‘Do not engage’: As violence erupts elsewhere, Bay Area campuses keep a fragile peace

When a pro-Palestine protester snatched an Israeli flag from a counter-protester on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall this week, it seemed as if it could go the way of violent clashes in universities in Southern California.

But the ensuing scuffle quickly de-escalated, and a relative calm returned to campus Thursday.

At Stanford, when students turned up waving U.S. and Israeli flags, pro-Palestine protesters encamped at White Plaza kept the commitment they had pledged to each other: They will not be provoked.

They are “trying to get a response and a reaction out of us, but we don’t want that,” Emily Williams, a third-year Stanford student and pro-Palestine activist, said Thursday. “So we just ignore them.”

So far, with a combination of relative discipline among protesters, police-as-a-last-resort campus policies and a more progressive Bay Area political culture, the Bay Area’s biggest universities — from Berkeley and Stanford to San Jose State and the University of San Francisco — have largely managed to avoid the kinds of bloody skirmishes and riot police that have made headlines at campuses across the country.

But whether the uneasy peace will last remains uncertain.

“It’s a fragile situation,” said Dan Mogulof, vice-chancellor for public affairs at UC Berkeley, the cradle of protest movements dating back to the 1960s. “The actions of a single individual can lead to really severe consequences because it begins a chain reaction. So we’re not taking anything for granted. We’re not patting ourselves on our backs. But we do have institutional experience.”

UCLA administrators in Southern California had thought they balanced First Amendment rights with safety on campus, but that quickly changed Wednesday night when a bloody melee with fistfights and chemical sprays broke out, lasting for hours before police intervened. At the University of Southern California, 93 people — including 51 students — were arrested last week following reports of vandalism.

The tensions across California follow dramatic scenes at Columbia University, where 217 were arrested and the encampment was removed by police, and scores of other universities where pro-Palestinian students are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza. Some 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in counter-strikes after Hamas militants attacked Israelis on Oct. 7.

On Thursday, President Biden called for calm. “Order must prevail,” he said. “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.”

At Stanford, protesters at the pro-Palestine encampment erected a large white board with a list of “community norms” they are expected to follow, including this: “Do NOT ENGAGE with counter protestors!”

It’s been a lesson in restraint, Williams said, as they feel goaded by counter protesters waving Israeli flags and one pro-Israeli student in particular who parked himself in the middle of their encampment one afternoon.

“We can’t physically pick him up and boot him out, so we’re just going to leave him,” Williams said. “The main target here is the administration, because they’re the ones that have the endowment, that have access to the investment holdings. We don’t want to be deterred by these individual actors who are trying to agitate us on purpose.”

Stanford officials sent a campus-wide email and handed out fliers warning protesters that they are in continued violation of the university’s rules against overnight encampments, and the Office of Community Standards has initiated disciplinary proceedings against several students.

“We welcome the peaceful expression of diverse viewpoints at Stanford,” university President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez wrote in an email to students last week. However, “while we understand their perspectives on an important global issue, violations of university policy will not be overlooked.”

To avoid being identified and sanctioned, some protesters are wearing masks.

At USF, a private, Catholic university, pro-Palestine protesters have set up more than 50 tents on Welch Field since Monday and intend to stay through graduation later this month. The university set up portable toilets for the protesters, an effort that was not welcomed by protester Susu Steyteyieh, who said that it suggests the university plans to wait them out rather than take their cause seriously.

“We don’t want porta potties,” she said. “We want our demands met!”

At Berkeley, where an estimated 150 tents are set up after 11 days of occupying the steps of Sproul Hall, doctorate student Yazen Kashlan said Thursday his fellow protesters had tried to avoid the kind of conflict over the Israeli flag that erupted Wednesday. His fellow activists had formed a human chain to try to keep the two sides apart, “but still the person managed to grab the Israeli flag,” he said.

“We realized what might tip the scale and invoke the law enforcement to ensure order,” Kashlan said, “so we’re working on just keeping things civil and nonviolent.”

It helps that Berkeley is a longtime liberal city where passersby mostly tend to be sympathetic to their cause. It’s also encouraging, he said, that university officials have been meeting with protesters.

“That’s evolving slowly, but they’re listening,” Kashlan said.

Mogulof said two campus committees in particular are playing roles in keeping the peace, including the longstanding Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish student life and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Muslim and Palestinian students.

“We have faculty with relationships and connections to a wide variety of student groups who have been doing really important work behind the scenes to keep communication channels open,” the vice chancellor said.

At the same time, he said, officials are making it clear that “we will respond to violence.”

Any decision to send in police would not be made lightly.

“You can go and you can affect arrests. You can use law enforcement. But what happens the next day?” he asked. “Are the protesters likely to simply say, ‘Oh, sorry, we’re done?’ Or could you wind up in a situation like Columbia where the protests tripled in size?”

Nollyanne Delacruz contributed to this report.