I got a message from a friend today telling me that Brown-RISD Hillel is commemorating the Nakba tomorrow.
So let me get this straight: Jewish Students are mourning the failure of a genocidal group that tried to annihilate them.
UPDATE 3 (5/12/2016 @ 10:03am): It turns out the private event starting at 8pm was a decoy. They actually held it earlier. I have recorded proof, and the entire scoop here.
UPDATE 2 (5/10/2016 @10:19pm): The event was not cancelled, as you may have been told. It is to take place in the Hillel building, but is no longer sponsored by Hillel due to external pressure. The organizers, Sophie Kasakove, Ben Williams, and Eital Schattner-Elmaleh, made a new event, this time a private one – only those invited can see it – where they stated the following:
As a group of Jewish students committed to the well-being of the Brown Jewish community, we strongly believe that watching these films and having the difficult conversations that will follow are critical for the creation of an open community that can learn and grow together. In order for Hillel to maintain its integrity as a pluralistic Jewish space, the community must embrace Jews who currently feel excluded from mainstream Jewish discourse and who seek to question dominant narratives about Israel. We claim our right as Jewish students to gather in the space designated for Jewish life on campus. We invite students in the community to join us in gathering tomorrow to watch these films and discuss them at 8pm in the Hillel Meeting Room, despite the lack of official Hillel sponsorship. Join us in creating the pluralism that we want to see reflected in the American Jewish institutions that claim to represent us. Join us in setting a precedent for future critical dialogue and institutional change. Students only.
UPDATE 1 (5/10/2016 @5:20pm): A friend inquired about it and was told it was cancelled due to pressure from donors. This news doesn’t suddenly make Hillel the good guy as they’re not sorry, if they were they wouldn’t have allowed this in the first place. They’re only sorry they got caught.
Yes, they did.
It’s almost as if this is the way to prove they are more sophisticated than you: by having edgy views that are trendy and avant-garde.
Sometimes I feel like they espouse these views just to appear contrarian, better than us for showing something we haven’t. Or perhaps to assert the illusion of moral superiority, because they love their enemies whereas normal people fear them. Or maybe they just want to be edgy or avant-garde, doing what nobody else is doing to try to predict the trends and be ahead of the pack.
Regardless, by this point if Hillel has an event where everyone drapes themselves in Palestinian flags or walks through the street flagellating themselves for the “horrors committed against the Palestinians,” it wouldn’t surprise me either.
The organization Hillel is bringing in, Zochrot, is anti Israel and in many ways makes Breaking The Silence look good in comparison. The goal of the organization is to spread awareness about the Nakba and mobilize support for the Palestinians right of return. In other words, commit national suicide.
They get funded to go around promoting a false narrative, denying our unique indigenous status to as many people as possible, and then commit state suicide… or should I say Jewicide?
How could they be so ignorant of their own history!
I’ve spoken to Israelis who were witnesses, as well as some top historians like Gil Troy (who taught at my university; I’ve known him for years and he even wrote me a reference letter for my first hasbara gig). I even spoke to a Jew growing up in the Arab world who heard himself the broadcasts from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Arabic, telling all the Arabs to leave to prevent becoming collateral damage when the six Arab armies massacred the Jews. But not to worry – when they are done massacring the Jews after about a day, they’ll be able to return home!
Some Arabs fled war, because it’s war and people flee wars. Especially when they feel the enemy has the upper hand.
A very small number were allegedly massacred by Jews, but historians increasingly keep finding that many of these stories are made up, that they fled war but just wanted another excuse to blame the Jews. No matter, why should it be surprising that hostile Arabs were supposed to leave? The Jews were on a mission, they wanted to create a state, of course they are going to attack anyone that gets in their way and shows hostility to our national aspirations. We were also fresh from the worst recorded genocide in our history and have lived with Arab massacres of our villages from time immemorial.
As an aside, I was looking to see if there were any Independence Day parties at Hillel, and there were not. Columbia/Barnard Hillel isn’t doing anything, probably to accommodate those who are ashamed of their own people and to create a “safe space” for those with “different narratives.” Hillel at my other alma mater, McGill, isn’t doing anything either, but they’re forgiven since summer vacation started about a month ago. And all Brown is doing is commemorating the Nakba, rather than commemorating what they should be celebrating – the return of us Jews to our ancestral homeland after 2000 years in exile! So they are actually only promoting one narrative this time around. Pretty incredible, no?
Another sad part of what is happening at Brown is that this Zochrot event has the sponsorship of every pro-Israel group on Brown’s campus, including Brown Students for Israel, the more traditional (I refuse to call them “right wing”) group on campus (unlike Breaking the Silence at Columbia, where the head of the more “traditional” pro-Israel group, Aryeh, said that while they wouldn’t host it themselves they support the right of J Street to host it).
They may feel like their embrace of the “enemy” narrative shows their enlightenment, their ability to understand many sides to a story. However, I believe this is nothing more than good old-fashioned sucking up in the hope they will be killed last.
And besides, many Israeli Arabs don’t even support the Nakba narrative because they acknowledge it wasn’t even really true, or at least, how it is told by Zochrot.
Yahya Mahamed weighed in on this discussion:
The important part is that those events are used for INCITEMENT and for calls and prayers for the Jewish state to get destroyed.
And I’d like to point out that this incitement, will later be turned into violence and terror attacks.I hope that you can see that all Israeli citizens of Israel are equal, doesn’t matter which ethnicity or religion they are or come from.
and from the famed Mohammed Zoabi:
I am an Israeli Arab and there’s nothing in my Arabic history nor heritage called Al Nakba. And that’s the same for most Arabs in Israel. Al Nakba (the catastrophe in Arabic) is nothing but a hoax meant to de legitimize Israel’s right to exist and portray it as a colonial power.. A hoax that existed only after the Arab refusal to accept the UN 1947 resolution to creat an Arab and a Jewish state in The land of Israel. Despite all that, your claim about Al Nakba and that it is not allowed in schools and other institutions is simply wrong! The fact is that it is allowed but not funded by the state, since those who glorify it have nothing but hate to Israel and the Jewish people. In addition to that, Israeli Arabs (Muslim and Christian alike) are allowed to learn their heritage and history in their own language, Arabic! That’s exactly why Israel has an entire educational system for its Arab minority!
I’m not going to deny that a tragedy happened, that many Arabs were forced from their homes. Such is war. Many Arabs also remained here in Israel and became loyal citizens, like Mahamed and Zoabi.
In the mean time, this Hillel event represents a damning trend among Jewish youth.
If we don’t take back our young generation from this scourge of suicidal “open-mindedness,” what will we have?
