UCSF students, employees set up pro-Palestinian protest encampment

More than two dozen UCSF students and employees set up a tent encampment on the school’s Parnassus campus Monday, joining the nationwide network of collegiate protesters calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and for their universities to cut ties with Israel.

Nearly a month after Columbia University students set up an encampment on their New York City campus, around 30 people did the same Monday at UCSF as they held a rally to draw attention to their demands.

“We're calling on UCSF — because we're a health sciences campus — to demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire and a resumption of humanitarian and medical aid to be brought into Gaza,” said Jess Ghannam, a professor at the school and the chief of medical psychology at UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion.

Ghannam said he has traveled to Gaza for more than 25 years. The Palestinian American’s most recently scheduled trip was derailed in the aftermath of Oct. 7, he said, and he hasn’t been able to return since.

Hamas killed around 1,200 people that day, according to the Israeli government, taking around 250 people hostage. Israel has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in its subsequent military offensive, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

“I've lost four colleagues and their family members, ranging in age from 4 months to 77 years,” Ghannam said. “I have a personal connection there.”

UCSF Palestine Solidarity Encampment organizers’ calls echoed those of demonstrations at other University of California campuses , demanding the system divest from all companies, programs and organizations with financial ties to Israel and its military. The university system said last month it “ has consistently opposed boycott against and divestment from Israel .”

UCSF didn’t respond to a request for comment prior to publication.

Unlike many of the encampments to grab headlines over the last month, UCSF demonstrators set up theirs at a postgraduate campus with no undergraduate presence.

“We don't have an undergrad population here,” Hadi, a demonstrator who asked to only go by her first name for privacy reasons, told The Examiner on Monday. “We all have jobs. We all have families or loved ones or other responsibilities that we have to take care of. That's also made it a lot harder, but it's also made it a lot more rewarding.”

“We're not just here for the school semester,” Hadi said. “We're here for the long haul.”

Students at UC Law San Francisco, another postgraduate school in The City, have not established an encampment. The school’s student chapter of the National Lawyers Guild has been training legal observers to attend protests at other campuses to record interactions between police and demonstrators crossing any lines, Zoe Papadopoulos, one of the organizers, told The Examiner last week.

There have been no arrests at San Francisco schools’ protest encampments, nor have there been any violent clashes between opposing demonstrators. Both have occurred on other campuses around the country.

Roger Feigelson, the executive director of SF Hillel, said that this might just be due to the culture in San Francisco where students are more respectful of activism.

“I don't want our Jewish students being harassed or bullied or targeted over this,” he said. “I'm not seeing that happen — it's uncomfortable, but rhetoric is uncomfortable.”

The atmosphere of college campuses lends itself naturally to these sorts of movements, he said, and he welcomes those conversations.

“An institution of higher learning is all about being open to new ideas, to scary ideas, to challenging ideas that you might not otherwise be exposed to,” he said.

In addition to their personal ties, UCSF organizers argued the school had a duty to speak out from a public-health perspective.

A United Nations official said this month that northern Gaza was in “ full-blown famine .” The World Health Organization warned last week that hospitals in the country’s southern end were days away from running out of fuel. Only 12 of 36 hospitals there are functional, according to the U.N. agency.

“The health care system has been absolutely decimated,” Ghannam said. “We want the focus to be on protecting civilian lives, protecting physicians and health care workers, and protecting hospitals.”

“Hospitals are not a political space,” Hadi said. “But they've been targeted and destroyed.”

The UCSF organizers also joined peer protesters elsewhere in the University of California system to call upon the school system’s administration, UC President Michael Drake, the UC Board of Regents and Gov. Gavin Newsom to condemn the conflict, demand a cease-fire, and allow aid and medical care to return to Gaza.

But UCSF protestors have also singled out the school’s relationship with the Helen Diller Foundation, one of its largest donors, for its ties to Israeli organizations and demanded that those funding ties be severed.

Hadi said that it took longer for UCSF organizers to start encampment than others in the UC system for several reasons, including that the campus administration has made it difficult for them to protest in previous months.

“The activism that we have tried to do on campus, within the bounds that the administration has given us, has been met with a lot of vitriol from people who work here,” she said.

Flyers and posters they’ve put up supporting Gaza and calling for divestment have been ripped down, she said, and negative emails circulated within the student body about them afterward. Throughout all of it, she said, the administration has met with them but not taken concrete steps to meet their demands.