War on Gaza
I was distracted from what the speaker was saying by the intensity in the room. Everyone was angry, everyone was proud-- the Arab guys draped in keffiyehs, the girls in hijab, the few Zionists who dared to show up, identifiable by their yamakahs or by the long black/denim skirts peculiar to conservative Jewish women. The tension was in no way eased by the appearance of two armed police men who stood by the door, arms crossed, legs apart.
I was there cause I thought there would be food.
There wasn't.
The event was hardly publicized. Last week the director of Middle Eastern Studies told me my professor had promised to end class early for the event. But when I got to class, my professor was muttering something about how he would be teaching through the event because it didn't encourage open dialogue. He said the same thing he had seen happen at Columbia was now happening at Rutgers-- whatever that means.
So I left class early, wearing my own keffiyeh.
As I entered the building, I saw from afar several people standing, peering in through the door of the event. I was confused. Was it so packed they couldn't find anywhere to sit down? I saw the glint of the hair clips commonly used to hold one's yamakah to one's head and recognized one of the rabbis from on campus. By the time I put two and two together, a girl had thrust some blue piece of paper in my hand. Reading it while walking to my seat, I saw: "Israel's War with Gaza: The Facts".
They were trying to crash the pro-Palestine party but didn't do a very good job of it, not even during the Questions and Answers period where they tried to embarrass the speaker with some pro-Zionist questions. She must make a living doing this, cause she totally shot them down.
After it was over, I saw my friend there. She told me the whole story. Middle Eastern Studies had procured some doctor from Gaza to come speak at the event. But the Zionists wrote letters to every single dean at Rutgers, calling the event anti-Semitic, so the doctor's visit got cancelled and they got some anti-Zionist Jewish woman to come speak instead. Who, as I said, was very good, but it's not the same as hearing from somebody who was actually there.
Stuff like that makes me so angry.
Afterwards, we went out for cheap Mexican food on French Street with my friend's radical left-wing friends-- the people who organize all the anti-war stuff on campus. And one guy said: "This has changed everything, the war on Gaza has changed everything, Israel is not gonna get away with this stuff anymore."
I hope he's right. It takes forever for normalized evil to be recognized for what it is. It took years for the ANC to free South Africa from Apartheid, for Jim Crow Laws to be abolished, for colonialism to fall. Because otherwise good people supported cruel injustice, and people (like me) were afraid of standing unequivocally against an evil accepted as just by millions, and everybody else didn't really care one way or another. But such a thinly-veiled injustice cannot stand for ever.
Free Gaza, Free Palestine....
I was there cause I thought there would be food.
There wasn't.
The event was hardly publicized. Last week the director of Middle Eastern Studies told me my professor had promised to end class early for the event. But when I got to class, my professor was muttering something about how he would be teaching through the event because it didn't encourage open dialogue. He said the same thing he had seen happen at Columbia was now happening at Rutgers-- whatever that means.
So I left class early, wearing my own keffiyeh.
As I entered the building, I saw from afar several people standing, peering in through the door of the event. I was confused. Was it so packed they couldn't find anywhere to sit down? I saw the glint of the hair clips commonly used to hold one's yamakah to one's head and recognized one of the rabbis from on campus. By the time I put two and two together, a girl had thrust some blue piece of paper in my hand. Reading it while walking to my seat, I saw: "Israel's War with Gaza: The Facts".
They were trying to crash the pro-Palestine party but didn't do a very good job of it, not even during the Questions and Answers period where they tried to embarrass the speaker with some pro-Zionist questions. She must make a living doing this, cause she totally shot them down.
After it was over, I saw my friend there. She told me the whole story. Middle Eastern Studies had procured some doctor from Gaza to come speak at the event. But the Zionists wrote letters to every single dean at Rutgers, calling the event anti-Semitic, so the doctor's visit got cancelled and they got some anti-Zionist Jewish woman to come speak instead. Who, as I said, was very good, but it's not the same as hearing from somebody who was actually there.
Stuff like that makes me so angry.
Afterwards, we went out for cheap Mexican food on French Street with my friend's radical left-wing friends-- the people who organize all the anti-war stuff on campus. And one guy said: "This has changed everything, the war on Gaza has changed everything, Israel is not gonna get away with this stuff anymore."
I hope he's right. It takes forever for normalized evil to be recognized for what it is. It took years for the ANC to free South Africa from Apartheid, for Jim Crow Laws to be abolished, for colonialism to fall. Because otherwise good people supported cruel injustice, and people (like me) were afraid of standing unequivocally against an evil accepted as just by millions, and everybody else didn't really care one way or another. But such a thinly-veiled injustice cannot stand for ever.
Free Gaza, Free Palestine....