Campus protests hearten San Franciscans with family in Gaza

Reem Assil said she last heard from her family in Gaza about two weeks ago, about a month after Israeli forces withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital.

“The [Israeli Defense Forces were] taking over the Al-Shifa Hospital, and my family was sheltering outside,” Assil said. “Unfortunately, some of them didn’t make it — the houses they were sheltering in got destroyed.”

In the aftermath, her family feared that her aunt had fled to Rafah, which is now the subject of an expanded Israeli military operation , but the last Assil spoke with them, she found out her aunt was back in Gaza City.

“It’s just a nightmare,” she said. “This is not going to end tomorrow.”

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is nothing new for Assil, a Palestinian American whose two Reem’s California restaurants in The City — in the Mission and in the Ferry Building — serve the cuisine of her culture. She said her mother was forced out of Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israeli forces have killed more than 35,500 Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on the country, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people and took around another 250 hostages on Oct. 7, according to Israeli tallies.

With cease-fire negotiations stalled amid the uncertainty and human toll in Gaza, Reem and others with family and friends overseas said the number of student protests around the world — including here in San Francisco — drawing attention to the war has helped them keep going.

Assil said those demonstrations — which have called upon higher-education institutions to cut financial ties with Israel and companies supporting its war efforts — have given her optimism of future “divestment from the war machine.” The protests, she said, have heartened her family on the other side of the world.

“It’ll take longer to see the impacts on anything,” she said. “But in the immediate term, they’re giving people in Gaza hope.”

Although many U.S. schools’ spring semesters have ended and others’ quarters are winding down, campus protests have continued around the country. Academic workers at multiple University of California campuses have started striking in response to the school system’s response to the demonstrations. UC officials have said the strike is unauthorized.

Three such encampments popped up in The City, at San Francisco State University, UCSF and USF. The protests were largely peaceful, aside from the arrest of one demonstrator on the first day of the UCSF encampment.

SFSU protest organizers struck an agreement with university officials on May 15, with the latter agreeing to disclose investments, add a “human rights” principle to future investments and divest from direct investments in weapons manufacturers.

USF officials said Tuesday that the encampment on the campus’s Welch Field had disbanded, less than a week after university officials ordered students protesting to disperse or face potential discipline. The school did not call in the police, but did say some participants violated the university’s code of conduct, including those who “wrote graffiti on walls” and “affixed signage to the exterior” of multiple buildings.

Officials announced the formation of a “socially responsible advisory investment task force composed of a representative group of students, faculty, and staff.” The university “will not take an advocacy position” but will “[foster] conversations among scholars, academic experts, and others regarding the definition of genocide and the nature of U.S. support of Israel’s military operation,” they said.

Demonstrators at UCSF said they have faced firmer resistance from officials.

Jess Ghannam, the chief of medical psychology at UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion and a professor at the school told The Examiner on Thursday that campus police closed the encampment at the school over the weekend after it stood for just shy of one week.

UCSF’s encampment went up May 13 , later than most in the Bay Area and around the country. But the student and faculty demonstrators had similar goals to the others related to divestment, as well as shared public-health concerns. They said their goal is not to keep the spotlight on themselves.

“We don’t want it to be about us; we don’t want it to be about the encampment,” Ghannam said. “We want it to be about the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza that are facing famine and a brutal military assault where everybody’s life is on the line.”

While the encampment is gone at the moment, organizers are discussing what steps to take next, Ghannam said.

These types of protests harken back to historical civil-disobedience movements, according to Monadel Herzallah, a San Francisco resident who joined several plaintiffs in November filing a lawsuit against President Joe Biden after the war led to five of his family members’ deaths .

“This is not the first time in America [that] students on campuses have declared their emotions and their position against war — from Vietnam to war in Iraq, or for other civil rights,” he said. “But this is only the beginning.”

Herzallah said he grew up hearing about how his grandparents were forced out of their home in Palestine in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war during what is known as the Nakba. Now, he said, Palestinian advocates’ voices are louder than ever.

“I feel this is a defining moment,” he said. “Where people will be asked generations from now — where were you when the genocide took place? Were you fighting for justice?”

However, the attitude towards campus protests has not been positive all around. Multiple national polls this month have shown a majority of Americans disapprove of the campus protests. Critics of the demonstrations have argued that the protesters have not helped the situation overseas and have put universities in difficult positions.

“I think these chancellors and presidents are in a lose-lose situation,” said Tyler Gregory, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “They are afraid to call in law enforcement because they’re worried that it’s going to lose credibility with their own faculty, but they also know that they can’t throw one community under the bus to lift up another.”

Gregory said he’s concerned about what repercussions might arise down the line from allowing students to have sway over major decisions — financial or otherwise — made by higher-education institutions. Faculty and staff have joined in on the campus demonstrations, including at UCSF.

“This is a slippery slope of moving from one topic to creating a precedent where Israel can be singled out,” he said. “What I object to is that these student groups leading encampments are being given a platform to advise on investment policies, where other interested parties — like the Jewish community, for example — is not being given that voice.”

Gregory also cited concerns over a rise in antisemitism on campuses as a result. But Roger Feigelson, the executive director of SF Hillel, which works with organizations on campuses across The City, said this hasn’t necessarily been the case for Jewish students in San Francisco.

“They’re generally uncomfortable, but they don’t seem to feel unsafe,” Feigelson told The Examiner.

Some students have been frustrated about not being able to be a part of the dialogue going on, Feigelson said — which, he said, is a shame, considering that students should be able to engage with each other on difficult topics.

“It kind of goes against the idea of the institution, where you’re there specifically to be critically thinking about these issues, to exclude people with different views,” he said. “That’s really a big problem.”

Wael Buhaissy, a dancer in the East Bay who is another plaintiff in the lawsuit against Biden, said campus protests in the Bay Area and elsewhere have given him — and his family and friends overseas — the strength to keep going even when it feels the most challenging.

“It gives them hope that somebody out there cares,” he said. “So the larger the movement, the more they are, I think, empowered, or at least given the ability to withstand what’s going on.”

Buhaissy, who asked to go by his stage name for this story, said his family was also forced out of Palestine in 1948, and that he was born in Kuwait after his family settled there. He said he has lived in the United States for around 35 years now and remains close to his relatives in Gaza, some of whom have died since the war broke out.

While it’s been difficult, he said, he has shared videos and other coverage of the Bay Area campus protests as often as he can to show them that they have not been forgotten by the rest of the world.

“These moments where they actually are being made visible, and given a voice by movements in general, is very empowering to them,” he said.