Views on Thursday Night's Fight

A concert is taking place on Lower Sproul Plaza as part of a student organization's "Yes on 8 Week." The week is predicated on the myth that homosexuality is a choice, and that therefore queer students are not real-they are not equals to everyone else. Enraged and offended, you and two other friends go to a balcony near the event, careful to keep a physical distance to avoid any confrontations. There, you unfurl a large pride flag, asserting both the fact that you exist and that, damn it, you have the right to say you do, too.

A few minutes later three organizers of the "Yes on 8" hate week storm up the stairs and rampage through crowded meeting rooms to reach you. Behind them, a small mob of angry bigots follows. They demand that you remove the flag, but you refuse. Then, they attempt to shove you aside to remove the flags themselves. A scuffle ensues.

Who is to blame? It doesn't take a genius to see how this one went down: it has "hate crime" written all over it. Are we really supposed to believe they intended to make a "civil request" that the flag be removed, as they later claimed? What gives them the right to make such a request, anyway?

None of that happened at a Prop 8 rally, but a direct parallel did last Thursday when three Palestinian students decided they couldn't stand by as the Zionist Freedom Alliance claimed that they were not real people. While the imperative for us to recognize who the attackers were is not directly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, in many ways it strikes at some of the core issues. The ZFA's basic message, borrowed from debunked Israeli state historiography, is that Palestinians don't exist. The problem is not a communication issue. Israel, especially the Israeli right, has never recognized the right of Palestinians to exist as human beings equal to Israelis.

What happened last week has nothing to do with "ethnic tensions" or "cultural differences," as some have claimed. Rather, it concerns a small group of students who have adopted that attitude vis-a-vis fellow students. ZFA and Tikvah students perceive the very presence of Palestinians, whether physical, poetical, or political, to be intolerable. They think that it's OK to insult them, degrade them, attack them and humiliate them around campus (all of that has happened). On top of that, ASUC Senator John Moghtader, President of Tikvah, forced a senate meeting to go to recess earlier this year because he was "offended" by a "Free Palestine" sticker on another student's laptop. The student had to cover the sticker for the meeting to continue.

You can call that a political difference, but the more honest word is bigotry. If it were a "No on 8" sticker, we wouldn't have called it by any other name. Tikvah's problem is not what it says, but the fact that it doesn't recognize the rights of others, especially Palestinians, to express alternative opinions, an attitude that eventually led to violence. Students who support Israel have every right to organize and express their opinions on campus when they don't interfere with the rights of others. That is the basic rule of an intellectual setting like a university. Indeed, the Israel Action Committee, Kesher Enoshi, the Jewish Student Union and Berkeley Hillel are very vocal about their activities, but never ended up in balcony brawls.

That should be indication enough of where the problem lies. As a campus community we failed to acknowledge the warning signs and confront Tikvah's aggressive and hateful behavior.