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“Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
By: Sara Dogan
On September 22, 2023, roughly two weeks before Hamas would launch a barbarous and unprovoked attack on innocent Israeli civilians, the University of Pennsylvania hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on campus. The event was sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Even before the Hamas attacks brought anti-Semitism to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, the event drew strong criticism and outrage from Jews and supporters of Israel as well as the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Those latter two groups sent a letter to the University’s then-president Liz Magill back in August of 2023, sharing their “deep concern” that individuals scheduled to speak and present at the event had a history of promoting anti-Semitism. These scheduled speakers included Roger Waters, “whose shows were recently condemned by the U.S. State Department as anti-Semitic after he dressed in a Nazi-like uniform and shot a prop machine gun into the audience during two concerts performed in Germany.” Another featured speaker was CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by the network after endorsing the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations and who has glorified convicted terrorist Fatima Bernawi.
Other speakers at the event which were highlighted in the ADL/JFGP letter included the festival’s co-chair Susan Abulhawa who wrote, following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, that “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants. They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor” and Rutgers University Professor Noura Erakat who “repeatedly expressed complete opposition to Israel’s right to exist and shared her approval for military campaigns to end Israel’s existence. She also suggested Zionism is a ‘bedfellow’ to Nazism.”
Unsurprisingly, these predictions that the Palestinian Writes Literature Festival would openly promote Jew hatred at the university proved to be spot on. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic anti-Semitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
The AJC also noted that the perpetual use of the term “settler colonialist” to describe the state of Israel is deeply anti-Semitic and inaccurate. “The term ‘settler colonialism’ refers to a system of oppression in which a colonizing nation engages in ethnic cleansing by displacing and dispossessing a native or pre-existing population,” explained the AJC. “This phrase is false for many reasons outlined here. Referring to Israel as a settler-colonialist state is not only factually inaccurate, it is an anti-Semitic demonization of the State of Israel.”
Individual speakers at the event also demonized the Jewish people and Israel.
Hoda Fahredin, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, used the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea” adding that “Under occupation in refugee camps in the diasporas and around the world, Palestinians are a people who have been facing the daily brutal injustices of an apartheid regime for the past 75 years. We gather here today and in the coming days in their honour.”
The professor also denied the well-established fact that the Jewish people have deep ancestral ties to the land of Israel, stating “And now, as Zionists continued to forcibly remove us from our homes, destroy and build over our ancestral villages, cemeteries and archaeological heritage. They have invented a stunning new tale of indigeneity [that is] propagated in popular culture throughout the West in particular.”
She also invoked anti-Semitic tropes that Jews control the media, stating “An open collaboration with Israel media continues to remove or shadow ban Palestinian content on social media, a phenomena that was verified by an independent investigation commissioned by Facebook itself that revealed unequivocal anti Palestinian bias. Financial platforms like PayPal have been pressured by Zionists to disallow Palestinians even the most mundane of transactions.”
Fahredin dismissed concerns about the potential for anti-Semitism at the festival as “Hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas” adding, “Again, this is an old, well worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native. Which I will not dignify with a response.”
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fahredin alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Nor was Fahredin alone in demonizing and delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state (classic forms of anti-Semitism according the definition used by the U.S. State Department). Speaker Ahmad Zahid claimed not to “hate anybody for who they are” but asserted that “We hate occupation. We hate apartheid. We hate racism,” accusing Israel of all three sins.
Palestinian poet Dana Dajani vilified Jews for claiming their birthright as citizens of Israel, stating “The insanity of your alleged birthright, Israelis minting fresh citizens. They import entitlement and market it as democracy. And though your apartheid apathy acknowledges 1 million of my friends had second class citizens among you, millions still are caught in between.”
Roger Waters, co-founder of the band Pink Floyd, who spoke via Zoom, endorsed the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, stating, “I have remained wedded to the idea, of course, that was the year 2006, which was the year that the BDS movement started in Palestine and the whole of Palestine civil society. Sent this message to those of us outside the borders. To say please support us, please support the boycott, please, you know, please.”
The Palestine Writers festival attracted controversy because of its size and scope and the long list of anti-Semites featured as speakers. But the Middle East Center at U. Penn has a much longer and more extensive history of promoting Jew hatred on campus.
In May of 2022, the Middle East Center at U. Penn co-sponsored an event titled “Trauma and Resilience – Mental Health in the Middle East.” At the event, speaker Devin Atallah, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at UMass Boston, demonized Israel, accusing it of “settler colonization,” “abuses of colonial power,” and treating Palestinians as less than human.
Atallah claimed that Israel exercises “excessive violence” against the Palestinians, claiming “We as the colonized are seen and treated as excessively violent and therefore deserving excessive violence. We’re killable, detainable, displaceable and our belongingness is always in question. This is part of the racialization process.”
He also promoted ancient blood libel tropes against the Jews, stating, “Scholars are using terms in Palestine such as dismemberment, caging, unchilding… unchilding is a really important colonial wound understand as the uncompromising practice and ideology whereby violence against Palestinian childhood becomes part of the war machine. It’s the process by which legal, political, military apparatuses of settler colonial state objectify the Palestinian child as a security threat that must be constantly surveilled, managed and targeted.”
Just two months earlier, in March of 2022, the Middle East Center gave a platform to another notorious Jew-hater, Rutgers professor Noura Erakat, who also spoke at the Palestine Writes festival. Erakat demonized and delegitimized Israel, stating that we should “understand that when we discuss these processes when we discuss the condition of settler colonialism, or what many have become more familiar with is apartheid. That this doesn’t begin at the false partition of the green line but begins within Israel itself and marks all Palestinians for removal regardless of juridical or geographic demarcation.”
She went on to defend the Palestinian Intifada, a series of terrorist attacks, stating, “[T]his is what animates the May through June Unity Intifada. This is what catalyzes this organic movement of Palestinians in Ramallah, of Palestinians in Jerusalem, of Palestinians in Iliad, of Palestinians in Haifa, of Palestinians in Gaza, of Palestinians in Philadelphia, to unite with a singular voice to affirm once again that they are a single nation targeted with a single policy by a settler sovereign seeking to remove them in order to suspend the critique and the protest of Zionist settler sovereignty.”Since the events of October 7th, Penn has pledged itself to combatting anti-Semitism, although its messaging has been decidedly uneven. Penn President Liz Magill—who was ousted in December after she testified before Congress that calls for the genocide of the Jews did not necessarily violate Penn’s policies—announced an “Action Plan to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
“Across the country and world, we are witnessing pernicious acts of anti-Semitism, including on college and university campuses,” Magill said. “I am appalled by incidents on our own campus, and I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories from those who are fearful for their safety right here at Penn. This is completely unacceptable.”
Despite Magill’s words—and similar ones from her interim replacement J. Larry Jameson—Penn is failing in its promises. Some of the most blatant and obvious Jew hatred on campus comes from the university’s own academic departments and centers, particularly the Middle East Center, which deserves its place on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments.
