In a landmark ruling, a federal district court has ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to prevent student activists from setting up anti-Israel encampments that exclude Jews from areas across the university’s campus. 

The court order, which will go into effect August 15, marks the first of its kind in holding an American university responsible for permitting antisemitic and anti-Israel encampments to exist on campus. 

“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,” the Los Angeles district judge, Mark Scarsi, charged in his 16-page ruling. 

“This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating,” Judge Scarsi wrote, underscoring the point: “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” 

The administration, he wrote, “did not dispute” the discriminatory exclusion. Rather, UCLA argued that it has “no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters.” 

Judge Scarsi, however, deemed the administration’s shirking of responsibility toward its Jewish students to be unconstitutional. 

“Under constitutional principles,” he argued, “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.” 

The “hugely important” ruling comes “right as the country is getting ready to go back to school, and right as these issues may flare up again,” the president, Mark Rienzi, of the firm behind the case, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, tells the Sun. 

Getting a federal court to put in writing that UCLA actually violated the law when it allowed the mistreatment of Jews on campus via exclusionary encampments, Mr. Rienzi says, is “enormously important in making sure that the fall is different from the spring.”  

“Now we have a federal judge who has sent a message that I hope gets received by every public college and university in America,” he adds. 

The lawsuit, filed in June by three Jewish UCLA students, alleges that the university violated the students’ civil rights by permitting the “segregation and exclusion” of Jewish students from areas at the center of campus, including classrooms and the main undergraduate library.

The anti-Jewish agitators would prevent students “who refused to disavow Israel” to enter areas on campus by installing physical barriers and locking their arms together. They even implemented a wristband system to mark the students who were able to pass the checkpoints. 

This “Orwellian inquisition,” the lawsuit claims, led to the exclusion of “the overwhelming majority of Jews” from areas in “the heart” of UCLA’s campus. 

All the while, UCLA’s administration “knew about the activists’ extreme actions, including the exclusion of Jews,” the suit claims. “But, in a remarkable display of cowardice, appeasement, and illegality, the administration did nothing to stop it.” 

Even worse, the administration effectively served to reinforce these discriminatory zones by providing the protesters with metal barriers and by sending Jewish students away, the suit argues. 

Under the judge’s ruling, the defendants in the case — including UCLA’s president, chancellor, executive vice chancellor, and several others — are “prohibited from knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities, and campus areas” regardless of whether it comes as a result of “a de-escalation strategy or otherwise.”

Judge Scarsi further ordered the defendants to instruct campus security “that they are not to aid or participate in any obstruction of access for Jewish students to ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas.” 

The injunction also broadens the exclusion of Jewish students to include exclusion on the basis of “religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.” 

The university has already released a statement condemning the ruling, with UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications, Mary Osako, claiming that the judge’s orders “would improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground and to meet the needs of the Bruin community.”

Mr. Rienzi calls the statement “outrageous.”

“When someone says, ‘Don’t discriminate against the Jews, or, ‘Don’t discriminate against any other group,’ the answer shouldn’t be, ‘Gosh, that’s going to hamstring me.’ The answer should be, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to discriminate against the Jews,’” he tells the Sun. 

The university’s response, Mr. Rienzi says, “just demonstrates the problem,” and further underscores “why we need a judge to tell them: ‘Nope, you’re not allowed to do that anymore, guys. You’ve got to find a plan that doesn’t rely on allowing discrimination against Jews.’” 

While the school has not yet filed an appeal, it is not seen as an unlikely outcome. “I don’t know yet for sure, but they sounded like they might in their briefs to the lower court,” Mr. Rienzi says. 

In her statement, Ms. Osako said that UCLA was considering “all our options” in response to the ruling.