POLICE ARREST 79 AFTER THEY STORM BERKELEY CLASSROOM BUILDING
By Paul Glader
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP - 9 April 9) - Campus police arrested 79 pro-Palestinian
protesters who stormed into a classroom building Tuesday during an afternoon
of student vigils and rallies.
Assistant Chancellor John Cummins said the arrested student protesters could
face a semester of suspension, and that all the protesters - including
about 20 non-students - could be prosecuted for trespassing.
He said police at the University of California, Berkeley, started arresting
protesters around 2:45 p.m. after a noon rally turned into a march and nearly
500 people tried to enter Wheeler Hall.
Police blocked entrances to the building and asked the roughly 200 people
inside to leave. Some students hung a Palestinian flag from a third-story
window, while others marched and chanted in the hallways of the building,
which houses classrooms for Middle Eastern studies.
Pro-Palestinian rally organizers outside said police were dragging people out
of the building, and asked supporters to pound on windows. Some of
those arrested yelled "Free Palestine" as they were hauled off.
Matthew MacLean, 33, a graduate student cited for trespassing, said the
building's occupation represented the occupation the Palestinian people
face in Israel.
Several classes and tests had to be moved and rescheduled because of the
takeover.
"They are disrupting an academic building," said Cummins, who noted that the
last arrests made on campus involved the same group of people when
they tried to storm the hall last April. During that protest, 32 people were
arrested, 19 of them students.
Nearly 1,000 pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students and community members
protested peacefully earlier in the day, but the verbal sparring was
anything but sedate.
Speakers with Students for Justice in Palestine likened the current situation
for Palestinians to the Holocaust, a comparison that riled Jewish students
gathered at Sproul Plaza.
"They are trying to subvert language used in the Holocaust," said Eddan Katz,
26, a third-year law student and an Israeli-American. "I hear no one in
Israeli politics today talking about the eradication of all Palestinians."
Micah Bazant, 28, a local community member, recited a Jewish prayer for the
dead after calling for an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
About 300 pro-Israel students booed, cursed and chanted "shame" at Bazant as
he spoke.
The pro-Palestinian students wore yellow armbands that read "Never again,"
words often invoked by those remembering the Holocaust.
Several small groups of Jewish and Muslim students spent the afternoon
arguing - with red faces and loud voices - about history, policy and who is to
blame for current bloodshed in Israel.
About 100 feet away from the speakers, a small clutch of Jewish students in a
tent took turns reading names from a list of Holocaust victims. It was
part of a 24-hour vigil for Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust remembrance.
The protests and demonstrations came a day after UC Chancellor Robert M.
Berdahl appealed for calm on campus between the groups.
But Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, a central gathering point on campus, has long
been a hotbed of political protest. The 1964 Free Speech Movement began
here, and the plaza has since resounded with the shouts of anti-war
demonstrators, pro-Third World studies demonstrators and the bloody clash in
1969 over Peoples Park, a UC parking lot reclaimed and replanted by anti-war
demonstrators.
Protests have picked up across California and the nation as violence has
escalated in the Middle East.