University of California, Berkeley. Photo: wiki commons.

The pro-Israel education and advocacy organization StandWithUs has garnered more than 1,500 signatures on a petition urging the University of California (UC) system’s President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate to accept a report whose findings reveal that anti-Israel bias on UC campuses negatively impacts Jewish students and faculty members.

Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, and Richard Barton, national education chair of the Anti-Defamation League, conducted the report on California state schools titled “University of California Jewish Student Campus Climate Fact Finding Team Report and Recommendations.”

According to StandWithUs, the report urges the UC system “to develop model institutional protocols that will ensure that bigotry, intimidation, and undue bias are marginalized, that Jewish students, faculty, and community members’ rights to free speech are protected, and that the university sets clear guidelines for responsible, reasonable debate.”

The StandWithUs petition counters a petition launched by the UC Ad Hoc Committee on Jewish Campus Climate and endorsed by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an organization some in the Jewish community consider to be anti-Israel due to its support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The Ad Hoc Committee on Jewish Campus Climate contends in its petition that the report “distorts campus life, and its recommendations threaten free speech on campuses.”

The UC President’s Advisory Council is set to decide in late October whether or not to accept the report’s findings.