In the SRJC, SSU campus protests over the war in Gaza, the same words can have very different meanings

Phrases used at protests on the Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University campuses reveal the linguistic divide that often separates staunch defenders of Israel and those demanding equality for Palestinians.|

More than 200 people gathered at Santa Rosa Junior College’s Bertolini Quad near midday Thursday. They were there to express solidarity with the Palestinian people and demand a cease-fire in Gaza, the densely populated strip of land that the Israeli military has subjected to sustained bombardment in the wake of the Hamas-led attack on Jewish communities on Oct. 7.

After listening to several speakers, the crowd moved toward Mendocino Avenue and set up on the lawn facing the busy street, chanting pro-Palestine slogans and waving their handmade messages at passing cars.

The tone was urgent, but the protest was peaceful.

That evening, Santa Rosa resident Lev Luvishis, who identified himself as the father of an SRJC student, emailed college President Angélica Garcia and other members of the administration. Luvishis signaled his disgust at images he had seen in the Oak Leaf, SRJC’s student newspaper.

They included a photo of a young woman holding a placard that read, “F*ck Zionism.” Another sign bore the phrases “Zionism = Nazism” and “Get Rid of the Genocide.”

“My great grandmother was killed in the Holocaust,” Luvishis wrote. “I know what Nazism is and what genocide is. I also know that U.S. Congress adopted HR 894 last December that recognizes that denying the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state — the core definition of Zionism — constitutes antisemitism.”

Luvishis pressed Garcia to publicly condemn the messages, and to create a task force to address antisemitism.

Compared to campuses such as Columbia University and UCLA, the scenes at SRJC and nearby Sonoma State University have been mild. But they, too, reveal the linguistic divide that often separates staunch defenders of Israel and those demanding equality for Palestinians.

As the world assigns accountability for the conflict in Gaza and Americans weigh this country’s role in the violence there, the discussion is frequently clouded, and sometimes derailed altogether, by a disconnect. How do you discuss a major geopolitical event when the words used to describe it can be interpreted so differently?

The Press Democrat spoke to protesters, their critics and experts, about the most prominent of these contested phrases.

Zionism

To Israel’s founders and their modern-day supporters, Zionism is a declaration of the right of Jews to live in the region they see as their spiritual home. To many of the students and faculty members rallying for a cease-fire in Gaza, the term has become a shorthand for oppression and religious extremism.

“Zionism is, simply, Jewish nationalism,” said James Gelvin, a UCLA history professor whose primary area of expertise is modern Middle East history. “Zionists regard Jews not as a religious community, but as a national community with the same right to sovereignty as any other national community.”

That’s the crux of 75 years of religious and ethnic conflict in the region. Both Jews and Palestinian Arabs have legitimate historical ties to the area, and each has attempted to stake their right to be there since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948.

The young woman holding the “F*ck Zionists” sign declined an interview.

But Mae Berry, an SRJC student who participated in Thursday’s campus rally, argued that Israel does not have a right to exist. And that is not a call for expulsion or violence, she insisted.

“Talking about Zionism is often being currently conflated with antisemitism, which is just completely wrong,” Berry said. “Because Jewish people also deserve to live, and there are plenty of Jewish people in support of the Palestinian cause. So Zionism is being weaponized by people.”

But Danielle Feldman, a Santa Rosa resident who has spent most of her career in public health, does equate the criticism of Zionism with criticism of Jews generally.

“It hurts,” Feldman said. “And it feels ignorant. And it feels like it’s been co-opted to make us into the bad guys. Like they’ve taken an idea and the basic premise of Judaism and vilified it. It’s painful.”

From the river to the sea

It’s the most common phrase associated with the recent wave of campus protests — the 2024 equivalent of “No Justice, No Peace” or “Si Se Puede.” And it’s hard to imagine a grouping of words that could be more contested.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The only thing everyone can agree on: The river is the Jordan. The sea is the Mediterranean. They frame the state of Israel and the two Palestinian areas it occupies, the West Bank and Gaza.

“The slogan is ambiguous,” said Gelvin, the UCLA professor. “It is sometimes used to refer to the possibility of a single state made up of Palestinians and Israels with equal rights, or it can refer to a single state with one dominant community. Dominance would come about through the suppression or expulsion of the other community.”

It’s religious Zionists and members of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that carried out the lethal attacks of Oct. 7, who tend to use the latter definition, Gelvin said.

To Mike Harris, a retired pediatrician who lives in Bodega Bay, the phrase clearly calls for the elimination of Israel.

“They may not be calling for expulsion in all cases, but certainly it’s a call for removing the national self-determination of the Jewish people in any part of our indigenous homeland,” Harris said.

He noted that the organizations promoting that phrase at rallies, such as Students for Justice in Palestine and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, do not accept existence of the Jewish state.

“They can couch it, and claim it’s ambiguous and they just want freedom for all people living there,” Harris said. “But drill down in, and, ‘OK, how about a Jewish state next to a Palestinian-Arab state? No, not acceptable.’”

Berry didn’t mention any group membership when she talked about her “From the river to the sea” sign at the SRJC rally.

