The author of this article wishes to remain anonymous. The author is not affiliated with SJP or VOICE in any capacity.
I don’t use the term “absurd” lightly, it suggests that something is a complete departure from reality, but there is truly no other way to describe President Bradley’s response to the SJP protest than absurd.
Last week Hen Mazzig, a Mizrahi (a Jewish person of Middle-Eastern and/or North African descent) Zionist speaker and writer, gave a lecture at Vassar. The talk, hosted by Vassar VOICE, was on “The Indigenous Jews of the Middle East: Forgotten Refugees.” The talk, like much of Mazzig’s work, centered on the idea that many Jewish people in Israel are of Middle-Eastern and/or North African descent and that progressives in the West should stop looking at Israel as a state full of “privileged and powerful white Europeans.“ SJP protesters sat outside the lecture hall and chanted for six minutes before leaving.
Following the protest, Mazzig took to twitter to claim that the SJP protesters were endorsing genocide and calling for his death. Rather than challenging these hyperbolic claims, President Bradley gave in. She condemned the SJP protest as anti-Semitic and publicly announced that the protesters will face disciplinary action.
Hen Mazzig and the Apartheid State
Mazzig is a master of identity politics. He utilizes his identities as a person of color and a gay man to rationalize colonialism and apartheid. If a white person came to Vassar to defend Israel, protesters would be able to call them out with much less consternation. Yet Mazzig uses his identity as a cloak to perpetuate false notions that he is the voice of the Mizrahi people and that Israel saved all Jews of color like him. Mazzig misrepresents Israel as a safe haven for people of color rather than a colonial state. He argues that Israel should be celebrated for its history of welcoming people of color and finds that activists who frame Israel as oppressive or colonialist erase the history and existence of Israeli people of color.
Mazzig manipulates racial justice rhetoric to avoid the fact that the Israeli government is responsible for championing a colonial project, regardless of the country’s racial make-up. Lest we forget that Britain and France drew the borders of contemporary Israel in the wake of WWI after the fall of the Ottoman empire in order to gain control over the region. The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, which gave British power over Israel and Palestine, created new borders, ones that were not aligned with Ottoman communities, resulting in many of the conflicts we see today.
Even if the project, that is the occupation of Palestine, wasn’t colonial it would still be wrong. Palestinians in the occupied territories are held hostage to Israel’s policies regulating how much food, water, and electricity is let in, who is able/unable to freely move between the territories, and what land people are entitled to live on. These repressive policies have had such a severe impact on Palestinian life that the UN declared that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020. Despite the fact that Palestinians are ruled by Israeli policies they are denied Israeli citizenship and the right to vote.
In addition to these repressive policies Israel has waged brutal military attacks against Palestinians. Here are some highlights from last year’s Human Rights Watch’s, a non-partisan multi-national NGO, report:
Between March 30 and November 19, [Israeli] security forces killed 189 Palestinian demonstrators, including 31 children and 3 medical workers, and wounded more than 5,800 with live fire. Demonstrators threw rocks and “Molotov cocktails,” used slingshots to hurl projectiles, and launched kites bearing incendiary materials, which caused significant property damage to nearby Israeli communities, and, in at least one instance, fired towards soldiers.
The Israeli army also launched intermittent air and artillery strikes in the Gaza Strip, killing 37 Palestinians between March 30 and November 19, including at least five civilians. Palestinian armed groups fired 1138 rockets and mortars indiscriminately toward Israel from Gaza as of November 13… killing one person and injuring at least 40, including civilians.
During 2017 and the first eight months of 2018, Israeli authorities approved plans for 10,536 housing units in West Bank settlements, excluding East Jerusalem, and issued tenders for 5,676, as compared to approving plans for 4,611 units and issuing tenders for 592 units in all of 2015 and 2016.
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities destroyed 390 Palestinian homes and other property, forcibly displacing 407 people as of November 19, the majority for lacking construction permits that Israel makes nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain in East Jerusalem or in the 60 percent of the West Bank under its exclusive control.
[Italics my own.]
This is apartheid plain and simple. Even if “Israel isn’t a Country of privileged and powerful white Europeans” as Mazzig so often says, Israeli policies are still deeply oppressive and inhumane. Violence perpetrated by a supposedly majority-minority country is not somehow less destructive than violence perpetrated by a majority white country. One only has to look at the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs or the Turkish government’s treatment of the Kurds to see that genocide is genocide.
SJP, an Existential Threat to Israel
Mazzig’s pro-Israel speaking tours are not merely a passion project but funded explicitly in part by the Israeli government. Mazzig received more than 180,000 shekels from the Israeli Government’s Advertising Agency from 2017-2018. The government office paid Mazzig and one of his employees for items related to “‘campuses-apartheid campaign’ and ‘campus campaign for pro-Israel people,’ alongside dates — many of which line up with his North American campus tours.” Mazzig, however, never registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). FARA was written into law under the pretense that Americans have a right to know when foreign governments are attempting to shape internal debates.
