Editor’s Note: This is a faculty submission.
We would like to respond to the letter signed by several faculty members and published in The Denisonian on Nov.15: “Response to statement on justice in Palestine: A letter to our communities.” Reiterating and echoing a spirit of critical dialogue, we are deeply concerned by the misreading of the ceasefire letter and the false public charge that students, faculty, and staff signatories are “siding with the terrorists of Hamas” and are “calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.” We categorically reject both claims. Critique of the state of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights are not synonymous with antisemitism. By implying that these ideologies are equivalents, the letter creates a hostile atmosphere on campus, despite the authors’ claims to favor “dialogue.”
Students and faculty stand together, in solidarity, to protest ongoing ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and the potential genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel. We firmly stand side by side with our Jewish students, friends, and colleagues in our vocal condemnation of antisemitism and attacks on Jewish communities here in the US. We also stand against the killing of civilians by Hamas and other groups on Oct. 7. In all of the various campus events organized to date on peace and justice in Palestine, faculty and students have repeatedly disseminated factual and verifiable information about indiscriminate attacks against civilians, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the need for an immediate end to the conflict. As signatories to this letter, we resist attempts, such as the faculty letter we are responding to, that seek to silence support for Palestine and undermine any public engagement or political analysis critical of Israel’s illegal occupation. We also recognize the efforts of faculty who have stood up to support our students and keep them safe, moderating valuable and open public teach-ins and townhall discussions where students of all backgrounds and perspectives have come together to ask earnest and discerning questions about the complexities of the conflict, its history, and what a free and just Israel and Palestine might look like. In other words, in these spaces the dialogue and community that President Weinberg and our colleagues call for has already been taking place, much to the credit of the students and groups maligned by the faculty letter.
While it might have been possible to have a useful debate about the complicated history of slogans (e.g., “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) that have been assigned conflicting meanings by different groups, about how to contextualize resistance to the mass killing of a colonized people at the hand of a powerful state, or about the violent dynamics of nationalism throughout history, the irresponsible accusations leveled against vulnerable students and faculty only inflamed and escalated a situation in which many of us already feel unsafe. Such language takes on an inherently anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and most concerningly defamatory tone, conflating Palestinian rights and liberation with militancy, violence, and terrorism. This rhetoric incites palpable fear, particularly when we consider how students and faculty across the U.S. have been harassed, stalked, and violently attacked for speaking out on this issue.
In addition, the faculty letter goes against many of the critical thinking practices that are crucial and definitive of a liberal arts education. For instance, it lays claim to the “indisputable facts” of Oct. 7 and in so doing, suggests that the narrative of the letter is the only vantage point from which to understand ongoing events. It also reiterates unverified talking points emanating from the Israeli military and picked up by mainstream media. The letter uses highly politicized language (like “jihadist”) seemingly uncritically, as if these words are mere descriptors rather than powerful forces with real world effects. In this, we find their letter an affront to students craving frank, critical dialogue on difficult topics. It also ignores the fact that many faculty who support peace and justice for Palestine actively critique and teach about the historical and present dangers of antisemitism in our classes. Lastly, as students and faculty of the liberal arts know well, one’s subject position matters. The faculty authors made no mention of themselves as tenured professors with considerable class and racial privilege and power over students in and beyond the classroom, and therefore willfully ignore critical differentials that exist around who can speak about this issue and in what ways.
We recognize how the ongoing conflict is triggering and traumatizing for people with different religious, ethnic, or national identities. However, to suggest that the ceasefire letter authored by students in the SJP and MSA, among many other student organizations across multiple universities, constitutes a call for antisemitism or the erasure of Jewish people is a gross misinterpretation. We direct our colleagues and the reader to the end of the fourth paragraph as well as the fourth demand at the bottom of the letter, both of which resist the common false assertion that pro-Palestinian advocacy is equivalent to being “pro-Hamas” or antisemitic.
Let us be clear and unambiguous: we are not calling for the elimination of the Jewish people, and we are not calling for the dismantling of the state of Israel. We are calling for an immediate ceasefire. We are calling for the end of apartheid and occupation which are deliberate acts on the part of the state of Israel to control and oppress Palestinians. If there is any common ground that we share, it would seem to be a desire for a “lasting and just peace,” united in a shared humanity.
FACULTY SIGNATORIES:
Ron Abram
Anna Adams
Hanada Al-Masri
Lauren Araiza
Beronica Avila
Nida Bikmen
Jason Busic
Isis Campos
Christina Cavener
Jennifer Woody Collins
Chris Crews
Julia Fernandez
Zach Joachim
Zarrina Juraqulova
Fadhel Kaboub
Tess Lanzarotta
Cheryl McFarren
Caitlin Marie Miles
Michael Alexander Morris
Kelsi Morrison-Atkins
Isis Nusair
Christine Pae
Marion Ramirez
Sheilah Restack
Jane Saffitz
Hosna Sheikholeslami
John Soderberg
Ahmed Soliman
Catherine Stuer
Micaela Vivero
David White
FACULTY EMERITI SIGNATORIES:
Sohrab Behdad
Susan Diduk
Sandra Mathern
Bahram Tavakolian
Anita Waters
STUDENT ORG. SIGNATORIES:
African and Caribbean Student Association
Black Latinx Asian STEM Society
Black Student Union
Democratic Socialists of America
Denison Asian Student Union
Denison Disability Advocacy Association
Denisonians for Planned Parenthood
First Generation Network
Green Team
History Club
La Fuerza Latina
Muslim Student Association
Outlook
Students for Justice in Palestine
University Programming Council
Vietnamese Student Association
Women’s and Gender Studies Senior Fellows
Denison Student
I am shocked, embarrassed, and at a loss for words (mostly). This sort of forced, willfully petulant, bellicose, revisionist rhetoric demonstrates how little these faculty members, students, and Denisonians trust the rest of their community to engage with them in a meaningful, responsible, good-faith manner.
