By Jennie Gross, LDB Senior Staff Attorney

Wednesday’s announcement from the Regents of the University of California is particularly timely for the Davis campus, where a disruptive protest temporarily halted a lecture by Israeli diplomat George Deek earlier this month. LDB’s legal staff sent a letter to UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi on Monday, asking her to make a strong statement condemning the acts that disrupted the visiting diplomat’s lecture.

Mr. Deek’s lecture, “The Art of Middle East Diplomacy,” might have had a positive influence on campus relations between groups with opposing views on Palestine.  The announcement of the event described Mr. Deek as an Arab-Christian Israeli who has been involved in the promotion of mutual understanding and co-existence between Jews and Arabs in Israel since he was a young man.

He was only about five minutes into the lecture when anti-Israel protesters marched to the front of room with a large banner, obstructing the audience’s view of the speaker and drowning out his voice with loud chants of “free, free Palestine,” “Allah ahkbar,” and “long live the intifada,” followed by increasingly incendiary invective, including “Israel is anti-black,” “when Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified,” and “Palestine will be free, fight white supremacy.”

Mr. Deek could not be heard (and could barely be seen) until the raucous protesters chose to leave. He later told a faculty member that he had never experienced a disruption like this while speaking.

The lecture on diplomacy might have had a positive influence on campus relations between groups with opposing views on Palestine, but the protesters that shouted him down proudly assert their refusal to engage in civil discourse.  In a statement on the website Liberation, the protesters claim that they “did not participate within the established framework of the event because [they believe] discourses about ‘dialogue’ and ‘democracy’ function to silence anti-Zionist voices.”  LDB’s legal staff note that willful disturbance of an assembly violates California Penal Code § 403.  We believe that the protestors here violated §403, as well as the UC Davis’s “Principles of Community,” reaffirmed less that one year ago.

You can read the LDB legal staff’s letter to Chancellor Katehi below. (more…)