10/25/24
Today, the Daily Cal published our and the Berkeley Journal of Black Law & Policy’s responses to Dean Chemerinsky’s latest op-ed, which cynically weaponizes our identities to smear the Palestine solidarity movement. Below is a version of our statement with hyperlinks to substantiate our assertions. Free Palestine.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
On October 20, 2024, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky published his latest attack on the Palestine solidarity movement in an opinion piece in the New York Times. We, Berkeley Law Jews for Palestine, wholeheartedly condemn Dean Chemerinsky’s statement, which weaponizes concerns for Jewish safety to manufacture further consent for a genocide and likens the movement for Palestinian liberation to the Ku Klux Klan. As the Berkeley Law Journal for Black Law and Policy explains, weaponizing Black trauma to attack students protesting genocide is inexcusable, especially in the light of the University’s continual disregard for the real needs of Black and Brown students.
Dean Chemerinsky dismissively notes that “there is an important conversation to be had about Israel’s actions over the past year.” Yet, when we and our peers express support for Palestine and call to end the ongoing genocide, he responds with bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism to shut down the conversation. We condemn his expectation that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students quietly accept their erasure and dehumanization amid the televised slaughter of hundreds of thousands of their kin with U.S. weapons.
Dean Chemerinsky refuses to acknowledge Zionism’s violent history of occupation, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinian people. His privileging of Israeli life over Palestinian life is evident, shameful, and actively endangers our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim peers. He sensationalizes, exceptionalizes, and decontextualizes violence against Israelis. He responds to anti-colonial Palestinian resistance with unequivocal condemnation, yet the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, if he mentions it at all, gets only ambiguous, passive lamentation.
Not once have we, as Jews, felt unwelcome or unsafe participating in the student movement for Palestine; more Berkeley Law students have been harmed in Dean Chemerinsky’s own backyard than in the dozens of mobilizations for Palestine held on campus in the past year. It is our duty as Jewish persons to oppose genocide wherever we see it. As such, we fully support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination, and we oppose the United States’ and the University of California’s active enabling of the genocide.
October 8, 2024, marked one year since the acceleration of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, which Dean Chemerinsky refuses to recognize despite the conclusions of numerous leading human rights organizations, scholars of international law, and historians of Holocaust and genocide studies. On that day, Berkeley students rallied as part of an organized walkout to protest the ongoing genocide and our institution’s complicity in it. Cherry-picking examples of protest signs, Dean Chemerinsky characterizes the rally as “largely the celebration of the coldblooded murder and torture of innocent [Israeli] civilians.” Yet coldblooded murder and torture of innocent civilians is the ongoing reality in Gaza — before and after October 7, 2023 — which we oppose at its root. The rally foregrounded desperate pleas and screams to stop Israel’s relentless violence, which Dean Chemerinsky neglects to acknowledge, just as he has been unwilling to engage with the realities of Palestine, both past and present. His characterization of the action obscures its principal purpose: to mark one year of this accelerated phase of the Zionist genocide against Palestinians, and to reiterate our demands, including an arms embargo, an end to the ongoing atrocities, and the University of California’s divestment from companies complicit in the occupation of Palestine.
It might surprise Dean Chemerinsky to learn that the rally featured speeches by representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace (who co-sponsored the walkout) and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Many additional speakers acknowledged the presence and contributions of anti-Zionist Jews who, far from being tokenized, are overrepresented in the Palestinian solidarity movement relative to the population writ large. Furthermore, Zionists regularly observe and walk past our rallies completely ignored, though they often deliberately agitate with symbols and fervent vocal support for Zionist violence.
Throughout our years-long presence as an active coalition of anti-Zionist Jewish law students, Dean Chemerinsky has never meaningfully acknowledged our existence. Instead, he repeatedly props himself up as the sole mouthpiece for Jewish students at Berkeley Law, consistently suggesting that all such students share his own Zionist worldview. We demand that Dean Chemerinsky stop referring to “[his] Jewish students” as a monolith — we refuse the Zionist monopolization of Jewish identity at Berkeley and everywhere. What makes us unsafe is that our identity as Jews is used to justify unspeakable atrocities, and that he smears us in his attempt to repress our movement.
Since Dean Chemerinsky claims to be interested in difficult conversations, we note that there is no credible evidence of rape or sexual mutilation on October 7, and that the most lurid propaganda about what occurred that day has been definitively debunked. Two babies were killed on October 7. Since then, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian babies and many tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women and children. Every single day, we are inundated with new images of murdered and mutilated Palestinians. Do you condemn this, Dean Chemerinsky?
Dean Chemerinsky repeatedly takes to national news publications to smear his students for protesting genocide, but is silent on actual threats to his students’ safety and security. This speaks volumes. He never condemned the Berkeley Law professor who begged law firms not to hire pro-Palestine students, nor did he comment publicly when Berkeley Law students were doxxed by their peers. More recently, he was silent when Berkeley police, at the behest of UC Berkeley administrators, desecrated and destroyed a student-constructed Sukkah. His silence, as well as his words when he does choose to speak, create a hostile environment for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students as well as anti-Zionist Jewish students.
In Dean Chemerinsky’s most recent statement, he asserts that although hateful speech is protected at public universities, administrations have a duty under Title VI to speak out against it. His hypocritical application of this duty is blatant. On September 24th, 2024, Berkeley Law’s Federalist Society hosted a far-right member of the Israeli Knesset, Simcha Rothman. Rothman’s support of violence is apparently not “deeply disturbing” to him. He was silent on the event except to threaten disciplinary action against students who protested the genocidal incitement hosted on our campus.
For our broader demands, please refer to the statement we released on October 7, 2024. To Dean Chemerinsky, we issue a simple message: We, as Jewish students of conscience, have the duty to say that celebrating or remaining silent in the face of genocide and Israel’s long history of settler colonialism and apartheid is deeply offensive and fundamentally inconsistent with what this university claims to stand for, and what we, as students, will continue to stand for.
Signed,
Berkeley Law Jews for Palestine