FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)The inaugural event for the University of Maryland Students for Justice in Palestine club featured points of view that speakers said are not often heard when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They remarks also elicited strongly dissenting, but respectful comments.
About 75 people gathered in the basement of the Juan Ramón Jimenez foreign languages building for the Thursday, Oct. 8 presentation, “Jewish Voices for Peace.”
The event featured guest speakers Jesse Hochheiser, a member of the Jewish-Arab partnership Ta’ayush, which supports non-violent action in the occupied territories of Israel, and Shelley Cohen Fudge, a board member of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace.
Hochheiser and Fudge, both of whom are Jewish, spoke about first-hand experiences with the conflict, stressing they are committed to advocating for peace in the warring region. They are among the few Jews who outspokenly say that Palestinians are being unfairly treated in the West Bank, also known as the occupied territories.
“In college, I would have been angry to hear someone say what I’m about to say,” said Hochheiser, who graduated from Bard College in 2006 before moving to Jerusalem to study.
In the three years that he lived throughout Israel, Hochheiser often spent time working along side Palestinians, where he was slowly learned—and he says now understands – their side of the story. During this time, he said, that witnessed unfair treatment of Palestinians by Israeli civilians, such as when a West Bank Palestinian farmer was tied to a pole and assaulted to the point that he needed hospitalization.
Through such incidents, Hochheiser, who said he used to consider himself a Zionist, recognized the “cognitive dissonance” between what he had been hearing his whole life as an American Jew and what he was seeing with his own eyes.
“People are living in terror every single day,” Fudge agreed. “There really is no substitute for seeing things with your own eyes.”
While the audience remained respectful and attentive during the presentation, the question and answer session revealed that some of those present strongly disagreed with what had been said. Several questions challenged the speakers’ sympathies, citing the terrorist actions of Hamas, the radical Islamic group that controls Gaza and is listed as a terrorist group by most western nations, including the United States.
“As someone who is passionate about defending Israel, it’s hard to see Jews come here and speak out against it,” said sophomore American Studies major Seth Finkelstein, a representative of the pro-Israel StandWithUs Emerson Fellowship group. “I personally don’t agree with their views, but I think it’s important to hear both sides out.”
The presentation was the first big event for UMD Students for Justice in Palestine, which recently organized on campus. The chapter is one of more than 50 branches of Students for Justice in Palestine across the United States and Canada comprised of students sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Prior to the forum, Students for Justice in Palestine backers had held a smaller event for the campus’s Radical Rush Week, which lets clubs advocating controversial topics to recruit members. The group said it now has 300 members on its Facebook group.
“[The University of] Maryland is known as a pro-Israel campus,” said senior Government and Politics and Spanish major Sana Javed, an officer of the club. “So having a Palestinian voice is hard … It’s important to let people know our side of the conflict as well.”
Kerri Pinchuk is a journalism student at the University of Maryland-College Park.