Last Tuesday, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a very successful multimedia exhibition dedicated to providing an alternate source of information on the December 2008 invasion of the Gaza Strip. The exhibition was held in the Atrium of the Campus Center so that information could be made available to anyone willing to stop for a couple of minutes on their way to check their mail or grab a snack from Schwemm’s. And indeed, a really encouraging amount of students stopped to read the posters and sign thank-you letters to Amherst Representative John Olver for being vocal on the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. At the end of the day, a panel took place during which three panelists discussed the ideology of the invasion of Gaza. The first panelist, Prof. Sayres Rudy, talked about the Zionist logic of preferring land over peace as part of this ideological framework (remember first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s words: “peace for us is just a means…”). The second panelist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Professor Joseph Levine, put forth the historical pattern of dismissals of peace offers by Israel, and the third speaker Alisa Klein mentioned her change from “Zionist Israeli soldier to a peace activist” fighting for Palestinians’ rights.
Some people congratulated us for the hard work, some thanked us for our insightful non-violent activism, and others mentioned the one-sidedness of our presentation. This last opinion is interesting for it is symptomatic of a widespread “strive for neutrality,” which comes from the belief that “there are two sides in every story.” The problem with this sort of blanket criticism is that it fails to see that the point of organising this exhibition and this panel was precisely to show that this kind of reasoning is faulty. The story of the invasion of Gaza cannot be told in a “balanced” way, since the death toll, power dynamics, international aid, military might, media coverage and control of resources are all unbalanced: Gazans do not have control of Gaza. This reality is completely elided by the language adopted to talk about this invasion, which favours this theoretical presupposition that everything is fair and even.
Another conversation that happened that day was about the table tent used to advertise the exhibition and the panel. It contained an image which shocked many people on campus because it represented a pile of corpses, most of them in turbans and striped trousers: a painful reminder of the Holocaust. Understandably, this upset a certain number of people who brought it to our attention last Tuesday, and we would like to thank them for coming forward to talk about this. This table tent was not designed to introduce a comparison between the Holocaust and the invasion of Gaza, and SJP members were not aware of the implications of this cartoon and it was absolutely not our intention to shock people by using imagery of the Holocaust.
This cartoon was drawn by a Brazilian artist, Carlos Latuff, who drew it in March 2008, in reaction to a statement given by Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who threatened Palestinians with a “holocaust.” The exact quote is “they [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘holocaust’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” Unlike Mr. Vilnai, our intent was not to use the theme of the Holocaust as an unfortunate and disturbing connection with the situation in Israel/Palestine: The Holocaust has not got anything to do with Hamas firing rockets onto Sderot, or the invasion of Gaza, or the settlements in the West Bank. Arguments over terminology should not conceal the gravity of the situation. This is why we were particularly glad to see that people who visited the exhibition and attended the panel stayed focused on the point of that day: the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Many fruitful and engaging conversations happened last Tuesday (which is really what SJP is about), making us really pleased with the event and hopeful for the future.
-Amal Ahmad ’12
Romain Cames ’09