On June 4, three members of the USC chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace joined nearly 200 JVP Action members to meet with United States representatives and senators. The group discussed their experiences as student organizers, as well as their work calling for the U.S. to stop sending weapons to Israel.  

Harlow Raye, a rising senior majoring in sociology, spoke with Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar about their experiences, beliefs and ways they could “support each other.” Raye also met with Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, and with the offices of Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and California Senator Alex Padilla.

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“[With the office of Senator Padilla] we really focused on the police brutality that we experienced, and the way that we are treated by administration, and the way that the silencing of anti-Zionist Jewish people is an act of antisemitism,” Raye said. “It was all very interesting and productive, and we created relationships with all of these offices.”

Raye plans to meet with Senator Padilla again in August to discuss how the USC administration treated them and share their experience as Jewish-Israeli student organizers. 

Bea Heard, a rising senior majoring in global studies, also met with various government officials. She recalled meeting with the office of a Republican representative, and said while the discussion felt “not the most productive,” it allowed anti-Zionist Jewish students to meet directly with elected officials. 

“What [the meeting] did was get us in the room with people who are not hearing our voices, who are seeing a narrative in the media of who we are and what we think,” Heard said. “The most important thing was … making people understand that we are nice, young people who have these certain beliefs, and we’re not crazy terrorist protesters like the media wants to portray us as.”

Luca Berk, a rising junior majoring in political science, said that he attended the event to express his anger that elected officials were refusing to meet with credible student organizers. He said he did not feel encouraged by his meetings with California elected officials, as he felt that many of them had already made up their minds about Israel. 

“While it’s important to continue to engage with people, I think that our elected officials fully understand what’s going on right now and many of them are fully in support of it,” Berk said. “At this point … if you haven’t allowed your conscience to say, ‘I need to — as a human — acknowledge something horrible that’s going on right now,’ I really don’t know what I can say to you.” 

Heard said that the main goal of JVPA’s “lobby day” was to get representatives and senators to publicly confirm that they would vote for the U.S. to stop sending weapons to Israel. Heard said when students met with government officials, they were “not necessarily just sharing our experiences but also demanding that they actually listen and that they take action.”

Heard said she personally also wanted to attend the event to ensure that government officials saw the perspective of pro-Palestinian Jewish student organizers.  

“That’s what I wanted to get out of [the event], making sure people made an actual face-to-face connection with a student protester, especially a Jewish student protester, to break the narrative that Jewish students are uniformly scared on campuses and not participating and just completely harmed by these protests,” Heard said. 

Berk said that he felt government officials were trying to ignore student protesters for as long as possible in order to “brute force” their way through the resistance to their “support and their complicity in the genocide,” and that, therefore, it was important to continue appearing at these events.

“I think that meeting them in person and really relaying the student experience is important … and continuing to say, ‘I recognize that there’s so much riding behind your support for Israel and your support for this genocide, but so long as you continue to do that, we’re gonna stand in your way,’” Berk said. “When you call on the students to campaign for you, we’re going to remember this.” 

Raye said that one of the most interesting parts of the experience was seeing people lobbying alongside them for an offensive arms embargo against Israel had previously lobbied for The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby that supports strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship and the U.S. sending Israel “security assistance.” They said that their experiences with government officials and other lobbyists made them feel optimistic for the future. 

“We do feel hopeful that [an arms embargo] will happen. I think that more and more people are realizing that Israel’s behavior right now is not about the hostages,” Raye said. “Israel’s behavior right now is … an act of genocide against people [whose] fight towards getting their land back and towards their liberation is a threat to the existence of the country as it is — as a Jewish supremacist country.”