Students at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school hosted a campus classroom event on Monday featuring convicted Palestinian car bomber Israa Jaabis.
The “Teach-in: Palestinian: Palestinian Political Prisoners Day” event took place in Room 170 at Berkeley Law, according to promotional materials shared by Berkeley Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Jaabis spoke to the group via video call.
“Join us on Political Prisoners Day to hear the experiences of Palestinian torture survivors and prisoners of conscience,” the SJP chapter said, not naming Jaabis as the speaker.
Jaabis was convicted of detonating a car bomb in Israel at the Adumim junction in 2015, severely burning herself and Israeli police officer Moshe Chen. She was released in November 2023 in exchange for hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
SJP shared a video of Jaabis’s closing remarks. “Firstly, I would like to thank the students for their attentiveness, for listening with their hearts. For many reasons, even their attendance is enough to make us feel, as liberated Palestinian prisoners, that there is someone who cares about us,” Jaabis said in Arabic.
“That there are those who are in solidarity with us, those who support us and do not abandon us,” she said. “Your attendance in particular as law students makes us hopeful that there remains some humanity.”
“That there is someone to support us in the future, delivering our message to the international community, and amplifying our call to liberate Palestinian prisoners as well as to liberate all societies from servitude and from bigotry which produces populations complicit in perpetrating inhumane laws,” Jaabis concluded.
The LawFare Project called the event “institutional normalization of terrorism.”
The consequences must be met with the full force,” the legal advocacy group stated. “Academic freedom does not include platforming terrorists.”
A university spokesperson told the New York Post, “UC Berkeley has a non-discretionary obligation to abide by and support the First Amendment in a completely content-neutral manner. We do not have the legal ability to sanction or censor constitutionally protected expression.”
