Public Comment

The resignation of the City Manager, Dee Williams-Ridley wasn’t the only surprise on May 6, 2024. 

This was the email sent at 1:09:20 PM PDT on May 6, 2024 to the Peace and Justice Commissioners by Peter Radu giving notice to the Commissioners that the evening Commission meeting scheduled at 7 pm was cancelled. (Note: Okeya is the Peace and Justice Commission Secretary.) 

“Dear Commissioners, 

With sincere apologies for the late notice, I am writing to inform you that the City Manager has directed staff to cancel tonight’s Peace and Justice Commission meeting. We will pause on rescheduling this meeting until City staff can meet to discuss how we can better plan for and accommodate meetings with potentially volatile agenda items, at this and other commissions. [emphasis added] 

Okeya will be taking the formal administrative steps to cancel tonight’s meeting shortly. But I wanted to give you advanced notice, out of respect for your schedules this evening. 

Respectfully, 

Peter Radu 

Assistant to the City Manager - Neighborhood Services 

Interim Deputy Director – Health, Housing, and Community Services Department 

The three Discussion/Action items for the evening were: 8. Update on Planning Gaza Peace Conversation for Berkeley Residents. 9. Discussion on History of Commission Action in the Past Years and Potential 2024 Actions., 10. Discussion and Possible Action on Potential UC Police Removal of Demonstrators from Sproul Plaza. 

College student pro-Palestinian demonstrations have taken center stage with some national media anchors and pundits calling students terrorists, comparing them to January 6, 2021 insurrectionists, describing them as brainwashed and a string of other derogatory terms. 

Chris Hayes had this to say on the long history of college activism in his eight-minute commentary on All In on May 1, “What I find particularly maddening about the focus on the protesters of the conflict is that it is an evasion. It avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country in our names, with our support.” (the full commentary at https://youtu.be/LZi7gxXEh5I?si=z85rQf870F8QlvIG ) 

On Saturday, May 4 Ayman Mohyeldin made his commentary on pro-Palestine protests by starting his first hour with Israa University in Gaza established in 2014 to ensure poverty would not stand in the way of pursuing a college degree. He described the University’s main building as constructed as a love letter to Islamic architecture. The school planned to open a museum in celebration of its tenth anniversary with more than 3000 artifacts from Roman to modern pieces of history and culture. 

On January 17, 2024, the IDF demolished that beautiful Israa University building. Nothing is left but rubble, but you can see what it was in pictures of the main building, past conferences, activities and events on the Israa University website. https://en.israa.edu.ps 

The UN describes the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza as Scholasticide. 

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine said this about the complete and partial demolition of five of seven educational institutions in Gaza including Israa University, “You are not fighting Hamas, you’re fighting the existence of Palestinians. You’re fighting their capability to have memory and to have records and be educated.” 

Friday afternoon, I walked up to Sproul Plaza with a friend to see the UC Berkeley pro-Palestinian encampment. On the sidewalk outside campus grounds members of the worldwide peace movement Women in Black greeted us offering 4” by 6” cards with “Apartheid Israel” in large bold letters. https://womeninblack.org 

On one side were four maps with the title “Israeli Theft of Palestinian & Syrian Land, 1947 to Present” with the website, https://ifamericansknew.org at the bottom. On the other side were three quotes from Ariel Sharon. The first quote dated 1973 stated “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them… we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” The third quote dated 2000 stated “the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.” 

Given all the media coverage of police violently clearing student encampments across the country, we weren’t sure what we would find at Berkeley. 

The demonstration was unexpectantly quiet. Other than a speaker surrounded by people sitting quietly on the plaza and two young people (presumably students) with information and free buttons not much was happening. There was a woman painting a portrait on one of the large plywood boards. The tents were packed in closely on the grass in front of Sproul Hall with several porta potties barely visible on north end. Not everyone was paying attention to the encampment. People were walking around on the plaza as one might expect on any normal pleasantly sunny noontime day.