Jewish students sue UCLA over pro-Palestinian encampment

Three Jewish students from UCLA filed a federal lawsuit against the president of the University of California and the university's leadership on Wednesday over the controversial pro-Palestinian encampment that popped up on its campus in April and May.

The 74-page complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, claimed the encampment blocked Jewish students and faculty from going to classes, offices and the library and subjected them to chants of antisemitic language.

Becket, a nonprofit specializing in religious rights, and the law firm Clement & Murphy, PLLC  filed the lawsuit on behalf of two law students and an undergraduate student.

"If masked agitators had excluded any other marginalized group at UCLA, Governor Newsom rightly would have sent in the National Guard immediately," said Mark Rienzi, president of the nonprofit. 

Rienzi alleged that UCLA capitulated to the demonstrators and "allowed its Jewish students to be segregated from the heart of their own campus."

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs claimed the activists used barriers and physically blocked students from passing through unless they said a statement of allegiance to the activists' views, received a "vouch" from a member of the encampment and disavowed Israel. 

The complaint alleges that the demonstrators handed out wristbands and "other forms of identification" to people who passed the check. 

The students' attorneys called the area a "Jew Exclusion Zone." 

"This is America in 2024—not Germany in 1939," Rienzi said. "UCLA's administration should have to answer for allowing the Jew Exclusion Zone and promise that Jews will never again be segregated on campus."

The students also allege in the lawsuit the guards hired to bolster the security outside the encampment discouraged Jewish students from crossing the area, the lawsuit claims.

"The security officers, acting as agents of Defendants, informed Jewish persons that, if they wished to access the encampment or other restricted areas, they would first need to obtain the permission of the encampment members," the attorneys stated in the suit.

The students are requesting "compensatory, punitive, and nominal damages for the loss of their rights under federal state law" and to cover attorney's fees and other costs. 

UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.