Activism

Guess who’s invited to Open Hillel’s first conference? Students for Justice in Palestine

In mid-October, Open Hillel is hosting their first conference at Harvard University. This will be a benchmark event for young Jewish students defecting from Hillel International’s austere “partnership policy.”

The full list of speakers and workshops is not up yet, but early announced keynotes are Judith Butler, Rashid Khalidi, Steven Cohen–which seems to indicate the direction of the conference.

Open Hillel circulated a special invitation to Students for Justice in Palestine, the leading campus organization for students in solidarity with Palestinians, many of which support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions call (BDS). “We want this conference to be a convergence of a wide range of people coming together to have the difficult conversations that we as a community need to have on these issues,” conference organizer Naomi Dann told me over email. “We invited students involved in Hillels, students who feel alienated by Hillel guidelines, students active in pro-Israel groups, students involved in JStreet, students involved in JVP [Jewish Voices for Peace], and students involved in SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], etc.”

The invitation:

Dear Students for Justice in Palestine leaders,

The Open Hillel campaign would like to extend a personal invitation to your chapters and members to join us in Cambridge, MA for our first conference: If Not Now, When? from October 11 to 13..

The first ever Open Hillel conference is organized by a grassroots group of young Jews seeking to change the parameters of conversation on the Israel-Palestine conflict within the American Jewish community. The conference intends to model open dialogue and the diversity of political opinions within the Jewish community by hosting a range of panels that explore the American Jewish community’s relationship to the State of Israel and engage with subjects such as BDS, the Nakba, distinguishing anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, and human rights issues in Israel-Palestine.

There will be lots of opportunities to attend conversations, panels and workshops on a range of subjects throughout the conference, which runs from Saturday night to Monday afternoon. We anticipate a range of exciting speakers, and it will be a great opportunity to make connections within the movement for justice in Palestine.

We would love to welcome SJP leaders and members to our conference, and hope that you will join us!  You can pre-register for the conference here, and when registration opens, we’ll send out information to everyone who’s pre-registered.

Please pass this information on to your members, and please feel free to contact us with any questions!

When I was in college and attended events at Hillel, afterwards Jewish classmates too alienated to step foot into the center for pro-Israel campus events would ask me the same question: “Did they say the ‘P’ word. The ‘P’ word was, of course, “Palestinians” (and usually no, they never said it: Arabs, Arab-Israelis, Bedouins, Jordanians, the Hamas, “our cousins”–anything to avoid saying “Palestinians”). Acknowledging the reality that other peoples besides Israelis simply existed in Israel, or that others called it Palestine, was apostasy. Talking about the conflict was being an antagonist. “Some people have relatives in the army,” I remember one email from a student active in Hillel said in order to put an end to a conversation on Cast Lead in the winter of 2008-09. Cast Lead was not to be talked about.

Simply, there was no room to discuss Israel, Israeli policy or what Zionism means today for a bunch of eighteen year olds reared in Zionist institutions, because everyone knew Hillel had a policy: pro-Israel, or leave. The “Hillel Israel Guidelines”  bans Jewish students from hosting events where Palestinians and progressive Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace participate.

In fact, a year before I started at The University of California, Berkeley, the non-Zionist group Cal Tzedek was kicked out of Hillel for not being pro-Israel enough. As I recall the story the students who started the group joined with the expectation of expulsion in order to bring light to the censorship spilling from the umbrella of Jewish student life.

Yet Cal Tzedek was dismissed without much fanfare. Others tried and suceeded in the short-term in starting a conversation about what was happening in the West Bank and Gaza, and to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Then came Open Hillel billowing in from the East Coast. These students have put up a major fight. And now they are upping their game. None of them minds using the “P word.”

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A change is gonna come.

It always does. Finally and hopefully forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbO2_077ixs

Interesting about the P-word. I think it is felt that the existence of Palestinians cannot be acknowledged without also acknowledging the injustice done them. A Jewish woman I met at a wedding recently had a curious reaction when I used the word “Palestinians”: she looked puzzled and repeated the word carefully after me. It was evidently a word she was not accustomed to hearing.

But there was a brief period at the start of the “peace process” when the P-word penetrated Zionist discourse, wasn’t there? And then it was pushed out again.

“Some people have relatives in the army”

yeesh. so by that standard everything is beyond criticism.

Denying Palestinians Their Humanity
A Response to Elie Wiesel

I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children included. As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims? Resisting a near half century of oppression imposed by Jews and through such resistance forcing us as a people to confront our lost innocence (to which you so tenaciously cling)?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/09/a-response-to-elie-wiesel/

BTW, just so I’m clear, what is the relationship (if any) between the “Hillel” I’ve known and “Open Hillel”.
Of course I’ll go to the web and see, but the article and headline leave me in some doubt about it.

The two organizations use the word “Hillel” in their titles, but are not administratively associated with each other, is that correct? “Open Hillel” is not a division of “Hillel”?