Israel uses speakers like Mazzig to undermine the work of SJP because they directly threaten Israel’s international standing. Pro-Palestinian activists expose Israel’s apartheid policies, and, in turn, leave many Americans questioning their country’s alliance with Israel. Staving off threats to this relationship is a top priority for the state of Israel as America is its most important strategic ally. Mazzig, like many other Zionist speakers, misrepresents pro-Palestinian student efforts as inherently anti-Semitic and/or violent in order to discredit their work. Furthermore, Mazzig tactfully co-opts campus discourse on identity politics to frame himself as a victim as a Jew of color and the “white” pro-Palestinian activists as bigots. It should be noted that many SJP members are not white despite Mazzig’s rhetorical footwork.
The Lecture
Thirty minutes before Mazzig’s talk began, about 25 students with SJP sat outside the lecture hall in protest. VOICE, the organization hosting the talk, was told by SJP in advance that there would be protests. SJP members held signs that read: “Stop Pinkwashing,” “Resistance is Not Terrorism,” “Free Palestine,” “Don’t Normalize Zionism” and “Palestinians are Indigenous.” None of the protesters obstructed people from entering the hall or documented students attending the lecture. Mazzig and his friend photographed and filmed student protestors, according to VOICE’s own open letter.
A few minutes into the lecture, protesters began chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “How do you spell justice? BDS!,” “From Kashmir to Palestine, occupation is a crime,” “Stop the killing, stop the hate, Israel is an apartheid state” and “When I say free, you say Palestine! Free—Palestine!” After six minutes of chanting, the protesters left the building. Mazzig continued his talk without any disruption.
“From the River to the Sea”
Hours after the talk, Mazzig took to twitter to condemn the SJP protestors, specifically their use of the chant ““From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
Tonight, as I spoke about how anti-Zionists hung my great grandfather in Iraq, anti-Zionists chanted for my death at Vassar College in NY.
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) November 15, 2019
(Note: “from the river to the sea” is a chant used by Hamas when they call for the genocide of all Jews)
Am Israel Chai pic.twitter.com/mMIQWeUPLp
Mazzig’s assertion that SJP called for his “death” is absurd. Despite his suggestion that “from the river to the sea” is exclusively used by Hamas, the chant has a deep history first originating in Zionist literature. In the early 1900s, the Zionist Organization proposed that they be granted authority over land from both banks of Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (a chunk of land spanning modern day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan). Under the British Mandate, Zionists were forced to narrow their vision to west of the river and east of the sea, similar to the borders of modern Israel and Palestine. This notion was enshrined decades later in the founding charter of Likud, Netanyahu’s political party, which states “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
Pro-Palestinian activists use of the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a subversion of the phrases Zionist origins and an assertion of Palestinians’ right to exist as equal citizens on the land. Freedom does not suggest genocide of the Jews in Israel as Mazzig so ardently asserted. It doesn’t mean expulsion either. A joint poll by Israeli and Palestinian authors found that a small minority, less than 15%, of Palestinians support any form of expulsion.
“Palestine will be free” simply means that Palestinians will have equal rights, access to basic resources, and the freedom to not live in constant fear of military attacks.
While there are members of Hamas who chant “from river to sea, Palestine will be free!” and perpetuate violence against Israelis, these few individuals are not representative of the vast majority of Palestinians. Mazzig’s distortion of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a genocidal phrase stands in direct contradiction to the most fundamental moral understandings of justice. Mazzig should be ashamed of himself.
President Bradley’s Response
It should come as no surprise that Mazzig’s response to the SJP protest was hyperbolic — his job is to convince people that his position is right at all costs. In this case, that meant demonizing peaceful protesters.
President Bradley’s response to the protest, however, is cause for alarm. In her statements following the protests she echoed Mazzig’s hyperbolism and castigated students for exercising their right to protest.
Bradley’s first statement reads:
A group of students disrupted the speaker by chanting outside the lecture hall for some time. People who were in the lecture expressed that the chanting was intimidating and hard to listen to. The words have been associated by some people with anti-Semitism. We have worked with student groups to promote peaceful dissent and assembly, and disrupting an invited speaker is antithetical to being a part of a learning community…. Students today knowingly violated those protocols, which is unacceptable. We will follow our internal processes to address the situation.
[Italics my own.]
The four fundamental issues with this statement are:
1) Bradley’s misuse of feelings as evidence of harm. She suggests that because the chants were “hard” for students inside to listen to, they were inherently wrong. It is always “hard” to face dissenting opinions – no one wants to be told their wrong – but dissent is neither hate speech or violence. While there are cases when people use dissent as a vehicle to express hate speech, as if often the case with white nationalists, this is not one of them.
