UCLA suspends Students for Justice in Palestine after protest at UC regent's home

Yahoo

13-02-2025

UCLA administrators said Wednesday said they were indefinitely suspending two Students for Justice in Palestine organizations after masked pro-Palestinian campus activists protested outside the Brentwood home of University of California Regent Jay Sures last week, vandalizing his property and surrounding his wife while she was in her car.
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.