Re: UR action against pro Palestine students

By Robert Sandrund

December 2, 2024
Robert Sandgrund
92 Shepard Street
Rochester, NY 14620

President Sarah Mangelsdorf
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
Re: UR action against pro Palestine students

Dear President Mangelsdorf,

I am a Jewish community member. In its statement regarding the arrest of the four pro-Palestine students, University of Rochester Jewish Voice for Peace, once more, efficiently disabled the persistent, lethal conflation, ‘anti-zionism is antisemitism‘:

Yesterday, the University of Rochester arrested four students (and threatened to arrest a fifth), charging them with felony criminal mischief, related to allegations of involvemen in distributing posters that criticized University employees and faculty for their involvement with the ongoing Israeli apartheid and genocide. Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Rochester condemns this gross and unprecedented escalation, which is a clear attempt to silence support of Palestinian liberation on campus. The posters in question highlighted how more than a dozen members of the University administration, staff, and faculty (the majority of whom arenot Jewish) actively support ongoing Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide (as designated by the United Nations). The individuals depicted appear to be tied together not by religion or ethnicity, but by their support of Israel’s ongoing campaign in the Middle East. The University has repeatedly claimed, with no basis or input from the majority of the Jewish community, that the posters were an act of antisemitism.

‘In a recent email, DPS conceded that the action did not meet the legal threshold of being a hate crime, but refused to retract the false claims of antisemitism. The administration, along with local, state, and federal law enforcement, operates under the guise of ensuring Jewish safety when, in actuality, they have taken every possible opportunity to silence pro-Palestinian voices on campus. In conflating what appears to be clear criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the University stokes fear among Jewish students, making everyone on campus less safe. In the last week, we have seen numerous threats levied at students for their involvement in the Palestinian solidarity movement.’

In noting that the majority of the officials pictured in the posters are not Jewish, the students expose the absurd and dangerous lengths to which the conflation reaches. The conflation is, in fact, in and of itself, Genocide deflection and denial. Gaza has been destroyed: hundreds of thousands expelled and uprooted and murdered, with those remaining, along with the indefatigable aid workers, starving to death. The Genocide has succeeded.

While hate crime allegations against the students seem not in play, its bare mention plumbs an abyss of irony. How are these students enacting ‘hatred,’ as an ethical, if not a legal category, while repudiating a Genocide? Their action is zealous repudiation of hatred. The students are angry: the only possible emotional basis of an ethical stance in the face of the annihilation of a people. To conflate just anger with ‘hate’ is Genocide denial. The students’ timing is not incidental. In the wake of an election between a Democrat whose embrace of the Genocide was made clear at a Convention in which Palestinians were excluded from the platform, and a Republican who is clear about his commitment to regional Genocide as the radial action from completed Genocide in Gaza, the student action is a scream for recognition of encompassing atrocity.

After thirteen months of slaughter and destruction, and the goal clearly a new precinct for Zionistic settlement, in their diligent witness, their anger is inescapably laced with despair.

According to the November 12 report in the Rochester Beacon, ‘$7.8 million in Israel-related investments through its Long Term Investment Pool, according to minutes from a February meeting of the school’s Ethical Investment Advisory Committee.’ While no possibility of imperial containment in the Middle East exists, with the defeat of Senator Sanders aid cut-off bill, the students continue to insist on the accountability of their institution of higher learning for its overdue disinvestment from legally and morally criminal activity. It is a gesture that, in itself, does not accomplish an end to the annihilation, but a principled stand in the vast ethical desolation.

They deserve nothing less. Their cause necessitates it.

Subjecting the engaged students to criminal action models our authoritarian moment. It is, indeed, inextricable from it. The expense to property, a reported $1500, is a drop in the sea of destruction their action has newly illuminated. An infinitesimal check from the $7.8 million in UR Israeli holdings could pay for repairs, as disinvestment unfolds, while redirecting the holdings, in the interests of justice and humankind, to the people of Gaza.

Of course, the political and community narrative of ‘antisemitism’ concerning the student action is now irreparably emblazoned in fictitious State Zionist victim lore, along with ‘pogroms’ at synagogues sponsoring West Bank real estate drives, and other non-existent offenses against the Jewish people in the course of the depleting year.

The great offense to Jewish people is genocide. Judaism must forever be decontaminated from its contact with ethnic cleansing/genocidal ideological State Zionism, the aircraft carrier and false moral cover for, first, British, and, later, U.S. Empire in the Middle East and South Asia, marauding the now obsolescent resource, oil, in never ending war. Note the 1977 Israeli ruling Likud Party’s Platform: ‘…between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty… ‘A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel, and frustrates any prospect of peace.’

When opposition to Occupation, Apartheid, Annexation, and Genocide is categorically extracted from the fiction of ‘antisemitism’, peace and justice will be possible. Only then.

The students were also leaders during our Indo-China genocide. Sen. Eugene McCarthy was of the moment and also prophetic in his preface (1970) to The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel, a history of the 1968 Columbia University student uprising:

‘Of most serious concern to students is the militarization of American life as well as the militarization of academic life. Universities are in trouble which is to a large extent of their own making, either because of what they have done or permitted to happen, or because of what they have not done or what they have not prevented from happening.’

Thank you,
Robert Sandgrund, LCSW