At campus protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, including the tent cities that have sprung up at schools such as UC Berkeley, many students have made a deliberate callback to the tent cities of the 1980s that protested apartheid in South Africa.
Like those earlier protesters, they want their schools to pull out of investments with a particular country — only it’s Israel they are targeting and not South Africa.
“Sending a letter to the Board of Regents would have had no effect. But when your person is on the line when you get arrested then it will come to the attention of the Regents.”
These words weren’t spoken in 2024, but instead four decades ago, in 1985, at a Jewish protest at UC Berkeley against South African apartheid. The speaker was Rabbi Joseph Milgrom, a respected scholar of Near Eastern studies and professor at Cal, who was arrested during a sit-in. Deirdre Steinberg covered it for this paper.
“The protest began at 8 a.m., when approximately 100 people gathered for a shaharit (morning prayer) service on a brick patio on the northside of the U.C. Berkeley campus.
“Following the half-hour service, the protestors marched and sang ‘Free South Africa’ to the tune of Dayenu (which means enough), a traditional Passover song, as they walked the half block across Oxford Avenue to University Hall, where the regents have their administrative offices. There they heard Rabbi Avi Levine of Temple Beth El in Berkeley read a statement issued by the East Bay Council of Rabbis, of which he is chairman, that called for Jewish institutions to promote a policy of selective divestment.
“Levine told the Bulletin that he was following the moral authority of the ancient Hebrew prophets in joining the sit-in. ‘We are standing in solidarity with black South Africans. We are one in suffering with them,’ he said, ‘and one with them in life.’”
Forty-three people were arrested; charges were later dropped.
A little later that same year, we ran an editorial asking Jews to participate in a march against apartheid.
“Jews and blacks have suffered the same oppression and deprivation at the hands of others,” we wrote. “Our opposition to apartheid is only natural given our revulsion of human rights violations.”
But it was a little more complicated than that. Anti-Zionism had already seeped into the discussion. Israel still traded with South Africa, as did many other countries, and some Jewish people weren’t happy at the way Israel was being called out.
Ira Kamin reported in these pages that “anti-Zionist groups have been taking advantage of the public forum provided by anti-apartheid protests on three Bay Area college campuses to exaggerate and condemn Israel’s links with white-ruled South Africa, Northern California Jewish leaders believe.
“In response, Jewish students active in anti-apartheid coalitions have fought those attacks, and on at least two occasions successfully have blocked the emergence of Israel-South Africa relations as an issue of apartheid, according to Hillel directors at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford and S.F. State University.”
Stephen Kay, a UC Berkeley junior at the time, was at the May 1985 protest and told this paper about needing to push back against anti-Israel rhetoric, in another article by Steinberg.
“’I’d spent the night sleeping-in on the steps, and the next day at the rally, out of nowhere, came these huge signs denouncing Israel’s trade with South Africa,’ said Kay. ‘It makes it very difficult to be involved as a Jew, as someone who cares about the state of Israel. It’s a constant battle.’”
Seeing the signs and placards created a lot of confusion and unhappiness in the Jewish students he knew, Kay told our reporter.
“‘We pointed out that other countries like France and Japan also trade in the billions of dollars with South Africa,’ he said. The group, according to Kay, mentioned that 46 of the 52 black South African nations also trade with South Africa and that South Africa has no oil resources and buys petroleum products from Arab countries.”
By 1988, views on Israel had split the anti-apartheid movement.
“‘From what I understand, any Jewish student who has expressed pro-Israel sentiments can’t have a place in the [larger] anti-apartheid movement,’ says Ron Squarer, one of the organizers of Jewish Students against Apartheid,” wrote Tamar Kaufman in 1988.
Co-founder David Kay described being pushed out of other anti-apartheid spaces.
“‘I said I’m a Jewish student and we’d like to participate in the rally,’ Kay recalls. ‘[A rally organizer] asked, ‘Are you a Zionist?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And he said, ‘Our group is anti-Zionist, and you can’t speak.’”
It’s the 30-year anniversary of the end of apartheid. Many consider the sit-ins that spread across the U.S. to have been instrumental in forcing that change, as elected officials in the U.S. bowed to pressure and brought forward sanctions against the South African government. Synagogues and Jewish institutions in the Bay Area were part of the wave of “divestment” — perhaps at times symbolic, but representative of the Jewish community’s feelings.
Israel is not South Africa, and many American Jews today resent the comparison. But the success of the anti-apartheid movement is the silent engine that fuels the tent encampments and divestment protests that are roiling college campuses now.
Will today’s sit-ins against Israel be successful in pressuring the American government to take a more forceful stance against how Israel is fighting in Gaza? Only time will tell. But the protesters have seen it work before.