If supporters of campus campaigns for divestment from Israel want to convince people that these campaigns do not foster a hostile environment for Jewish students, they will need to rein in the student leaders they have swayed. Having been fed a steady diet of demonizing rhetoric, these leaders are having a hard time distinguishing the Israelis they accuse of committing human-rights violations from Jews as such.

Consider UCLA, which passed a divestment resolution in November. The College Fix reports that, at an Undergraduate Students Association Council meeting, members debated whether Rachel Beyda should be confirmed as a member of the Judicial Board. Beyda, a candidate whom everyone present agreed was more than qualified for the position, had one strike against her: she is, as one council member put it, “a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community.” How then, could she be expected to rule fairly on student government matters of concern to that community? Although the president of the council objected to the line of questioning, some council members not only pursued it but, even more remarkably, were convinced by the argument that affiliates of campus Jewish organizations should be disqualified from serving on campus judicial boards. Beyda is an officer in UCLA’s Hillel and in a Jewish sorority. As another council member mused: “For some reason, I’m not 100% comfortable. I don’t know why. I’ll go through her application again — I’ve been going through it constantly, but I can see that she’s qualified for sure… but I just worry about her political affiliations.”

This is nothing new at UCLA. As Jonathan Tobin has reported, after the failure of an earlier divestment resolution before the Council, divestment supporters took two members before the Judicial Board, seeking to have their votes disqualified. These council members had gone to Israel under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Although that action failed, the pro-divestment crowd sought to make refusing to go to Israel on trips funded by pro-Israel organizations a litmus test for being elected to student government. Unruffled by the insanity of making a student government election about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a number of candidates, dutifully, shamefully, “signed a pledge not to take such trips.”

The Council, at first deadlocked on the question of Beyda’s confirmation, came around to a unanimous vote in her favor only after “much discussion and the intervention of administrators.” Perhaps because the whole discussion was captured on video (warning: it’s very difficult to hear), the council members who raised questions about Beyda’s Jewish affiliations felt compelled to issue a public apology.

Perhaps when UCLA’s student government is done making foreign-policy pronouncements it will turn to the question of how to deal with anti-Semitism on its own campus.