a collection of anti-Zionism expressions that are clearly antisemitic.
These encampments are the latest in an ongoing onslaught of hateful anti-Israel and antisemitic activity at universities across the country. This is not an issue of First Amendment right to freedom of expression. DFI-LA strongly supports that right for any student on any campus. But that freedom of expression does not include the promotion of bigotry, discrimination, or violence against any individual or group based on ethnicity, religion, national origin, or otherwise. Nor is it acceptable for hate groups to deny any student full access to educational opportunities by physically blocking access or by making people feel unwelcome and/or unsafe.
In coordination with other pro-Israel organizations, DFI-LA calls on university administrations nationwide to take all necessary steps to ensure a safe learning environment for ALL students, including enforcing all applicable school policies regarding conduct and safety. It is unthinkable that Jewish students are the ones being instructed to leave their campuses, while anti-Israel extremists and Hamas supporters are taking control of campus property and wreaking havoc on campuses locally and nationally.
To those students participating in these misguided encampments, our message is one of education: On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, burned alive, dismembered, brutalized, and tortured thousands of people. Hamas continues to hold 133 hostages in captivity. The U.S. Secretary of Defense has referred to the crimes of Hamas as “worse than ISIS,” and on April 24 – last Thursday -- these same terrorists praised the student protests now shamefully being promulgated across America.
Make no mistake: if genocidal terrorist organizations like Hamas, PFLP, and the Supreme Leader of Iran have your back, you are on the wrong side of history. Your actions and vocalizations in support of violence and hatred do nothing but fuel more division and conflict on your campuses and in the Middle East. DFI-LA hopes that those protesting students would learn the history of the worldwide attempts to create a two-state solution giving both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people homelands, and the ability to live in peace side by side. This was the goal of the United Nations in 1947 when it passed a resolution creating the two-state plan, and was promptly rejected by the Palestinians and the Arab nations in the region who chose instead to attack the State of Israel in the hope of driving the Jews into the seas. A two-state solution has been the goal of Israel since that War of Independence, Israel has actively sought a peaceful resolution with its Palestinian neighbors and surrounding Arab nations. Israel came to agreements in 1979 with Egypt, in 1993 with the Palestinian leaders in the Oslo Accords, in 1994 with Jordan, and in 2005 unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Israel has made many genuine attempts to make peace with its neighbors.
Israel has also agreed to NUMEROUS ceasefires with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – ceasefires that both organizations have willfully and repeatedly violated, most recently last October 7 in the most heinous attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Let all lovers of freedom continue to stand tall and strong, rejecting the hate and the fear being promoted by the campus extremists leading the encampments. Do not let any radical force or voice distract us from what matters most: defeating the terrorist organization Hamas and helping the Palestinian people establish an independent state that lives peacefully alongside the Jewish State of Israel.
