On November 1, 2023, dozens of students participated in a solidarity walkout organized to support Columbia students doxxed for speaking out against the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. We demanded swift, transparent, and accessible action from the administration regarding the safety of students and faculty members against doxxing attempts.
The Dean has failed to address the safety concerns and protection of the doxxed students for the past week. At one point, Dean of SIPA Keren Yarhi-Milo came to address us. As part of her response to the threats to our safety, she said, “We need to talk to each other, listen to each other… be there for each other, and hug each other.”
Her words of “hugging each other” have not left my mind since then.
I am writing this in response to the Columbia administration’s failure to value Palestinian lives.
Dean Keren, who exactly are you calling on to hug each other? Do your calls for hugs extend to my family in Gaza, who is surviving from the Israeli war machine by sheer luck? Will hugging save them? Will a hug save the Palestinian woman clutching the coffin of her child, whom Israel killed before even a dream could be dreamt? Will a hug bring them back?
Or is your question directed at the Palestinian mother who is shielding her toddler with her own body from Israeli shrapnel before rescue teams retrieve their lifeless bodies from under the rubble? Will it stop the ethnic cleansing we Palestinians have faced since 1948?
How can I, like millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, offer a hug to my family, friends, and loved ones who are being brutally slaughtered? Please tell me, will it be a delayed hug or an impossibility? What kind of hugging do you mean?
What kind of hugs can one give to starving family members rationing the last loaf of bread, even a moldy one, when more than 40 family members are huddled together in a desperate attempt to escape Israel’s bombs and forced to decide who should have priority to have the final bite of food? Can hugs make disappearing drinking water magically reappear in abundance? Can hugs protect children from the rising skin and diarrheal diseases they face in shelters, unable to access clean drinking water?
On the rare occasions when I can speak to my mom, the first thing she asks is how my school is. Should I tell her everything is great because we are hugging each other, or should I be honest and express my worries for their safety and my own? As a hijabi Palestinian from Gaza, as many defending Palestinian human rights, we are confronted with attacks before we even open our mouths to speak. Just mentioning Palestine is perceived as threatening. Should I tell her how I’ve confined myself to my room most of the time, grieving, because doing so on campus is not a right afforded to me? Grieving for Palestinian lives, for my own community, is met with counter-protests and counter-vigils, and staff members shouting at pro-Palestinian students, “I hope every one of these people die.”
How can you erase all that through hugging? Will hugs move us, Palestinians and those who believe we deserve freedom, up the grief hierarchy perpetuated by this institution in every email and correspondence sent by the administration, from the president to the SIPA dean? Or are you asking us to hug as a way to normalize this hierarchy? Emails and statements for some. Thoughts, prayers, and hugs for others.
Will hugs paper over how this institution dismisses Palestinian lives by not acknowledging their numbers or the fact that they are women, children, elderly, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, grandparents, and people with disabilities, a description afforded to one group but never to Palestinians? Will hugs remove the inherent violence in your own words and emails that tell some of your students that they don’t matter?
Lastly, pray tell me, what kinds of hugs should Palestinians give during times of the Israeli genocide againt Gaza? Should we offer hugs to the killing machine that is stealing our lives, dreams, and the valuable things we’ve collected over the years? Is a hug possible with an Israeli missile? Should we hug it before or after it tears us to pieces? Or should we hug the shells fired from Israeli tanks? Do you know that it takes a count of six for the shells leaving a tank to hit a house? Should we hug the Israeli settlers who are kicking Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank, stealing their land and killing them with impunity?
So, do tell me, how are hugs given during times of this Israeli genocide against Gaza? You see, we were not aware of this option before. Perhaps this is the magical solution to which we were so oblivious. Pray tell me — maybe, just maybe, if I had known, my friend Islam, my friend Abeer’s 50 family members, my distant cousin Dana, my colleague Tariq, his wife, his children, parents, and family members would not have been killed in the last four weeks of your silence.
Do tell me: how do I give a hug in times of genocide?
Talking and listening are more appropriate than hugging.