Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide and rape.
I attended my first Passover Seder in four years on April 22 with Chabad and 200 other Tufts students. Jews have attended Passover Seders every year since at least 90 BCE, and I celebrated the holiday every year up until college with my grandparents. Passover, like many Jewish holidays (i.e. Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Shmita, Tisha B’Av and Tu BiShvat), is directly tied to our claim of indigeneity based on a continuous 3,000-year-old history to the land of Israel, as it celebrates the arrival of the Jewish people to Israel from slavery in Egypt. Today, the “world’s oldest hatred” continues to be influenced by its past and morphs to fit the present social fabric. Simultaneously, we are connected to each past generation of Jews who each faced different challenges.
April 26, 2024: Chants of “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution” during a Tufts protest as well as a “Long Live the Intifada” poster on top of an entrance to Hotung Cafe mirror calls for a global intifada on college campuses across the country. The Second Intifada consisted of a series of attacks and several dozen suicide bombings by Hamas terrorists, described as resistance by any means necessary. In 2002, Hamas murdered 29 Jews and injured 100 in a suicide bombing during their Passover Seder. An intifada means more murdered Jews and more Palestinian martyrs. At the same Tufts protest, students chanted “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab” in Arabic and “from the river to the sea.” A poster outside the Mayer Campus Center read, “Homeland or Death. From the river to the sea.” To some, this statement represents the goal of exterminating the world’s only Jewish state from our indigenous homeland, along with its Jewish population of over seven million, which makes up 46% of the world’s Jews. Both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of the oppressive Islamic Republic of Iran, and Hamas gave public statements in support of the growing number of college protests.
It is ridiculous that at Tufts, it can be seen as moral to justify, sympathize with and even celebrate the Oct. 7 attacks, which some have called a “pogrom,” where Hamas used large-scale gang raping of Israeli women as a weapon of war. Kidnapping Yocheved Lifshitz and murdering Hayim Katsman and Vivian Silver — all peace activists in southern Israel’s kibbutzim — is not fighting for freedom. Rape is not resistance. I want to uplift the voices of survivors by providing a link to the New York Times article titled “‘Screams without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary titled “Screams Before Silence” and Amit Soussana’s testimony of her horrific abduction and sexual assault in Gaza.
Understanding Jewish history in the Middle East matters — there was never a utopian-like peace that disappeared in 1948 because Israel was established as a Jewish state. In the 1840 Damascus affair in Syria, Jewish leaders were arrested and tortured under the blood libel claim that Jews murdered a Christian and Muslim to bake matzoh for Passover using blood; the same blood libel reappeared in a 2003 TV series broadcast in Syria and Lebanon. The 1929 Hebron Massacre was horrifically similar to Oct. 7, and the 1941 Farhud in Iraq was part of the Holocaust. Over 140 Jews were murdered in two pogroms in Libya in 1945 and 1948. In 1948, over 38,000 Jews were living in Libya, but none remain today. In 1947, 87 Jews were murdered in a pogrom in Yemen that led to the exodus of Yemenite Jews to Israel shortly afterward. Once Yemen had one of the oldest diaspora communities with a population of 55,000; today the last known Jew in Yemen is Levi Marhabi, who is illegally imprisoned by the terrorist organization Ansarallah, commonly referred to as the Houthis.
Many argue that Israel is an apartheid state. However, 18% of Israel’s population is Muslim and 21% is Arab, all citizens vote and there’s an Arab Muslim on Israel’s Supreme Court and 10 Arabs in Israel’s Knesset. Haifa University was named in one of the resolutions proposed to the Tufts Community Union Senate and is 40% Arab. This is a double standard — does Mizrahi Jewish expulsion from Arab countries not constitute apartheid designation?
Anti-Israel reporters cite Hamas’ death count. Hamas controls the Gazan Health Ministry and government, winning the 2006 elections over Fatah, the dominant party in the Palestinian National Authority, which led to Israel and Egypt building border walls. They have not held another election since then. They don’t separate civilian and militant casualties, misrepresenting their reported death counts and leading to the rampant spreading of blood libels and misinformation in the news and social media. If you take them at their word about civilian deaths, you should take them at their word about their goal of the genocide of Jews.
Multiple things can be true at once. Hamas can use civilians as human shields to gain international support through Palestinian suffering, and the suffering and violence need to end.
Never again is now. It is not a slogan — it’s a promise to today’s Jews and to each and every future generation of Jews that the Holocaust will never happen again. The Red Cross was complacent in the Holocaust, just as they are complacent in abandoning the more than 130 hostages who are being raped and tortured. Kfir Bibas, a 1-year-old baby, is still being held hostage. Jewish institutions and businesses are targeted by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which has inflamed today’s high levels of antisemitism. During the Holocaust, six million Jews were killed because Nazis deemed us a non-European race: Research at Strasbourg University established “Jewish racial inferiority” and Jews in Auschwitz were used as experiments of “how different ‘races’ withstood various contagious diseases.” Today, Jews have been labeled ‘white colonizers from Europe.’ Of Israel’s total Jewish population, 45% are Mizrahi Jews, the largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel. All Jews are indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, including the 160,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel. Both today and in Nazi Germany, Jews are racialized to justify antisemitism.
Zionism is the right to self-determination of the Jewish people in our indigenous homeland. It is irrelevant if college students living on stolen land want to erase Israel off the map and tell us to “go back to Poland” or call Zionism ‘white supremacy.’ Let our people go. Bring the hostages home now. Am Yisrael Chai.
