Pro-Israel students at Brooklyn College don’t understand why the pro-Palestinian students don’t want dialogue. Zach Wales explained this to me a long time ago, after Columbia U (recovering from the witchhunt that it licensed during the Columbia Unbecoming period) committed itself to dialogue at the behest of alum/Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The problem, said Wales, is that the Palestinian students described horrific conditions on the West Bank outstripping the Jim Crow south, and the Jewish students nodded and said they felt awful about that and then the two groups walked away and nothing changed; and Wales said that the dialogue became an opportunity for atonement on the pro-Israel Jewish students’ part, and the pro-Palestinian students felt used. Because actually the dialogue was structurally imbalanced; it was not individual but political at heart, two sides were talking (ala the great peace process sham) and one side had the power; and the other side was being asked to give up its power– which lies in noisily protesting inhumane conditions in the wheelhouse of American idealism, the privileged campus… From the New York Jewish Week, reported by Doug Chandler; note that the Palestinian students are not against individual dialogue.
Marcos Askenazi, Hillel’s director of community affairs, …said Hillel has reached out to the Palestinian Club through emails, phone calls and personal interactions, suggesting a weekly dialogue or joint activities, only to be rebuffed each time…
“We hold an anti-normalization stance on dialogue,” said Eeman Abuasi, 21, a co-founder of the Palestinian Club who grew up in Brooklyn, east Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah. “We don’t favor a dialogue with them because [we’re] not on the same political, social and economic level as them. You have one that’s an occupier and one that’s occupied.”
An opponent of a two-state solution, Abuasi also had a ready answer when a reporter noted that her club is in Brooklyn, not the West Bank, and that her fellow students are Jews belonging to Hillel, not occupiers.
“These are people who are Zionist or pro-Zionist, and any dialogue we have is bound to be political,” Abuasi said. She added that she has “no problem talking to [individual] Jewish students. We see them on campus all the time; they’re in my classes, and we do talk.”
Discussing her organization’s mock checkpoint, a guerrilla-theater tactic used at Columbia University last month and at other campuses around the nation, Abuasi dismissed suggestions from Hillel students that her club was distorting reality.
“I don’t want to sound mean or anything, but how would they know what the norm is” on the West Bank, she said. A scenes of Palestinians detained at checkpoints and forced to kneel “is not something I’ve seen once in a blue moon. It’s something I’ve seen frequently.”
