As an organization, we unequivocally condemn acts of sexual harassment and assault. In light of the testimonies regarding Professor Gabriel Piterberg’s abuse of power and sexual assault of two UCLA graduate students, we are fully endorsing the platform statement (available here) from Bruins Against Sexual Harassment (BASH). 

BASH has been instrumental in organizing students and keeping them informed not only on the allegations themselves but also on the university’s troubling lack of response to them. They have created a thorough timeline detailing major developments in the case and have helped disseminate information on the victims’ actual testimonies as well. 

Our organization has a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault, and we fully support BASH in their endeavors to establish a safer environment for students and create a more transparent framework for handling cases of on-campus sexual assault. 

By Robert Gardner
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UCLA Professor Raul Moreno Campos once told me, “Words have meaning, so be careful when you use them.” Therefore, I do my due diligence when using words, especially when they have serious ramifications for context. So when I read the opinion submission, “Jews not to blame for Palestinian displacement,” I was taken aback by Goren and Moore’s misrepresentation of words in an attempt to level frivolous charges against pro-Palestinian students on campus.
On May 16th, a submission to the Daily Bruin described the 1947-1949 Palestinian exodus – and, Israel’s current state policies – as “ethnic cleansing.” In response, Goren and Moore suggested that the use of the term ethnic cleansing to describe the Palestinian exodus was “baseless.” They then claimed that ethnic cleansing is used to describe the Rwanda and Armenian genocides, as well as atrocities such as the Holocaust. So for them, usage of the term ethnic cleansing to describe the Palestinian exodus is “hateful,” “discriminatory,” and serves “to create a hostile environment for pro-Israel and Jewish students.”
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While it is true that ethnic cleansing is used to describe genocides, it is also true that the term is used to describe systemic practices that serves the same purpose of a genocide: Ethnic or religious expulsion to achieve homogenous geographical spaces.

By doing a simple Google search, one can see that ethnic cleansing is defined as “the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society.” Ethnic cleansing is also described as “the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area.” Former UN Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, emphasized that ethnic cleansing should be equated “with the systematic purge of the civilian population based on ethnic criteria, with the view to forcing it to abandon the territories where it lives.”
Now, some scholars suggest that any form of ethnic cleansing should be considered genocide, but I am discussing the most basic definition at the moment. By examining the basic definition, one can easily see that ethnic cleansing encompasses a genocidal component with the intent of death, and a systemic component that emphasize systemic displacement. So, I find Goren and Moore’s attempt to vilify Palestinian students for exposing Israel’s history of ethnic cleansing humorous given the fact that a simple Google search disproves the very bases of their argument that usage of the term ethnic cleansing is slanderous.

Moreover, while Goren and Moore seem to have a problem when Palestinians use the term ethnic cleansing, they have forgotten, unless they were not aware, that Israeli documents from 1948 used the term “to cleanse” when talking about Palestinian expulsion and village demolitions. So Israeli documents illuminate the purposeful ethnic cleansing inflicted upon the Palestinian people despite the Israeli government’s attempt to re-write history and deny Palestinians the right of return. In fact, the Israeli government reclassified and sealed historical material once available to researchers after documents showed evidence of deliberate expulsion ordered by senior commanders of the IDF and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself. So, the idea that over 700,000 Palestinians voluntarily left their homes at the orders of Arab leaders are just false and part of Israel’s long standing propaganda machine to reshape the historical narrative.         
 
In addition, a simple Google search will show a proliferation of discussion regarding Israel’s systematic denial of building permits and home demolitions that is, by definition, ethnic cleansing. For example, you will find that a United Nations report revealed that Israel issued over 14,000 demolition orders in Area C of occupied Palestine, where most illegal colonies are built. According to the UN, home demolition orders “heighten the vulnerability of thousands of poor Palestinian households” who are “at imminent risk of forcible displacement.” Forcible displacement of Palestinians from their home land? That is the definition of ethnic cleansing. Using Israel’s own data, a report by Peace Now revealed that over a 7 year period, 94%, or 1,533 out of 1,715 building permits requested by Palestinians were denied. In contrast, 18,472 illegal colonial projects were constructed for Jews in Area C of Palestine. This data was extracted from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, so Israel’s own numbers tells a story of ethnic cleansing.
If people are going to personally attack students on campus by accusing them of being hateful and discriminatory, I suggest that they adequately make their case and not use baseless accusations and over-the-top rhetoric designed to inflict harm to one’s character. There is plenty of room for scholarly debate without having to resort to such disgusting libel.

Goren and Moore told the Daily Bruin that it should have “known better than to print offensive and ultimately false accusations without doing their due diligence beforehand.” Now there’s something we all can agree on.   

http://dailybruin.com/2016/05/16/submission-palestianian-ethnic-cleansing-from-israel-is-ongoing-must-be-stopped/

For us Palestinians, May 15 is a date of irreversible loss. It marks the start of when our relatives and our people were driven from their homes during Israel’s 1947-1949 campaign of ethnic cleansing, never to return. Many of them carried the keys to the homes that they were forced to leave, thinking that they would see them again one day. This dream was never realized, and to this day Israel continues to deny Palestinians the right of return. We refer to May 15 as Nakba Day – nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” and this phrase refers to the beginning catastrophe that first uprooted our people. However, Israel’s present-day actions also constitute a continuous nakba that Palestinians are forced to endure.

