Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Arrest made in pro-Israel violence at UCLA encampment

Edan On, 18, is first pro-Israel protester charged for encampment protests

UCLA police have arrested a pro-Israel protester who allegedly participated in a violent assault last month against a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus.

Edan On, 18, has been charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, and was released on $30,000 bail after his arrest on May 23.

On, who is not a UCLA student, is the first known pro-Israel protester to be arrested in connection to the campus encampment protests that roiled universities across the country beginning in April. More than 2,000 pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested.

On was originally identified by CNN in a May 16 investigative report about the attack. In various videos from the night of April 30, a man in a gray sweatshirt can be seen wielding a wooden pole to beat a pro-Palestinian protester on the ground and throwing an object into the encampment. On’s mother, Shiran Or-Siboni, confirmed to CNN that the man in the video was her son, though she later said that her son told her he was not there.

A May 2 Facebook post from Or-Siboni further corroborated the video.

“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA,” Shiran Or-Siboni wrote in Hebrew, “and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” (Nukhba is a term used to refer to the Oct. 7 massacre.)

On-Siboni also told CNN that her son went to Beverly Hills High School and planned to join the IDF after graduation. (Beverly Hills High School said it could not confirm the identity of a student.)

A few hours after the Passover holiday ended April 30, a group of pro-Israel agitators — none or nearly none of whom attended UCLA — launched an attack on the encampment. During the brawl, they threw several firecrackers, along with poles, wooden sticks and liquids and tried to destroy the encampment’s makeshift barrier fence. Encampment organizers said scores were injured in the attack.

UCLA and its police department were criticized for their handling of the attack. Despite the arrival of officers from multiple area departments at around 11 p.m., authorities did not intervene until around 3 a.m.

UCLA has since temporarily removed its chief of police, John Thomas, from his post and hired a consultant to review the department’s response to the attack.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.