The manner in which they have engaged with us: gesturing at critical theory, tilting at Clinton-era straw men, and generally acting as if all those who are not explicitly engaged in their self-supporting, pseudo-academic project endeavoring towards an anticolonial, uninformed, sloppily conceived vision of an exclusionary, self-righteous movement for global liberation.
Your vision of yourselves as saviors, rather than as members of a community bound by all-too-real physical and structural interconnections that require the sort of shared humanity you claim to represent, is tarnished by these sorts of pieces for every person who encounters them.
This conversation resurfaced most recently when SJP used the largest killing of Jews since Holocaust to manufacture the sort of division and lazily masked antisemitism that they are now basking in. The Jewish voices grieving were asked to explain themselves and to understand. Now, they are asked not to understand, but to shut up.
When a principal SJP organizer refers to their critics as “sniveling” and gestures limply at their organization’s having “plenty of Jewish members” in order to avoid asking hard questions about why they believe what they do, we have a problem as a community.
Silly Denny Student
Dear Ron DeSantis, thank you so much for this insightful comment and for taking out time to pay attention to our humble campus.
Your laborious analysis has a lot of big words which are hard for these students, C3 organizations, and professors to understand. You demonstrate a very keen understanding of critical theory (absolutely no real academic worth their name would ever engage with critical theory). You also seem to know a lot about pseudo-academic projects and thank you for all you and your allies have done to shut down and attack gender studies, black studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and other fake programs all over the country. You are right. I think these organizations (every single students of color organization and the queer club and majority faculty of color) have gone astray with their uninformed movement for global liberation. And thank god you mentioned, how exclusionary! Where are all the actual good orignal inclusive people supposed to go? If only we could go a few decades back, Denison would still have been the hub of good people without all these exclusionary, self-righteous people. You should work on getting these exclusionary people out of Denison again.
I think they are jealous of not-sloppy, very-informed, and colonial (NOT anticolonial, pfft) European saviors like yourself. If only you were the one doing things on campus, which I am sure you cannot because you already have so many issues being yourself on this exclusionary campus, we might have been able to excavate this humanity that these delinquents have tarnished.
And ah, yes, thanks for letting us know that these freaks have been telling Jews to explain themselves or shut up. Why don’t they talk about Palestine instead? Isn’t that in their name? Why are they talking about Jews? Can someone tell me why they keep telling Jews to shut up instead of talking about Palestine? Why are the Jews in their organization talking about being Jews and posting about being a Jew on their story? Do they ever talk about Palestine? Do they also tell Palestinian Jews to shut up and explain themselves? Who tells the Jews in their organization to explain themselves and shut up? They have to be consistent, right?
And finally, you have asked the million-bitcoin question, the rock-hard question they keep avoiding, why do they believe what they believe? These weirdos! It is not like any of them are students or scholars of history, anthropology, Middle East, international relations, etc. or have ever been part of groups that were also oppressed. Oh, Mr. DeSantis, if only everyone had your thesaurus and your foresight to ban SJP before they could manufacture this division when they and their pseudo-movement came into being on October 7. Keep up the hard work!
With so much love for your brain and dictionary,
A stupid, silly, unknowing student
Serkan Tan
To the commenter above me; I’m frankly embarrassed at your buzzword-soaked, poorly warranted, facetious comment, so the feeling is mutual. You say that signers of this letter do not trust their community “to engage with them in a meaningful, responsible, good-faith manner.” Curiously, you omit all of the meaningful, responsible, and good-faith efforts conducted by both SJP & the University; from teach-ins, to town halls, to vast informational initiatives. Furthermore, when you state “The manner in which they have engaged with us: gesturing at critical theory… self-righteous movement for global liberation,” you remain completely (and probably willfully) ignorant of the actual platform used by the SJP. I am also perplexed by the use of “us” in your diction here. Your own diction seems to indicate that you have “othered” those in opposition to your viewpoint instead of attempting to have meaningful, engaging conversations with them. The main platform of the SJP is to end apartheid practices (which have been very possible in the past if you look at poll numbers for a 2-state solution) and genocide that becomes more plausible by the day. At this, no college student has some 27 stage plan that they, themselves thought up and plan to implement. You’re making an argument that promotes this elitist idea that if you aren’t an expert on the issue, you should shut up. No. You shouldn’t. Students here and everywhere are watching a genocide happen against civilians. You do not need to be an expert to understand that the shooting of innocent people (most of whom are children) by the Israeli state, is wrong. You point out that Oct. 7th was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, but completely omit the exponentially higher amount of Palestinians that have been unjustly killed, displaced, and imprisoned since Israel’s atrocious settler colonial and apartheid practices started decades ago. You should be ashamed of what you’ve written here. It is completely disingenuous to a collective understanding and solution to this issue.