Judge Mark Scarsi did not mince words as he opened his ruling issuing a preliminary injunction against UCLA.

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

As the court notes, this was not about litigating the permits of the war in Gaza, despite the delusions of the unduly passionate that somehow seizing a portion of campus and precluding students who did not bend the knee to their will, but the merits of the war on Royce Quad.

On April 25, 2024, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters occupied a portion of the UCLA campus known as Royce Quad and established an encampment. Royce Quad is a major thoroughfare and gathering place and borders several campus buildings, including Powell Library and Royce Hall. The encampment was rimmed with plywood and metal barriers. Protesters established checkpoints and required passersby to wear a specific wristband to cross them. News reporting indicates that the encampment’s entrances were guarded by protesters, and people who supported the existence of the state of Israel were kept out of the encampment. Protesters associated with the encampment “directly interfered with instruction by blocking students’ pathways to classrooms.”

Protesters “required” passersby, by which they mean their fellow UCLA students, to wear  a specific wristband to cross their “checkpoints”? Was this the Warsaw Ghetto? Checkpoint Charlie? By what imagined right do some students believe themselves empowered to deny other students the right to campus access?

The pro-Hamas faculty,* as amicus, argued otherwise.

4 In its brief, Amicus Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA disputes the facts presented in the complaint and motion papers and asserts, inter alia, that no one “was denied entrance to the Palestinian solidarity encampment based on their identity.” This conclusory assertion is in tension with Plaintiffs’ record evidence, which UCLA declined to refute. Further, Amicus’ assertion that no one was excluded from the encampment based on identity does not grapple with an important nuance—that Plaintiffs here assert that supporting the Jewish state of Israel is their sincerely held religious belief.

The last part of footnote 4 reflects the key “nuanced” belief that both faculty and students tell themselves justifies their actions and saves them from being antisemitic. They aren’t denying access to Jews. They are denying access to people who support the state of Israel. It would be wrong to hate Jews, but it’s glorious to hate the colonialist apartheid genocidal state of Israel, Jewish though it may be.

To prove their point, they hold out Jews who agree with them, who take no issue with destruction of Israel and the annihilation of Jews, Hamas’ sole purpose for existence. After all, if some Jewish students see no problem with the rape, murder and kidnapping of Jews on October 7th as the compelled response of freedom fighters seeking to free Palestinians from their “open air prison,” then it proves that it’s not about Jews, but about Israel.

The plaintiffs in the case, three Jewish students, alleged that supporting the Jewish state of Israel was a religious obligation. While that’s no doubt a sincerely held religious belief, shared by many if not most Jews, particularly those old enough to remember why Israel was created, what its Arab “neighbors” sought to do over and over to destroy Israel, and were never indoctrinated into the bizarre and simplistic universe of oppressed/oppressor ideology, the allegation should not be necessary.

There is no serious contention that the Jewish state of Israel isn’t inherently related to Judaism, just as numerous “neighboring” countries aren’t inherently related to Islam. That there are young Jewish people whose twisted grasp of righteousness compels them to wish death upon their fellow Jews doesn’t, and can’t, change reality. There have always been some who wanted to play the “good Jews” so antisemites wouldn’t hate them for being Jewish. This is hardly new.

But what’s the harm from a little encampment for what they believe to be a virtuous cause?

UCLA also argues that Plaintiffs lack standing because “they have not pleaded facts demonstrating that UCLA would be the cause of any future injury that they might suffer, such that an injunction directed at UCLA would redress those alleged injuries.”  “To show causation, the plaintiff must demonstrate a ‘causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of—the injury has to be fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant, and not the result of the independent action of some third party not before the court.” Salmon Spawning & Recovery All. v. Gutierrez, 545 F.3d 1220, 1227 (9th Cir. 2008) (quoting Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560–61 (1992)).

UCLA, however, misconstrues the Plaintiffs’ injuries. The injuries are not simply the exclusion of Plaintiffs from certain of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas. The injuries result when Plaintiffs are excluded from certain of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas and UCLA still provides those programs, activities, and campus areas to other students knowing that Plaintiffs and students like them are excluded based on their religious exercise.

There are some obvious analogies that make the point. What if the excluded students were black or gay? No matter what the nonsensical rationalization, it would be wholly intolerable and the campus, if not the nation, would rise up in outrage. But Jews? That’s how it is “in the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles.” And elsewhere.

*The group, Students for Justice in Palestine, is not merely pro-Palestinian, but pro-Hamas.