“I chose ‘from the river to the sea’ because I know personally from a lot of Palestinians that I know ... that it’s a phrase that brings them a lot of hope and security,” Berry said.

Viviano Cunningham expressed similar thoughts.

They have been camping on the Sonoma State campus to bring attention to America’s involvement in the Gaza war and are among a handful of students there who have gone through a form of media training. They and two peers, Albert Levine and Madyline Jaramillo, talked to a reporter inside a cluttered, airless “media tent” on Person Lawn on Thursday.

“I think ‘from the river to the sea’ specifically is more like ‘end apartheid from the river to the sea.’ Free all the oppressed people, and make sure everyone can be equal,” they said. “It’s absolutely not calling for the eradication of everyone in Israel. The people in Israel aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s the government, and the system the government is running.”

Globalize the intifada

Use of the term “intifada” has taken various forms at recent campus protests. Two of the more popular have been “Globalize the Intifada” and “One solution, intifada revolution.”

They rest on a term that might well define the religious-political divide in Israel.

“Intifada” is an Arabic word that literally translates to “shaking off.” It has been used beyond Palestine — for example, in Bahrain, where it referred to shaking off an autocratic government, Gelvin explained. In Palestine, there were two sustained uprisings against Israel known as intifadas.

“The first, launched against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, began in 1987,” Gelvin said. “It was mainly nonviolent or with symbolic violence, and it was symbolized by Palestinian youths throwing stones at Israeli tanks in the territories. The second intifada, launched for the same purpose in 2000, was bloody. Its main symbol was the suicide bomber.”

Some 1,000 Israelis died in the second intifada.

One was Marla Bennett. She was killed at Hebrew University on July 31, 2002, the day before she was scheduled to fly home to the Bay Area. It is Bennett, her friend from UC Berkeley, whom Feldman thinks of when she hears “intifada.”

“When I see them calling for intifada, it scares me and breaks my heart,” Feldman said. “Because the periods of intifada in Israel were periods of violence. They took the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and tourists and students. I will never be able to see a call for intifada without seeing it as a call for the terrorism that took Marla’s life.”

The SSU encampment spokespeople view “intifada” in a purer form. And they are convinced some of the opposition to the word is a reflexive reaction to hearing darker-skinned people shouting in Arabic.

“Our country has a really bad history with the Middle East, and there’s a lot of Islamophobia,” Cunningham said. “So hearing the word ‘intifada’ and being scared by it, there’s probably a lot of racial bias behind that.”

Apartheid

Another word showing up on local campuses does not share the Middle Eastern roots of others. It began a continent away, where the white Afrikaner government in South Africa imposed a system of political and economic oppression that made Blacks — and others — powerless in their own homeland.

“Throughout the 1950s, regulations created separate residency areas, job categories, public facilities, transportation, education, and health systems, with social contact between the races strictly prohibited,” Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute explained on its website. The system was brutally enforced.

That framework has not been duplicated in Israel and its occupied territories, despite the signage, according to Luvishis.

“This is another lie fed by Israel haters,” he said. “There are no Jews living in Gaza. They would have been killed if identified as Jews. Same goes with Christians as well.”

But Eleanor Pearson, who marched with Berry at SRJC, compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to Jim Crow laws in the American South, an analogy that Cunningham also drew.

“Palestinian people, you have to have a permit to gather water from the land. And the permits are ridiculously hard to apply for and get approved,” the SSU student said. “They can’t walk on certain streets. There are checkpoints they have to go through. There’s a curfew. So when they go somewhere, they need to go to one place a day, because you have to get through all the checkpoints.”

Genocide

As SRJC students demonstrated in front of Mendocino Avenue on Thursday, they included a chant aimed at the president of Israel’s largest benefactor: “Joe Biden, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

It’s a devastating word that refers to the systematic and targeted erasure of a people, based on their religion or ethnicity or race. And it’s a particularly laden term for Jews. Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in 1944, to describe the murder of 6 million Jews by the German Nazis during World War II.

Julie, a Jewish adjunct instructor at SRJC who declined to give her last name during a campus rally, understands that. She has been reading the scholarly reviews of the subject, as it applies to Palestine, she said — most of it written by Jews — and “every quality for defining genocide is being met.”

The United Nations has outlined clear guidance on the subject. In their definition of this international crime, it must include both intent and a “physical element” that includes things like killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to result in its physical destruction.

The footage of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Julie said, fits the definition all too snugly.

“It’s the most horrific abuses of human rights — forced starvation, mass murder, women and children slaughtered, academics slaughtered, universities bombed, hospitals bombed,” Julie said. “It’s the most abhorrent thing I’ve ever seen our U.S. tax dollars going to support. And every bone in my body cries out to stop this genocide.”

Harris, the Bodega Bay resident, argued Israel’s bombing of Gaza doesn’t fit the definition of targeted persecution of a religion or ethnicity, because the country is not inflicting the same violence on Israeli Arabs or residents of the West Bank.

“So perhaps there’s another reason people in Gaza are suffering,” said Harris, a lay leader for the group Stand With Us. “And there is — because of what Hamas has done there.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @Skinny_Post.