At least one University of California official is calling out the Hamas apologists within the system’s ranks.
Jonathan “Jay” Sures, a University of California Regent, sent a letter Tuesday to the system’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council denouncing the group’s October 16 communication to the broader University of California leadership — in which the council took issue with that leadership’s characterization of Hamas as a terrorist organization — as “appalling and repugnant.”
“Your council has willingly chosen to be surrogates and supporters for Hamas’ destructive actions,” Sures wrote. “The UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council letter does not come in a vacuum, but at a time when Jewish students across the country, including on all our UC campuses, are experiencing increasing antisemitic threats and intimidation. Your blatant and baseless rhetoric feeds into this hostile environment.”
Sures also signaled his distress at the notion that these professors are tasked with shaping the minds of college students across the state.
“The thought that young and impressionable students might be taught the falsehoods of your letter absolutely sickens me,” he wrote.
In its letter, the council of ethnic studies professors wrote that it “rejects recent UC administrative communications that distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and thereby contribute to the racist and dehumanizing erasure of Palestinian daily reality,” arguing that “context is crucial” in understanding the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli response.
“We call on the UC administrative leadership to retract its charges of terrorism, to uplift the Palestinian freedom struggle, and to stand against Israel’s war crimes against [sic] and ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people,” the missive reads.
The University of California leadership in its initial October 9 statement decried Hamas’s violence.
“Our hearts are heavy in the face of the horrific attack on Israel over the weekend, which involved the loss of innocent lives and the abduction of innocent hostages, including children and the elderly. This was an act of terrorism, launched on a major Jewish holiday,” wrote Richard Leib, University of California Board of Regents Chair, and Michael V. Drake, University of California President.
The University of California system has been the site of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric since the October 7 attack. On October 13 and 14, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism held a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, titled “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism.” The event’s name refers to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s “points of unity” include claims that Israel is “a settler colonial racial project,” that the “rigorous, transnational study of Zionism as a political ideology and practice, and of Zionist institutions as political actors, is necessary for political pursuits from democracy to decolonization,” and that “researching the role that Zionism plays in struggles over racism and violence” advances movements “for justice and self-determination.”
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, 51 University of California student organizations signed a statement written by “Bears for Palestine” pledging “unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza” and saying “glory for the martyrs.”
On October 25, a protester at a pro-Palestinian rally at the Berkeley campus, when asked if he supports terrorists, said “I support them 100 percent.”