Nobody was stabbed at the checkpoints by a crazed Palestinian.
Via SF Chronicle:
Students’ screams echoed through UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza as their classmates — wearing Israeli military uniforms, sunglasses and what looked like assault rifles — stood guard at a mock checkpoint and threw Palestinian actors to the ground.
“Go! Go!” a guard shouted at a Palestinian, barring her from passing through the Sather Gate-turned-checkpoint and urging her to go back to where she came from. She yelled back: “What do you think you’re doing? What’s wrong with you!?”
The elaborate display Tuesday featured dozens of members of Students for Justice in Palestine playing the role of Palestinians passing through the mock Israeli checkpoint over several hours. The drama criticized security policies in Israel and that country’s practice of demanding Palestinians’ identification and searching their belongings as they head to work, school and other activities in Israel.
But for some Palestinan students, like Hannah Al-Bayan, a junior majoring in biology, the play was very real. “When I go visit, this is exactly the kind of thing we go through,” she said.[…]
On college campuses around the world, other pro-Palestinian activists — many of them Jewish — enact similar protests each year as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week.”
The campus checkpoints cause tension among some students — while some sympathize with Palestinians and condemn Israeli actions, others defend the checkpoints as essential to preserving the Jewish state and protecting Israelis from terrorism.
The checkpoint dramas are often accompanied by lectures urging college leaders to boycott Israeli products and divest from holdings in the country. The actions are seen as anti-Semitic by many Jewish students who say they inspire hostility toward those who embrace Israel.
This year’s protest at Berkeley came a week after the UC regents adopted “Policies Against Intolerance” to address Jewish students’ concerns that anti-Semitism is on the rise at UC. Swastikas and other anti-Jewish graffiti have appeared on UC campuses in recent years, as have attempts to stifle Jewish students. Pro-Palestinian students and faculty alike had feared an original version of the policy would limit their free speech.
In part, the regents’ document sought to clarify whether “anti-Zionism” — generally defined as opposition to Israel as a Jewish state — equates to anti-Semitism. The debate among students, faculty and others captured national attention as it led up to the regents’ March 24 approval of a document declaring that “anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism, and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”