On April 30, thirty people were injured when a mob of Zionist hooligans savagely assaulted the pro-Palestine UCLA encampment shortly before midnight. For over three hours, local and campus police stood down as the masked thugs assaulted students, journalists, and even officers of the law with fireworks volleys, pepper spray, and metal pipes. Though multiple attackers have been identified by community members on social media, to date there have been no arrests of pro-Israel goons.
The Grayzone has obtained a dossier composed by anonymous sleuths claiming involvement with the UCLA student protests which apparently identifies some of the attack’s perpetrators. The students emailed the document to the UCLA administration and police (UCPD), as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. It contains detailed information about the identities of those who were filmed carrying out wanton violence.
Los Angeles-area police have arrested droves of students protesting Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, accusing over 40 students and journalists of “conspiracy to commit burglary” for attempting a sit-in on school grounds. Yet local authorities have made a grand total of zero arrests in the coordinated Zionist mob assault against UCLA anti-genocide protesters on April 30.
The LA Times has reported that local law enforcement is relying on sophisticated facial recognition technology to hunt down the attackers. But as the UCLA sleuths’ dossier makes clear, many assailants have already been identified by matching their identities with social media profiles.
The UCPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether the persons identified in the dossier were under investigation, or had been taken into custody.
Alleged attackers listed in the email include:
Later that evening, a masked Mehdizadeh was recorded attempting to destroy barricades while a compatriot with a speaker blasted “Mani Mantera,” a Hebrew-language children’s song that Israeli soldiers have played while torturing and/or taunting captive Palestinians on camera. Despite getting caught red-handed by several security officers — and despite nearly getting into a fistfight with another guard in a separate incident — Mehdizadeh was allowed to remain in the area.
Also present in the run-up to the attack were members of Magen Am, a Los Angeles-based Jewish private security firm founded in 2017 by Yossi Eilfort, an MMA fighter-turned-Chabad rabbi. Magen Am, which claims to employ 12 former Israeli and US soldiers, bills itself as “the only Jewish, non-profit organization licensed to provide physical, armed security services on the West Coast of the United States.”
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Eilfort admitted coordinating with UCLA on an April 28 counter-protest aimed at antagonizing the pro-Palestine encampment, which featured speakers including an Israeli diplomat and a member of the California State Assembly. Footage published to social media appears to show a member of the group hulking over students and violently ripping them away from the encampment.
The group maintains a close working relationship with local law enforcement. At the conclusion of a training ceremony in 2020, LAPD commander Vic Davalos publicly declared: “I see Magen Am as the next evolution of an organized public/private first responder partnership in the community.”
That “partnership” appears to be paying off, with Magen Am now openly boasting about its ability to influence LAPD operations. In an Instagram post published in early January, the group wrote that the LAPD’s new “online hate incident reporting policy” had been “spearheaded by Magen Am.”
In an accompanying video, the now-deceased head of Magen Am, Ivan Wolkind, described the change as “a project that we’ve been working on for about a year with LAPD,” and offered a hint as to its purpose:
“Why are we excited about this and why is it important to report these incidents? … First of all, every police department in the country makes resource allocation decisions based on the number of incidents reported. If these incidents are occurring in our community and we don’t report them, the LAPD has no way of knowing that they should allocate more staff time and more patrols in our areas.”
But their links to the security state don’t end there. Magen Am’s official website boasts: “We have direct connections at the FBI and Local law enforcement, including the LAPD, Sheriff’s Department, DA’s office and the US Attorney’s office.” This means, they say, that “If, G-d forbid, an incident occurs that requires immediate attention, Magen Am is able to push it all the way up the chain of command.”
The Grayzone wrote to Magen Am to inquire whether any of its members were involved in the April 30 attack, and solicited their opinion on the violence, but received no response. Phone calls to Magen Am’s Los Angeles office also went unanswered.
As of publication, some of the most violent perpetrators in the April 30 mob assault have yet to be identified. According to students, these include:
So far, none of the figures listed above has faced legal consequences for the well-documented acts of violence they carried out against peaceful student protesters.
But the mollycoddling of violent pro-Israel agitators does not appear to be limited to UCLA.
Though he’s been removed from his postdoctoral teaching position at Arizona State University, Jonathan Yudelman, who moonlights as an assistant professor at the University of Texas, has so far faced no legal repercussions after being filmed hurling sexist obscenities while physically intimidating a Muslim woman in Tempe – despite a call by the Council of American Islamic Relations’ chapter in Arizona for “law enforcement to arrest… Yudelman for allegedly harassing and assaulting a Muslim woman in a hijab during his participation in a pro-Israel protest near campus.”
Another agitator filmed in the incident was identified by social media users as Sammy Ben, a US citizen who has recently documented himself repeatedly violating the Geneva Conventions while he spent two months occupying Gaza in an Israeli uniform, despite holding only a tourist visa.
Meanwhile, at Columbia University, two former Israeli army soldiers who attacked students with toxic chemical “skunk” fluid this January, sending at least 10 anti-genocide protesters to the emergency room, have not been expelled from campus, nor have they been arrested. “There are no arrests, and the investigation is ongoing,” an NYPD spokesperson told HuffPost.
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