Caught in the Campus Crossfire: Casualties of the Palestinian Protests by Mitch Wagner, Barnes & Noble Publishing © 2025; ISBN 8781966-903918; 436 pages, $18.95.
SAN DIEGO – One assumes incorrectly from the cover and the title of this book that it is non-fiction. Actually, it’s a novel based in San Diego County about a pro-Palestinian campus demonstration in which a Mexican-American student is fatally shot while trying to save the life of his Jewish friend.
Names of places and organizations are changed, but readers familiar with San Diego County can detect that one neighborhood in question is La Colonia de Eden Gardens, a Mexican-American enclave in Solana Beach, and that an organization referenced in the novel is the Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative.
More difficult to identify is the so-called California Pacific University, which I took to be UC San Diego, but a case could be made that it might be San Diego State University, or perhaps UCLA or an amalgam of public universities.
This, however, is not really a roman à clef, because the fatal shooting and the lawsuit emanating from it are entirely fictitious. Defendants are the shooter, an individual who gave him the gun, an Islamist student organization, and California Pacific University. Plaintiffs are the family of Javi Lopez, the victim of the shooting.
Author Wagner has 35 years of trial experience under his belt, and he utilizes the knowledge thereby gained to explore the legal question of what responsibility does a university have to simultaneously assure free speech and students’ safety.
In this novel, Cal-Pacific employed a militant Palestinian activist as chair of the political science department who one-sidedly taught that Israelis are White colonizers cruelly subjugating the indigenous Palestinians. The university president rebuffed student demands for a more balanced approach to the Mideast conflict. Nor did the university curb pro-Palestinian protests, even though some demonstrators carried signs urging people to kill Jews.
In the trial, plaintiff’s attorney differentiates the free-speech, free-assembly protections of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from violent gatherings, which are not protected.
My complaint with the novel is that the lawyer representing the university should have been nearly equally sagacious, leaving it to the fictional jurors (and the readers) to determine where justice lies. The defense attorney in this book was something of a straw woman, losing most legal arguments from the time of pre-trial motions to the final verdict.
Author Wagner more than makes up for this weakness. He tells the ins and outs of courtroom procedures, explaining possible strategies during the questioning of potential jurors, the questioning of hostile witnesses, and the preparation of friendly witnesses. He also tells how attorneys sometimes will pause their closing arguments, sometimes to take a drink of water, not because they are thirsty but because they want to give the jurors extra time for a legal point or key piece of evidence to sink in.
He also skillfully integrates a history of the Middle East through the device of an expert witness testifying how the Palestinian professor distorts the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without information to the contrary, students hear only one side of the dispute and are easy targets for agitators and hate-mongers.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.