Students for Justice in Palestine at Sonoma State University made an astonishing announcement on Wednesday. After nearly three weeks of anti-Israel protests, including an encampment of about 20 tents, the school’s president, Mike Lee, had agreed to an academic boycott of Israel, among other concessions to campus protesters.
“SSU DEMANDS MET,” the group celebrated in an Instagram post trumpeting the news. “Brick by brick, wall by wall!”
Then the story took a dramatic turn.
Later that day, CSU Chancellor Mildred García announced that Lee’s concessions had been made “without the appropriate approvals.” He was placed on leave for “insubordination,” pending a review by the board of trustees. His suspension lasted just one day. On Thursday, he retired.
The swift turnabout was a stark reflection of a certain dynamic at play over the last month. Students all over the country, at universities large and small, have angled for their institutions to treat Israel, essentially, as a pariah state. University administrations, for the most part, have refused.
In mid-April, taking the lead from student protesters at Columbia University, students began descending on campus greens and central plazas, insisting they would not leave until their demands were met.
While the protests were spurred by violence unleashed in Gaza by the Israeli military — a response to the unprecedentedly brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7 — the demands in most cases went well beyond an end to the war, often straying into calls for action that targeted Israeli society as a whole.
Their maximalist demands were a reprise dating to the mid-2000s, when the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel was born. On the updated list were an academic boycott of the country, including ending study-abroad programs in Israel, and divestment from a broad category of companies and entities that support Israel. As one UC official remarked, such a demand would first and foremost apply to the United States, with which the UC system has $12 billion invested in U.S. treasuries.
In pushing such far-reaching conditions, protesters may have painted themselves into a corner, leading to university responses that ultimately fell short — often far short — of their demands.
For one thing, in California, like other states across the country, it is illegal for entities that receive state funds to engage in discriminatory boycotts targeting Israel or “any sovereign nation or peoples recognized by the government of the United States.”
What’s more, in the United States, BDS stands on weak footing. Most Americans don’t hate Israel, and they certainly don’t hate Israelis. According to a Pew survey conducted in February during the thick of the current war, 31% of respondents said their sympathies were entirely or mostly with the Israeli people, while 16% said the same about Palestinians.
With an overlap taken into account, though, 68% of Americans sympathized to some degree with the Israeli people. (Another 5% felt no sympathy for Israelis, 8% had none for either side and 18% weren’t sure.)
The truth is that academic boycotts of Israel, divestment from Israel-linked companies including Google, Nvidia and Intel, and the banning of exchange programs — even those meant to educate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — don’t target the Israeli government. They target Israelis.
Meanwhile, the campus protests everywhere were rife with contradictions, muddling the emergence of a unified message. Student protesters said they did not interfere with Jewish students’ right to learn freely, while filling the air with chants like “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” and proclaiming Zionism to be akin to white supremacy, fascism and Nazism.
Students called for an end to the violence but flew banners decorated with an inverted red triangle, a symbol of Hamas militancy. At Stanford, a protester was photographed wearing a Hamas headband. Elsewhere, students flew the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninst group active in the 1960s and 1970s that hijacked commercial airlines and whose offshoot slaughtered civilians in an Israeli airport in 1972.
The protests’ maximalist ethos was brought into relief during a confrontation at the University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit university.
Paul J. Fitzgerald, a Catholic priest with a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne who has served as the president of USF for 10 years, agreed to hold a public conversation with leaders of its campus protest.
The conversation turned angry, with a spokesperson for the protest berating Fitzgerald for allowing Israeli students who have served in the Israel Defense Forces to enroll at USF. The student demanded USF cut all ties with what she referred to as the “Israeli occupation.”
Fitzgerald mentioned a USF study-abroad program to Israel, last active in 2023, in which students engage with Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians in Ramallah in the West Bank. (The “Beyond Bridges” program is run through the USF Center for Global Education.)
The student replied: “You still travel to occupied land. Our students learn on occupied, colonized land.”
“Yeah, just like here,” Fitzgerald replied.
There is no doubt that the protesters achieved some tangible results. At Cal, Chancellor Carol Christ released a statement calling for a cease-fire and a release of hostages, and decrying the “horrific killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.” She also promised to establish a committee, with input from students, to review the university’s investment policies. The committee will develop recommendations to present to the UC Berkeley Foundation’s Environmental, Social and Governance Subcommittee, which addresses “issues involving socially-responsible and sustainable investing that affect the endowment.”
In October, Brown University’s board will vote on divesting from companies linked to Israel. At Northwestern, administrators agreed to increase funding to programs for Muslim and Palestinian faculty and to build campus lodging for Muslim students. Many universities, including S.F. State, pledged more transparency of their investment portfolios.
All this has angered pro-Israel Jewish community organizations, as well as some Jewish students, who see it as rewarding animus toward the Jewish community and violations of campus policy.
“Chancellor Christ’s capitulation to the encampment is a slap in the face to Jewish students at UC Berkeley,” said Daniel Solomon, a Jewish Ph.D. student in history. “The administration’s message to the ‘Free Palestine’ movement on campus could not be clearer: violence, intimidation, and disruption not only escape punishment, but elicit reward.”
Indeed, beyond yielding to some of their demands, universities across the country have offered students amnesty from punishment in exchange for taking down their encampments. The bulk of the protesters’ larger demands, however, were either sidestepped or ignored completely.
No, UC Berkeley will not divest from Israel, though it will authorize a committee to suggest recommendations for divestment from some industries, without naming the country.
No, UC Santa Cruz will not cut its ties with campus Hillel, a demand widely condemned as antisemitic because of Hillel’s role in supporting Jewish community life on campus.
No, S.F. State will not divest its endowment from Israel-linked companies. Not only does it not have the power to do so, but its leadership does not support it, and such a move may be illegal to boot.
As students on some campuses have begun packing up their camps and going home for the summer, some expressed optimism. Many, though, remain angry. The leadership of the UC Berkeley encampment released a letter blaming Israel and Zionism for a heinous list of ills, from the “extermination of indigenous peoples” to “racist border regimes” to “industrialized killing and the policing of insurgent life.” They excoriated the university system, saying their negotiations with UC Berkeley “unveiled how university bureaucracy perpetuates and supports U.S. imperialism,” adding that “divestment task forces and program reviews without popular pressure to hold them accountable serve only to fortify these structures and contain insurgency.”
Perhaps that reaction is warranted. Protesters did not receive the definitive statements they were looking for. Instead, for the most part, they got exploratory committees, advisory boards, and promises to take a look at ethical investment strategies in the future. Most of these commitments didn’t name Israel. Given all of this, the impacts of the student protests — when it comes to their core demands — will take months, if not years to come into focus, if they ever do.