Law students at the University of California Berkeley gave a round of applause to a convicted Palestinian woman who Israeli authorities say attempted a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, an event organized by a campus group and defended by the university under the banner of free speech.
Israa Jaabis, who was convicted and imprisoned for 11 years after a 2015 explosion that left her disfigured and burned a police officer, appeared virtually before UC Berkeley law students at a "teach-in" organized by UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine. The event took place on a Monday, just one day before Israeli Independence Day.
Video posted to Instagram by the student group showed blurry footage of students applauding Jaabis's remarks, the Daily Mail reported. The event was billed as a chance "to hear experiences of Palestinian torture survivors and prisoners of conscience."
That framing, "prisoners of conscience", is doing a lot of work. It papers over the fact that Israeli authorities said their investigation revealed Jaabis shouted "Allahu Akbar" before the explosion and possessed handwritten notes expressing support for people she described as "Palestinian martyrs."
In 2015, Israeli authorities accused Jaabis of trying to ignite a gas tank in Jerusalem. A police officer at the scene said he had spotted Jaabis driving in a commuter lane with no passengers and spoke to her. The explosion that followed left Jaabis severely disfigured and the officer burned.
The officer later described the moment in stark terms.
"You always hear of terrorist attacks and suddenly I am in one, boom, that's how it is."
He called the incident an act of terrorism. Jaabis denied the charges. The Palestinian Authority claimed Israeli police fabricated the story as an excuse to attack her. She was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. A photograph from 2016 shows her in an Israeli courtroom.
Jaabis was released from an Israeli jail in 2023 as part of a prisoner exchange for 26 hostages taken on October 7 of that year, the same mass attack by Hamas that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.
Now free, Jaabis was invited to speak to future American lawyers. During the virtual event, she told students that the reception she received from them gave her hope. She said their support for Palestinian prisoners was meaningful.
"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."
She also said the students' engagement "makes us hopeful that here remains some humanity." The law students, captured on video, applauded.
Think about that for a moment. A woman convicted of what Israeli authorities describe as a terrorist attack, an act that burned a police officer, addressed an elite American law school and received applause. Not uncomfortable silence. Not pointed questions about the evidence against her. Applause.
It is worth asking what kind of legal education produces graduates who clap for someone convicted of attempted mass violence, regardless of the political cause attached to it. The pattern of public figures facing scrutiny over troubling statements only to receive institutional cover is not new, but the Berkeley episode takes it to a different level entirely.
When the Daily Mail sought comment, university spokesperson Alex AG Shapiro offered a statement that read less like moral clarity and more like a legal disclaimer.
"As a public university, UC Berkeley has a non-discretionary obligation to abide by and support the First Amendment in a completely content-neutral manner."
Shapiro added that the university does "not have the legal ability to sanction or censor Constitutionally protected expression." The spokesperson went on to note that students who feel threatened can contact the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, which "provides support to those harmed, investigates all allegations, and the campus takes appropriate steps following any findings."
The First Amendment argument is technically correct. Public universities cannot prohibit speech based on viewpoint. But there is a canyon-wide gap between what the law permits and what a university chooses to celebrate, platform, or quietly endorse through inaction. Berkeley did not organize the event, UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine did, but the university's response amounted to a shrug.
No one asked Berkeley to arrest anyone. The question is whether the institution has anything to say, anything at all, about the moral content of inviting a convicted bomber to address law students. The answer, apparently, is no. The Daily Mail reached out to UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine for comment; no response was reported.
The Jaabis event did not happen in a vacuum. Across American campuses, activist groups have spent years pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since October 7, 2023, those boundaries have collapsed almost entirely.
What once would have been unthinkable, platforming a person convicted of terrorism before law students, now passes with little more than a boilerplate statement from administration. The institutional incentives all run in one direction: avoid confrontation with activist groups, cite the First Amendment, and hope the news cycle moves on.
This is the same dynamic visible in other corners of progressive politics, where elected officials dodge difficult truths to avoid offending politically useful constituencies. The cost is always borne by someone else, in this case, by Jewish students on campus, by the Israeli officer who was burned, and by the basic principle that a law school should teach its students to distinguish between justice and propaganda.
The Jaabis case is not ambiguous. Israeli authorities presented evidence of premeditation: the "Allahu Akbar" shout, the handwritten notes praising "Palestinian martyrs." A court convicted her. She served 11 years. The Palestinian Authority disputed the charges, but a conviction stands as a matter of legal record.
None of that stopped the student group from framing her as a "prisoner of conscience." And none of it stopped future lawyers from clapping.
The willingness to elevate extreme figures and rhetoric while hiding behind procedural defenses is a recurring problem on the American left. It shows up in candidates who face scrutiny over radical associations and in institutions that treat accountability as optional when the politics point in the right direction.
Jaabis told the Berkeley students that their support would help "liberate all societies from servitude and from bigotry." The students apparently found this inspiring. They are training to become officers of the court, people who will one day argue cases, draft contracts, advise clients, and perhaps sit on the bench.
A legal education is supposed to sharpen the ability to weigh evidence, test claims, and resist emotional manipulation. What happened at UC Berkeley Law suggests something closer to the opposite. These students heard a convicted bomber reframe her story as one of liberation and responded not with scrutiny but with enthusiasm.
The timing was deliberate. The event fell one day before Israeli Independence Day, a pointed choice by the organizers that underscored the political nature of the "teach-in." This was not a dispassionate academic exercise. It was activism dressed in the language of human rights.
It fits a broader pattern in which anyone who challenges progressive orthodoxy faces punishment, while those who push the boundaries of acceptable radicalism face no consequences at all. The asymmetry is the point.
Berkeley's spokesperson said the university "has repeatedly informed the student body" about reporting options for those who feel threatened. That is a fine bureaucratic answer. It is not a moral one.
When a law school cannot bring itself to say that applauding a convicted bomber is wrong, not illegal, just wrong, the institution has already lost something no First Amendment citation can restore.