Though this massive campaign of ethnic cleansing reached its peak in 1948, it has been ongoing to date – 68 years later – with thousands of Palestinians continually being driven from their homes, primarily in the West Bank where hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements uproot and replace Palestinian homes and villages. As Palestinians in exile, we feel the effects of this ongoing nakba. For those of us with family still in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, we live in worry of what may come any given day. For those of us whose families were driven from our homeland, we continue to experience the trauma that our parents and grandparents suffered, and we grapple with the current reality that prohibits us from returning home. Many Palestinians are forced to live as stateless refugees in neighboring countries, but even the privilege of citizenship does not guarantee being able to see Palestine again: For while some of us have at least been able to visit Palestine, getting in is not a sure bet as Palestinians of all nationalities are subjected to intense interrogation by Israeli officials, often only to be denied entry. As long as the occupation and ethnic cleansing continues, Palestinians will remain uprooted, dispersed.

In addition to our physical displacement, we are forced to deal regularly with people denying our history, our very existence. How often have we heard “there never was a Palestine”? Discussing origins can be one of the most basic and meaningful ways of establishing a connection with others. But for Palestinians, this seemingly simple act is fraught with difficulty as our very identity is all too often dismissed as too political, too controversial.

Despite this reality, we, as Palestinians in the U.S., will continue to educate those around us, to share the voices and histories of our ancestors, and to demand that Palestinian rights are realized, including the full right of return.

Palestine is not far from UCLA. We are your students, your faculty, your staff. Our presence on this campus is testament to Palestinian resilience and perseverance in the face of Israel’s ongoing effort to eliminate and silence us. Dana’s paternal grandparents were driven from their home in Jaffa in 1948 and forced to go to Gaza, where they were made refugees a second time. Omar’s grandmother’s family was expelled from Haifa and forced to flee to Lebanon in 1948. Safwan’s family escaped the ethnic cleansing of their village of Jimzu in 1948 and fled to the United States where they have lived in exile since. On this Nakba Day, we affirm: we have been displaced, but we will endure. And Palestine will be free.

Dana Saifan is a UCLA staff member in the department of psychology. Safwan Ibrahim is a fifth-year comparative literature student. Omar Zahzah is a graduate student in comparative literature and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.

http://dailybruin.com/2016/05/11/submission-committee-hearing-on-discussion-of-campus-climate-issues-ineffective/

​When campus climate is used as a political weapon, it degrades the concept and hurts all students. That’s what happened last Friday when the California Assembly’s Select Committee on Campus Climate held a hearing at UCLA’s James West Alumni Center to discuss campus climate issues throughout the state of California. If you didn’t hear about this hearing, it’s probably not a coincidence; the meeting was not publicized, and it seems to have been thrown together at the last minute.
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Even more distressing than the timing and publicity, however, is the issue of representation. The meeting purported to deal with campus climate, yet it did not discuss most of the major issues facing students from a variety of backgrounds on campus. Although the hearing did touch on deplorable instances of anti-Semitism, much of the discussion was focused on bashing pro-Palestinian speech and actions. Shockingly, despite being scheduled shortly after the latest round of David Horowitz posters directly attacking pro-Palestine students and faculty, the committee opted not to include any Palestinians on the student panel, and only directly addressed Palestine and Israel by asking pro-Israel students questions about their feelings of personal well-being and safety.

This bias is particularly alarming given that Horowitz’s actions are a perfect demonstration of how pro-Palestine students and faculty, particularly students and faculty of color, are the ones facing intense, defamatory blowback for what ought to be protected political speech and beliefs. And while the eventual inclusion of Tahira Kazmi, a member of the Muslim Student Association, or MSA, and Eitan Peled, of Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, and Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, on the student panel was a positive development – albeit one that took significant pressure to achieve – it remains problematic, perhaps tellingly so, that those managing a hearing about student well-being that took place so close in time to instances of anti-Palestinian animus on university campuses saw no issue with omitting Palestinian students.
This partiality is perhaps best put into perspective by the political agenda being advanced by one of the assembly members at the hearing, Richard Bloom. Bloom recently introduced AB 2844 in the California Assembly. This is a McCarthyist bill that would prevent state contracts with any companies that choose to discontinue business operations in Israel and the occupied territories that further the violation of Palestinian rights.

This ideological partiality even seems to have played out in the assembly members’ own questions. After Tina Aoun, the director of the Middle Eastern Student Center at the University of California, Riverside, mentioned both an incident that is currently being investigated as a hate crime by UCR officials that was partially motivated by anti-Palestinian sentiment as well the experiences of a Palestinian UCR student who received death threats and hate mail for teaching a class on Palestine, Assembly member Jose Medina only questioned Aoun to follow up on whether a class with a pro-Israel perspective had also been offered. Furthermore, although David Horowitz’s defamatory posters had been directly referenced at least four times by students and commenters, neither Bloom nor Medina saw it fit to follow up about this incident, a strange oversight given that the hearing was allegedly dedicated to student welfare in relation to freedom of expression.

By their unwillingness to engage with hate crimes and hate speech against Palestinians in the University of California system, assembly members Bloom and Medina demonstrated that they don’t really care about campus climate at all. The hearing seems to have been a hollow gesture that would allow for squarely pro-Israel state politicians to reinforce their ideological biases while pretending to objectively cater to the feelings and experiences of marginalized student voices.
It is unclear what, if anything, will come out of this hearing. But, as the Joint Council forUAW 2865, the union representing over 14,000 student workers across the UC system, recently expressed in a statement responding to the latest batch of Horowitz posters, until the UC Regents and university officials can put aside their relentless pro-Israel agenda enough to genuinely address student welfare and concerns, they are just as complicit in creating a hostile campus climate for students as the individuals who put up the latest round of Horowitz posters. We can say exactly the same for state politicians. Is a relentless focus on Israel really worth ignoring the harassment, intimidation and marginalization that students continue to face? We hope not, and this should be just as true for Palestinian students as for any other.