If they ever imagined that they were dwelling in an ivory tower, the fierce and sometimes violent confrontations on their campuses have knocked academics who teach about Israel and the Middle East into a harsh new reality, Professor Dov Waxman, director of UCLA's Nazarian Center for Israel Studies told the Haaretz Podcast on the eve of a charged graduation week for his campus.

Waxman described the clash last month between pro-Palestinian protestors and Israel advocacy groups who came to confront them – and how he and other professors found themselves keeping the two sides apart with campus security nowhere to be found.

"I had felt like it was necessary to be there to observe and to try to be a witness and to provide an account, if that was needed. I didn't imagine that I'd be kind of brought into these protests or that I'd be required at all to keep protesters apart," Waxman said in a conversation with podcast host Allison Kaplan Sommer.

"Ultimately," he said "being there on the campus, particularly in the hours before the big protest encampment was dismantled by the police and "see[ing] hundreds of heavily armed riot police lining up on what is normally the quad in the center of our campus where students hang out" and "the world's media converging on our campus" was a "disturbing' and "very, very surreal experience."

Also on the podcast, Haaretz correspondent Linda Dayan recounts her reporting from campus protests at several California universities.

She said that it was impossible to paint a simple picture of the typical campus protester or generalize about their messaging. Some programming criticizing Israel was no more extreme than what one might find in an Israeli newspaper, she said. Other sessions contained inflammatory and even antisemitic content.

"I've gone to magnificently different events on the same campus at the same encampment with wildly different messaging," Dayan said.