2) Bradley’s rejection of protest as an expression of free speech. Protest creates a dialogue where there often is none. Inside the lecture hall, Mazzig controlled the whole conversation. Even during Q&A, he shaped the discussion to align with his opinions. When SJP voiced their dissent, they created a dialogue which extended beyond the lecture hall. Furthermore, the protesters didn’t prevent the lecture from happening or obstruct people from entering. They chanted for six minutes then left. Mazzig was given more than enough time to express his opinions.
It is deeply troubling that president Bradley views this kind of critical discourse as “antithetical to being part of a learning community;” critical thought is the foundation of any ethical education.
3) Bradley’s failure to acknowledge that the protesters, Vassar students, were put at risk by Mazzig’s secret filming. According to multiple reports Mazzig and his friend secretly filmed students, violating campus policy. This footage may easily be used to continue the tradition of doxing, the publishing of private information, pro-Palestinian students. Zionist websites have databases of tens of pro-Palestinian Vassar activists form over the years. These databases include personal information, social media accounts, and photos. Zionists refer to these databases when hiring to avoid employing pro-Palestinian supporters. This discriminatory practice is especially worrisome considering that many pro-Palestinian activists are black and/or brown already placing them at a societal disadvantage.
4) Nowhere does Bradley mention that Mazzig received funding from the Israeli government to do campus tours. Mazzig’s failure to register with the Department of Justice is a clear violation of FARA, which was enacted to defend Americans from foreign intrusion and/or manipulation. Mazzig’s relationship with the Israeli government was made publicly known at the VSA meeting preceding the lecture and has been reported on by several news outlets. Bradley’s silence on the matter is unacceptable.
While Bradley’s first statement is concerning, her second one really takes the cake.
Last week’s event in which students chanted at an invited speaker was unacceptable. The student leadership had committed to upholding our practices of peaceful protest, including not disrupting the speaker. They broke that promise.
Furthermore, protestors chose a chant that can be understood to be calling for the eradication of the State of Israel and is highly intimidating to Israelis and Jews and directed it to an Israeli speaker discussing his perspective on Indigenous Jews. In the days following the incident, I have spent time speaking with and learning from students, faculty, alumnae/I, and experts in the field, and I now believe the use of the chant—in this way, directed at this speaker—crossed the line into anti-Semitism. We have begun our adjudication processes, which by federal law are confidential.
….
I am grateful that after the fifteen-minute disruption, the invited speaker was able to continue and deliver his presentation to an engaged audience of students, faculty, and administrators.
[Italics my own.]
First of all, Bradley relayed misinformation and contradicted herself. The chants did not last “fifteen-minutes.” A recording and investigation done by the Miscellany News revealed they only lasted six minutes. Furthermore, Bradley’s statement is incoherent. She claimed that the the protesters “broke” their promise by disrupting the speech and then stated that the talk went on on “peacefully” after a short interruption. A six-minute chant out of an hour long lecture is not disrupting someone from speaking. It is inserting a dissenting opinion for a very, very, short period of time.
Beyond this simple contradiction, however, is the far more troubling assertion that the protesters were anti-Semitic. Many members of SJP are Jewish themselves. Claiming that these members are anti-Semitic is in fact anti-Semitic. As SJP writes:
Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is itself an anti-Semitic tactic as it falsely represents the Jewish community and tells them what they ought to believe. This misrepresentation erases the brave work of many Jewish people who actively speak out against Israeli apartheid. False accusations of anti-Semitism directed at activists acting in solidarity with Palestinians distract from real instances of anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, Bradley claimed that they were potentially calling for the “eradication of the state of Israel.” This is also false. No one wants to eradicate Israel. SJP and other pro-Palestinain movements want to free it of injustice – of starvation, displacement, and murder.
Finally, Bradley’s statements suggest that disciplinary action will be taken against the student protesters, an intimidation tactic to prevent future pro-Palestine demonstrations from occurring. Highlighting that “adjudication processes” are taking place sends a clear message to students that the administration has the power to punish students who express an opinion contrary to the administration’s interests.
In this case, the administrations interests lie with alumni donors who see SJP and other pro-Palestinian movements as anti-Semitic. As an educational institution, Vassar’s administration should work to challenge these outdated and harmful positions rather than give into them.
Where Do We Go from Here?
There’s nothing we can do to control Mazzig or alumni responses to these peaceful protests. Nevertheless, as students we have the power to challenge our peers and our administration to be on the right side of history, to fight for justice not only when it is easy, but when it is hard.
Although I’m not a member of SJP, I urge all those concerned about the group’s unfair punishment to sign this petition in support of their members currently facing disciplinary action.
