'Are you a Zionist?' Checkpoints at UCLA encampment provoked fear, debate among Jews

Eilon Presman was about 100 feet from the UCLA Palestinian solidarity encampment when he heard the screams: "Zionist! Zionist!"

The 20-year-old junior, who is Israeli, realized the activists were pointing at him.

"Human chain!" they cried.

A line of protesters linked arms and marched toward him, Presman said, blocking him from accessing the heart of UCLA's campus. Other activists, he said, unfurled kaffiyeh scarves to block his view of the camp.

"Every step back that I took, they took a step forward," Presman said. "I was just forced to walk away."

It's been a week since police swarmed the UCLA campus and tore down the pro-Palestinian camp, arresting more than 200 people. But the legacy of the encampment remains an issue of much debate, particularly among Jewish students, who make up nearly 8% of the university's 32,000 undergraduates.

In the days leading up to April 30 — when pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked the camp with fists, bats and chemical spray, and police took hours to stop the violence — frustration had swelled among many Jews: Viral videos showed activists restricting the passage of students they targeted as Zionists.

Some Jewish students said they felt intimidated as protesters scrawled graffiti — "Death 2 Zionism" and "Baby Killers" — on campus buildings and blocked access with wooden pallets, plywood, metal barricades and human walls.

The pro-Palestinian student movement includes various strains of activism, including calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, support for Hamas and demands that universities divest from firms doing business with Israel. But on campuses across the country, no word has become more charged than "Zionist."

In its most basic definition, a Zionist is somebody who believes that the Jewish people have a right to statehood in their ancestral homeland as a place of refuge from centuries of persecution — in other words, that Israel, established as a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, has a right to exist.

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