"We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced," she tells the student gathering. "We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism."
"The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history," she shouts.
She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.
The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.
"That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn't be them celebrating their victory," Reifkind says in the film. "It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, "Do you have anything to say?" And I was like, 'Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.' "
Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them "terrorists" and "Hamas sympathizers" who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.
"Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus," says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, "RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings." "And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, 'Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.' "
Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.
The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.
Television reporter: "Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this."
UC Davis male student: "This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus."
Television reporter: "After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel."
Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: "So, this is not out of the blue. We're pretty sure this is directly related."
"StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech," Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. "They gave us some legal research type stuff. I'm always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Project helped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they'd write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull."
"After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote," says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. "People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises -- the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It's pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us."
The Electronic Intifada's Abunimah says, "There's an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism."
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