The Persian Gulf War--the Student Front : At UC Berkeley, a Jewish-Muslim Coalition Struggles to Hold Together

One autumn afternoon in 1989, a group of UC Berkeley students sat down on the floor of a underfurnished apartment to share a potluck dinner. What was unusual--and unprecedented--about the gathering was that the students were mostly Muslim and Jewish.

Even in liberal Berkeley, Muslim and Jewish students tend to stay in their respective circles, their group affinities heightened by the mutual distrust between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Some of the Muslim women at the dinner wore veils; one Jewish woman had grown up in the Orthodox community of Brooklyn. However different their experiences, though, as the evening progressed, the students discovered their shared sense of community values and their distance from mainstream American life.

When the last of the hummus and baklava had been eaten, Samer Shehata, a self-described Marxist Muslim, announced that he was researching Egyptian and Israeli political humor and asked for contributions to his collection of jokes. He couldn’t have chosen a better way to break the ice.

By evening’s end, a new Arab-Jewish student coalition had been born. Within another month, our coalition had successfully lobbied the student senate to adopt Bethlehem University in the West Bank as a sister university. Bethlehem had been closed by Israeli military order since the intifada erupted in 1988.

The success of our coalition was, from one point of view, expected. The diversity movement on the Berkeley campus is burgeoning, and new multicultural coalitions form weekly. But while Jewish and Arab students tend to support the diversity movement, we sometimes felt excluded from its basic platforms because we are generally not defined as “people of color.” Nevertheless, it seemed important for us to organize as non-Christian minorities.

What most sets us apart from other campus groups is the necessity of working through radically competing political claims. Our group did not enjoy the luxury of being as radical as possible, a favorite stance in the political theater of Sproul Plaza. At times, the coalition appeared on the verge of collapse--at every meeting we wondered if the internal rifts of our group would break us apart.

But the coalition continued to work together even after widespread Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein damaged relations with the Israeli left in the early days of the gulf crisis. After a tense meeting that lasted well into the night, we managed to hammer out a consensus against U.S. military escalation in the region and to initiate some of the first teach-ins against the war. However clear these principles seemed in late August, though, the reality of war shook our firmly held ideals.

Ruti Rost Kadish, a Jewish coalition member, attended an anti-war demonstration of the morning of Jan. 17. By the afternoon, after she had heard reports of Iraqi Scud missiles hitting Tel Aviv, she felt she wanted nothing more than for “someone to go in there and destroy Saddam Hussein.” Now she often sits on the steps of Sproul Plaza with a handmade sign proclaiming “Israel and Palestine--I don’t need to choose.”

Other progressive Jewish students feel betrayed by what they perceive to be the lack of sympathy for Israelis among their friends in the anti-war movement. Signs decrying the loss of American and Iraqi lives are ubiquitous; mourning for Jewish casualties is conspicuously absent. Rally speakers who differentiate between American troops and the policies they serve, and Iraqi civilians and their leader, fail to draw the same distinctions between the Israeli government and the populations of Tel Aviv and Haifa.

While some Muslim and Arab students have deplored the missile attacks on Israel, others feel that the media have focused disproportionately on Israeli suffering, which, after all, has been relatively light so far. Reports circulating around campus of huge numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties have left Arab students enraged at what appears to be the undervaluation of Arab lives in the press.

Although the coalition, under the demands of the larger anti-war movement, is holding its separate activities in abeyance, we continue to share our confusion and pain with each other when we meet at events on campus. These informal meetings, in the hectic and sometimes alienating atmosphere of campus politics, mean a lot to us. As members of tight-knit and traditional ethnic groups, Arab and Jewish students appreciate the importance of creating a sense of community.

Last year, a Passover-Ramadan Liberation Seder attended by more than 70 Jews, Muslims and Christians brought home the primal connections between social ritual and political empowerment. We hope that next Passover we can join together to celebrate a true and just peace in the Middle East.