Israeli, Palestinian Backers Clash During Campus Rally

Tension between Berkeley supporters of Israel and Palestine soared to alarming heights yesterday as a noon rally prompted activists to trade fiery accusations and slurs, and resulted in the takeover of Wheeler Hall.

Seventy-nine protesters were arrested during the five-hour siege of the central campus building.

The rally, organized by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, drew approximately 1,000 people to Sproul Plaza, where heated debates erupted spontaneously in the audience—one man could be heard denouncing an Israeli supporter as "a fucking Nazi"—and chants of "Stop the suicide bombings" rippled throughout the crowd.

At its low point, crowd members waved Israeli flags and shouted "sacrilege," "anti-Semite," "shame" and "fuck you" amid a general uproar as speaker Micah Bazant, a Jewish supporter of Palestine, invoked the kaddish—a traditional Jewish prayer of mourning—in honor of Palestinians who had been killed in the conflict.