Rice professor: Antisemitism is ‘prevalent’ on campus
Dec. 1 was my 30th anniversary at Rice University. At times, I have had significant disagreements with Rice’s leadership; for example, I did not hesitate to criticize Rice’s response to the COVID pandemic. Yet I have always been proud of being a faculty member at Rice University.
With deep chagrin, I have to admit that I can no longer say that.
My first inkling of a problem brewing at Rice was in the fall of 2022. A group of students wished to start a club, Students Supporting Israel, to counteract the growing activities at Rice of Students for Justice in Palestine. As an Israeli-American faculty member, I was asked to be the club sponsor, and I accepted. The students submitted the paperwork for approval of a new club.
On Oct. 12, 2022, the parliamentarian for Rice’s Student Association emailed that the executive committee hadn’t approved the club’s formation.
“While the exec members have not explicitly cited their reasons for not approving the club,” she wrote, “I believe that the strong political nature focused on a contentious topic was the general reasoning.”
I was astonished and responded quickly, cc-ing a representative of the university’s administration. Given that Students for Justice in Palestine had been approved, I wrote, “an opaque negative decision concerning SSI creates an appearance of discrimination. It is not enough to assert that the decision was not discriminatory; it is incumbent on the decision makers to remove the opacity and demonstrate that it was a good-faith decision.”
Within less than 24 hours, a representative of Rice’s admin
istration informed me that the Student Association decision had been reversed, and the club was approved. A full explanation of the initial denial and its reversal was never provided, but I sensed a whiff of antisemitism.
A year later, in September 2023, Rice Pride cut ties with Houston Hillel, a Jewish student organization — even though Hillel supports LGBTQ+ students at Rice. The reason for this decision, which reverberated around the world? Hillel International, an umbrella group for campus chapters, prohibits partnering with or hosting groups that advocate for a boycott of Israel or that deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Pride argued that this intolerance of intolerance is intolerable. In the name of “inclusion,” Rice Pride decided to exclude the primary Jewish organization on campus. Ironically, Israel is the only country in the Middle East with solid LGBTQ rights.
About two weeks later, on Oct. 7, invading Hamas gunmen murdered some 1,200 Israelis; their rampage included torture, rape and mutilation. The vast majority of the victims were unarmed and included women, children, infants and the elderly. About
240 hostages, including women, elders, children and infants, were taken to Gaza as hostages. On the same day, Hamas fired an estimated 2,200 rockets were fired toward southern and central Israel, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
For Israelis and Jews, Oct. 7 was so unfathomable, so unbelievable, so abhorrent, that we cannot even name it. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the
Hamas Political Bureau, announced that day that the goal is not only to liberate Gaza and the West Bank, but also the territories “occupied in 1948” — in other words, to eradicate Israelis, “from the river to the sea.”
“Get out of our land,” Haniyeh said to the Israelis.
A Hamas official later said that they would repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 over and over and over.
When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their extraordinary tunnel system, burrowed below civilian Gaza. The tunnel system and Hamas’ stiff resistance made fighting very costly in civilian casualties in Gaza, triggering worldwide concerns.
On Oct. 11, Rice President Reginald DesRoche issued a statement that denounced Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.
In response, on Oct. 27, a petition titled “Rice University Faculty Statement of Solidarity with Palestinians” began to circulate. Hundreds of people affiliated with Rice — including students, faculty and alumni — have now signed it.
With only the barest acknowledgment of the Oct. 7 atrocities, the 1,100-word petition expresses “solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation” and denounces “U.S.-backed genocidal violence against Palestinians by the Israeli state.” The petition called for a cease-fire, but it made no mention of the hostages Hamas held.
The petition writers present themselves “as scholars of global studies of race, Blackness, Indigeneity, Latinidad, state violence, colonialism, human rights, anti-imperialism, social movements, queerness, transness, gender, disability, critical medical anthropology, and visual culture.” Apparently, antisemitism did not deserve a mention in this list of oppressions.
On Dec. 4, the Student Association Senate passed a resolution affirming support for that faculty statement of solidarity with the Palestinians. The Oct. 7 atrocities were not even mentioned in the resolution. In spite of the well-publicized wave of antisemitism that has been washing over U.S. campuses, the resolution called on Rice’s president to “[a]ffirm its commitment to a culture of care for our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student body, faculty, staff, and community.” Apparently, Jews do not deserve a culture of care.
While Hamas’ leaders might have been pleased to learn about the support Hamas is getting from Rice University faculty and students, the truth is that no one in the Middle East is paying any attention whatsoever to Rice. Such petitions and resolutions are meant to send a message on the Rice campus.
Rice colleagues and students, I hear your message loud and clear. I am a secondgeneration Holocaust survivor. I recognize antisemitism when I see it. You do not need to be a user of derogatory epithets to be antisemitic; using double standards qualifies.
It is OK to criticize Israel, but not OK to pay lip service to Palestinian atrocities. It is OK to call for a cease-fire, but not OK to ignore the hostages. It is OK to call for a two-state solution — which I strongly support — to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not OK to talk about Palestinian liberation while mentioning the Nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War; that implies the desire for ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel.
It is OK to express sympathy with Palestinian refugees. It is not OK to ignore close to 1 million Jews who were pushed out of Arab countries after the 1948 war. It is OK to talk about Palestinian casualties. It is not OK to ignore Jewish casualties and civilian casualties elsewhere in the Middle East. (Civil wars are raging in Syria, Yemen and Sudan.)
It is OK to express concerns about anti-Palestinian hate crimes. It is not OK to ignore anti-Jewish hate crimes. It is OK to demand a culture of care for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, faculty and staff. It is not OK to ignore Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff.
I was well aware that antisemitism is alive and well in the U.S., but I had believed that it exists only in the margins, among the extreme left and extreme right.
I have been rudely awakened.
I now realize that not only is it a mainstream phenomenon, but it is also quite prevalent on my very own campus, among Rice faculty and students. This is a profoundly bitter lesson for me. I am not quite sure how to cope with it.