UCLA suspends Students for Justice in Palestine after protest at UC regent's home
Chancellor Julio Frenk said in a campuswide message the decision by the UCLA Office of Student Conduct was an interim suspension while internal judicial procedures over the groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine — took place.
The organizations, which supported pro-Palestinian encampments last year, will no longer be able to reserve space for meetings on campus, apply for student club funding, or affiliate themselves with UCLA.
Read more: UC Regent Jay Sures' Brentwood home vandalized in pro-Palestinian rally
The conduct proceedings and suspensions have no end date.
"Without the basic feeling of safety, humans cannot learn, teach, work and live — much less thrive and flourish," Frenk said in his letter. "This is true no matter what group you are a member of — or which identities you hold. There is no place for violence in our Bruin community."
UCLA joins several other UCs and other campuses throughout the country that have banned or suspended SJP.
At UC Santa Cruz, the organization is suspended until September 2026. At UC Irvine, a suspension is in place through November 2029. And at UC San Diego, SJP was charged last spring with activities "incompatible with the orderly operation of campus" and did not renew its campus group status in the fall.
The UCLA suspensions come after UC adopted "zero-tolerance" polices for code of conduct violations following unrest during spring 2024 when campuses erupted in contentious protests — and violence targeted the UCLA pro-Palestinian encampment. The policy bans masking while breaking the law, including vandalism.
UCLA's rules add that it can hold students accountable for off-campus behavior if university leaders believe students have acted violently or endorsed violence. While the LAPD is investigating potential crimes during the incident at Sures' home, UCLA is not pursuing campus charges against individual students related to the actions.
In his letter, Frenk cited Instagram posts from the UCLA SJP groups advertising an early morning Feb. 5 protest outside the regent's home. Dozens of protesters — their faces concealed with scarves and masks — showed up with drums, fliers and signs demanding the UC system divest from Israel.
The activists "harassed" Sures and used "threatening messages," Frenk said, and held a banner reading, "Jonathan Sures, you will pay until you see your final day.' Frenk also said protesters "vandalized the Sures home by applying red-colored handprints to the outer walls of the home and hung banners on the property's hedges."
Sures, a UCLA alumnus and vice chairman at United Talent Agency, is one of 18 UC regents. An outspoken supporter of Israel, he called the actions of pro-Palestinian campus protesters antisemitic as encampments and conflicts with administrators and police escalated last year.
In a Feb. 5 Instagram post, accounts for the SJP chapters group said Sures is "one of the unelected officials responsible for protecting UC investments in genocide and weapons manufacturing." The post includes a doctored image of Sures in a suit with fire burning behind him under a pro-Palestinian banner and his hands edited to appear bloody.
In another post, the groups said, "Regents have repeatedly kicked us out of their meetings, canceled forums for public comment, and criminalized our attempts to protest investment policies. We have taken our issues straight to the Regents because they have systematically militarized our campus in response."
In an interview, Sures said he believed students chose his home because he is Jewish.
"This is not about me. I'm the target but this is about protecting every member of our community from intimidation and hate," Sures said. "The conceit that somehow you will intimidate me and the University of California will divest is silly and illogical. That's never going to happen."
In response to encampments, UC leaders said last year that they would not divest from Israel. About 18% of the university system's $175 billion in assets are connected to weapons companies, investment funds with Israeli ties, corporations such as Disney targeted by pro-Palestinian activists or U.S. bonds.
Graeme Blair, a member of UCLA's Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said the suspensions were part of a pattern of "violence against Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and pro-Palestine students."
"Just like in April, administrators today selectively deployed the charge of violence, not against those whose actions cause physical harm, but against those whose speech they dislike," said Blair, an associate professor of political science. "Chancellor Frenk and the UC regents' continuing complicity in genocide is violence. ... To call hanging banners on shrubs violence is a despicable distortion."
The UCLA SJP groups posted brief statements on Instagram Wednesday. "Damn, that's crazy," said a post on the graduate student group's account under a copy of Frenk's letter.
"Hey guys, @UCLA just 'interim suspended' our chapter," said the UCLA SJP account. "Stay tuned and turn on our story and post notifications to stay updated." An emoji of a Palestinian flag ended the post.
Kira Stein, the chair of UCLA's Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, said "it was about time" for the suspensions after more than a year of complaints her group has raised about SJP.
Stein, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, said SJP organizations have been "weaponizing political dissent to mask blatant antisemitism, using intimidation, harassment and inflammatory disinformation to divide and destabilize our campus. ... We have a long list of SJP violations of university rules and regulations that we have been sharing with the administration."
In an interview, UC Regent Rich Leib, who has also spoken in favor of pro-Israel campus communities, said he was "very supportive" of suspension.
"I strongly believe in peaceful protest but doing things at private residences and intimidating people is not a peaceful protest. What they did to Regent Sures' house and what they did to his family was way beyond a peaceful protest," Leib said.
