Around 11 p.m., a group of masked counter-demonstrators made their way to the Royce Quad in the heart of campus and began to attack the encampment set up last week by demonstrators opposing the war in Gaza. They threw a firecracker into the encampment, tore down its outer walls, threw heavy objects at demonstrators and instigated direct physical confrontations. Those in the encampment were left to fend for themselves against a violent band of thugs intent on inflicting damage.
The incident marked a total systems failure by the university, the city of Los Angeles and the state of California.
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Over the course of our hours on the front lines, I estimate that more than 90% of the verbal and physical instigation came from the agitated counter-demonstrators, a fair number of whom spoke Hebrew and appeared to come from outside campus. The anti-war group had yellow-vested personnel who maintained discipline and sought to de-escalate when the threat of violence arose.
But even they were greeted with insulting words from the other side, as were members of a small contingent of a local chapter of Standing Together who came bearing signs calling for peace and equality for Palestinians and Jews.
I do not know whether there was overlap between the counter-demonstrators on Sunday and those who provoked last night’s violence, who carried Israeli and American flags, as well as at least one Chabad flag celebrating “Mashiach,” or the Messiah. But the behavior of the two groups bore striking similarities, making it all the more unsettling that UCLA wasn’t better prepared.
That’s especially true because, on Sunday, I observed a contingent of university police officers standing passively a couple hundred yards from one of the main hot spots. When I went over to ask them why they weren’t helping to keep the peace, one officer told me that they were game-planning their strategy.
And no LAPD officers arrived to help us diffuse the situation over a period of more than two hours — even though we had been told that they were on their way.
That no police or skilled de-escalators intervened on Sunday was, at best, a bad mistake; a cohort of trained personnel could have made a big difference. That none appeared for hours Tuesday night, especially after observing the tension on Sunday, was unconscionable.
