Three weeks after his scheduled talk at UC Berkeley was shut down by an angry mob, Israeli attorney and IDF combat reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat returned to campus Monday and addressed a welcoming audience of about 150 people.
He was at the tail end of a U.S. tour to talk about his recent experiences fighting in Gaza, but his speech in Berkeley also referenced the events of Feb. 26, when some 200 anti-Israel protesters stormed Zellerbach Playhouse, breaking glass at the entrance and forcing Jewish students and Bar-Yoshafat to evacuate via an underground tunnel under police protection.
The escalation of expressions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, especially on U.S. campuses, is a “much bigger problem than a Jewish or Israeli problem,” he told the audience at Pauley Ballroom. “It’s the collapse of Western civilization.”
Rabbi Gil Leeds, the campus Chabad rabbi, told J. that he asked Bar-Yoshafat to return to Cal. Although Bar-Yoshafat spoke at the Chabad house after the disruption on Feb. 26, Leeds said many students didn’t find out about the last-minute venue change and missed him entirely.
“We wanted them, and all the students, to be able to hear him,” said Leeds.
After the Cal administration issued two statements that some Jewish students and supporters found lackluster, the university announced on March 4 that campus police would investigate hate crime allegations brought by two Jewish students who said they were assaulted on Feb. 26. And on March 5, federal authorities added UC Berkeley to their list of universities under investigation for alleged discrimination since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
In contrast to the mayhem of Feb. 26, this week’s event, sponsored by Chabad and pro-Israel student groups, went off smoothly. Campus police and private security were visible, and only those who had preregistered were allowed inside. The location was sent out by email just two hours beforehand.
In February, in addition to the hundreds of protesters, Bar-Yoshafat was depicted on posters with blazing red eyes next to the slogan “genocidal murderers out of Berkeley.” This time around, the protesters were primarily three older Jews standing quietly near the registration desk with signs declaring their opposition to genocide.
“Unlike what the sign says outside, I’m very much against killing civilians,” Bar-Yoshafat later told the audience, speaking in a calm, measured tone he maintained for the entire evening. “No one wants to kill innocent people.”
Bar-Yoshafat also responded to claims made against him by Bears for Palestine, the Cal affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine, asserting, among other things, that he had explicitly called for the deaths of 120,000 Gazans. Those claims were later referenced in a resolution passed March 15 by the university’s Associated Students that recommended barring guests like Bar-Yoshafat and others who “call for the death of a specific group of individuals” from speaking on campus.
Bar-Yoshafat said the Bears for Palestine statement included an “intentional misquoting” of his Jan. 7 Facebook post about proportionality, where he stated numbers comparing how many Hamas fighters were killed versus Gazan civilians — and then went on to disavow such comparisons, he said. “It was my response to Israelis who say we should use more force in Gaza,” he said.
Though he describes himself as a “right-wing, hawkish Israeli,” he said it was ironic that Bears for Palestine seized on “my most peaceful post.”
The organizers of Monday’s event presented it as a defense of free speech, which they said was denied Bar-Yoshafat and the students who came to hear him on Feb. 26.
“Free speech is essential. It lies at the heart of UC Berkeley’s ethos,” said Vida Keyvanfar, co-president of the campus pro-Israel group Tikvah. Keyvanfar criticized Chancellor Carol Christ for not accepting the group’s invitation to introduce Bar-Yoshafat at Monday’s event.
“She was asked repeatedly to introduce our speaker,” Keyvanfar said. “Her absence tonight and the lack of apology to our community speaks volumes.”
Cal spokesperson Dan Mogulof told J. that the chancellor emailed the students to say she had a prior commitment.
Turning to the war in Gaza, Bar-Yoshafat said that he was in synagogue in Jerusalem on the Shabbat morning of Oct. 7 when sirens announced Israel was under attack.
“It was my last Shabbat as a single man,” he said, noting that he was supposed to get married the following Thursday. Instead he put on his uniform and reported for duty. (He did return home briefly four days later, got married and went back to his reserve base.)
Two weeks after that, he was in Gaza in the first wave of the Israeli operation. He described the sights and sounds of war, the dead bodies on both sides, the destruction. He also said that in every house he and his soldiers entered, they found “Nazi material, anti-Israel propaganda or weapons.”
But even if Gazan civilians support Hamas, he said, that does not make them legitimate targets in war.
“I feel sorry for the lost lives on both sides,” he said, contrasting that with what he described as the inability of Hamas leaders “to say they feel sorry for kidnapping an 8-month-old baby.”
“If they would release the hostages and surrender, the war would be over,” he said.
The speaker was interrupted just once, by an audience member who began chanting “shame” and accusing Israel of genocide. She was shouted down by the audience and escorted out quickly.
Asked whether Hamas can really be destroyed, he said, “absolutely” but added that he wished the war had been launched 15 years ago, after Hamas took power in Gaza. “It would have been a short operation with fewer casualties on both sides.”
Now he estimates the war will last another 12 to 14 months. “We have to go inch by inch to find all the Hamas terrorists and weapons,” he said. “But it can be done, 100 percent.”
The only way to get the hostages out is by “pounding Hamas until they can no longer continue,” he said, while acknowledging that some might be killed in the process.
Inside Gaza, “we went to one house and saw a kid’s [toy] Torah scroll filled with blood, and children’s clothes on the floor, filled with blood,” he said, indicating that hostages had recently been moved from that location. “I felt horrible that we weren’t there in time.”
“War is difficult,” he said. “It’s an impossible scenario.”