University of California, Santa Barbara Library. Photo: UCSB Library/Wikimedia Commons.

Pro-Israel students at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have denounced an “Apartheid Wall” campus installation for featuring “anti-Zionist and antisemitic” material, including work by notorious Brazilian political cartoonist Carlos Latuff.

“Enough is enough,” Students Supporting Israel (UCSB SSI) said on Wednesday in an Instagram post. “The cartoonist of the wall, Carlos Latuff, won an award from the Iranian government’s Holocaust cartoon contest. Iran’s leaders often deny that the Holocaust happened and spread other forms of antisemitism.”

The Latuff work included on the wall shows a man, whose two shirt cuffs are each designed to represent the flags of Israel and the United States, holding down a Palestinian man while taping “Anti-Semitism” across his mouth. Another section of the wall promotes the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement, demanding that Israel end “its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands.”

To place Latuff’s work in context, UCSB SSI’s post also included one of his most affronting works. Published in 2009, it depicts a distressed Jewish concentration camp prisoner caught in a barbed-wire fence, with “Never Again” written above his body, alongside a man labeled “Gaza,” with the caption “Over Again!” Their arms and limbs contort to form the shape of a swastika.

UCSB said that his cartoons “are as much a piece of the wall as the panel that promotes BDS,” noting that “BDS is inextricably linked to antisemitism.”

According to The Daily Nexus, the school’s student newspaper, the wall was borrowed by UCSB Students for Justice in Palestine from the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at University of California, San Diego, where recent appearances by a pro-Palestinian activist accused of calling for violence against Israelis and several incidents of antisemitic vandalism have prompted concern from Jewish students.