The union representing UC police hailed the suspension — and called on UCLA to "to demand prosecution" if protesters break the law.
"Universities cannot allow lawlessness under the guise of activism. Only through full accountability will these students learn to confine their actions to those permitted by law and university policy," said the statement from Wade Stern, president of the Federated University Peace Officers Assn.
Pro-Palestinian movements grew quickly on U.S. campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Last spring, protesters erected encampments and demanded divestment. Actions at UCLA were among the largest in the nation.
UCLA, in internal and external reviews, has been faulted for a failure to quickly coordinate a response with Los Angeles police and other law enforcement when vigilantes attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment there on April 30 and May 1.
The university created a new campus safety office in response and, last month, said it hired former LAPD Cmdr. Steve Lurie to lead it. Lurie previously oversaw the department's West Bureau, which includes UCLA.
The Westwood campus has increased restrictions on protests since fall — making the majority of public areas off-limits to demonstrations without permits — and upped the presence of campus security guards.
Read more: UCLA students and faculty raise alarm on antisemitic and anti-Palestinian hate amid ongoing protests
UCLA has also been embroiled in a host of lawsuits, investigations and strife over pro-Palestinian protests.
In October, a group of pro-Palestinian UCLA students and faculty members filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the university violated their free speech rights when it cleared the spring encampment and wrongly subjected them to disciplinary measures over protesting. Earlier, a federal judge in a separate case ordered UCLA to ensure equal access to Jewish students, three of whom alleged that the university enabled encampment protesters to block Jews from parts of campus.
Also in October, the UCLA Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias released a 93-page report on "broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus' since 2023. The UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism has also published three reports since April detailing a campus that's "less safe than ever' for those groups and criticizing "increased harassment, violence, and targeting' of them.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Boston Globe
an hour ago
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Israel is making sure there is no one to document the horror of its war
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A look at Gaza ceasefire talks after Hamas accepts a new proposal
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San Francisco Chronicle
5 hours ago
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State Department employee fired after questioning talking points on Israel and Gaza
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has fired a press officer who was responsible for drafting Trump administration talking points about policy toward Israel and Gaza after complaints from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Officials said Shahed Ghoreishi, a contractor working for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, was terminated over the weekend following two incidents last week in which his loyalty to Trump administration policies was called into question. Ghoreishi, who is Iranian American, also was targeted Wednesday following his dismissal by right-wing personality Laura Loomer, who accused him of not being fully supportive of the administration's policies in the Middle East. According to Ghoreishi and two current U.S. officials, Ghoreishi drew the ire of a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and then top aides to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for drafting a response to a query from The Associated Press last week. The question related to discussions between Israel and South Sudan about the possible relocation of Palestinians from Gaza to South Sudan. The draft response included a line that said the U.S. does not support the forced relocation of Gazans, something that President Donald Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff have said repeatedly. However, according to Ghoreishi and the officials, that line was rejected by the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, leading to questions about policy back in Washington. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel changes. Ghoreishi also said he questioned a statement from the embassy that referred to the West Bank as 'Judea and Samaria,' the Biblical name for the Palestinian territory that some right-wing Israeli officials prefer. Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, also has repeatedly backed referring to the West Bank by Judea and Samaria. The ouster shows the lengths that the Trump administration has gone to ensure what it sees as loyalty to the president and his goals, including a foreign policy approach that has offered overwhelming support for Israel in the war against Hamas. The administration this week also revoked security clearances for 37 current and former national security officials, including many who had signed a 2019 letter critical of Trump that was recently highlighted by Loomer. 'Despite a close working relationship with many of my dedicated and hardworking colleagues, I was targeted following two events last week when I attracted the ire of the 7th floor and senior officials in Embassy Jerusalem: stating we are against forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza as President Trump and special envoy Witkoff have both previously claimed and cutting a reference to Judea and Samaria,' Ghoreishi said, referring to the floor where top leaders have offices at the State Department. 'Both of these had been consistently approved at the senior level in the past, so it begs the question why I was suddenly targeted without a direct explanation and whether our Israel-Palestine policy is about to get even worse — including an unwillingness to take any stand against ethnic cleansing. The future looks bleak,' he said. State Department spokespeople declined to comment on his firing, calling it an internal personnel matter. Without addressing the specifics, deputy State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement that the agency 'has zero tolerance for employees who commit misconduct by leaking or otherwise disclosing confidential deliberative emails or information. Federal employees should never put their personal political ideologies ahead of the duly elected President's agenda.' Loomer claimed Wednesday that she had a hand in Ghoreishi's removal from the State Department. She said he was affiliated with pro-Iran groups and jihadists, which Ghoreishi denies. Just days ago, the State Department said it was halting all visitor visas for people from Gaza pending a review soon after Loomer had posted videos on social media of children from Gaza arriving in the U.S. for medical treatment and questioning how they got visas.
