The War Comes to Stanford
Oct. 13, 2023
Chalk writing on a sidewalk about tax dollars funding genocide. Student bicycles are lined up near the sidewalk.
A chalk message expressing condemnation of American support for Israel on the Stanford campus Wednesday.
Written by Pamela Paul ... Opinion Columnist
Alma Andino, a Jewish senior at Stanford University, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel crying and distraught. Like many Jews around the country, much of the weekend passed on the phone with family members, fearing for the safety of friends and extended family in Israel. Andino’s fellow students in Columbae, the social justice and antiwar residential house where she is a residential assistant, held her through her panic attacks. “I felt so powerless,” she recalled when we spoke this week.
On Monday, a friend asked if she’d seen the banner some of her housemates were preparing to hang on the front of Columbae, the house she considered to be her community and her home. The sheet bore the slogan “Zionism is genocide” in red letters, styled to look as if they were dripping with blood.
It would join other celebratory banners that had already gone up over the weekend on prominent university buildings around campus, including one that declared, “The illusion of Israel is burning.”
Stanford is in the throes of a teachable moment right now, and it’s not a good one.
In an opinion column in The Stanford Daily on Tuesday, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine called Hamas’s butchery “part of the ongoing, decades-long struggle against Israeli oppression” and said Palestinians have “the legitimate right to resist occupation, apartheid and systemic injustice.”
A lecturer in one class that day asked Jewish students to raise their hands, then took one of the Jewish student’s belongings and told him to stand apart from everyone else, saying that was what the Israelis did to the Palestinians, a student who was in the class told me. In a later section, another student in the class told me, he turned to an Israeli student and asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust. When that student said six million, the teacher replied, many more millions died in colonization, which is what he said Israel was doing to the Palestinians. He then asked all of the students to say where they were from and depending on the answer, he told them whether they were colonized or colonizer. When a student said, “Israeli,” he called the student a colonizer. (The lecturer did not respond to an email request for comment.)
That evening, only hours after Chabad, the Stanford Israel Association and the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi held a vigil for those lost in the attacks, chalk messages were scrawled on the sidewalks where they had stood: “No peace on stolen land.” “Long live the intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” “Resistance to occupation is legal, collective punishment is not.”
Those messages remained, untouched, throughout the following day.
On Wednesday evening, Students for Justice in Palestine convened a Palestine Teach-In with over 200 students. A number of students spoke about legitimate Palestinian grievances and tragedies. But in a recording of the event that I listened to, the biggest applause line was for a woman who said her family was in Gaza. “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas?” she said, and cursed. “Stop asking all these questions,” she went on. “I’m so proud of my resistance.”
Stanford’s administration had given students little reason to think twice before defending mass murder. On Monday, Richard Saller, Stanford’s interim president, and Jenny Martinez, its provost, issued a brief statement “on the Middle East conflict” noting they were “deeply saddened and horrified by the death and human suffering.” The university also issued a statement saying the pro-Hamas banners were fine but would need to be relocated to another part of campus. “These removals are based on the location of the banners, not the content or viewpoint expressed,” the university made clear.
Stanford is correct to stand up for free speech. But Stanford should have taken a stand more quickly and forcefully against terrorism, particularly against Jews, given a history of antisemitic incidents on campus. Most recently, in 2019, antisemitic cartoons were posted on campus.
While in a statement on Monday the university said that “Stanford University as an institution does not take positions on geopolitical issues and news events,” Stanford did in fact issue a statement in 2015 in support of the Paris conference on climate change and release multiple statements condemning the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.
As recently as March of this year, Stanford was able to take a moral stance against unacceptable hate speech, after several swastikas and an image of Hitler were posted inside student dorms.
Stanford’s response to the Hamas attacks feels like too little, too late.
On Wednesday, Saller and Martinez updated their initial statement to say: “As a moral matter, we condemn all terrorism and mass atrocities. This includes the deliberate attack on civilians this weekend by Hamas.” They noted that in response to student complaints about the class, the instructor is not teaching while the university investigates. “Without prejudging the matter, this report is a cause for serious concern,” they wrote. “Academic freedom does not permit the identity-based targeting of students.”
When I reached out to Saller on Thursday, he responded that he “would like to let our message yesterday speak for itself.”
Saturday’s attacks were a moment when leaders and students at major institutions of higher learning had a chance to take clear, unequivocal and morally powerful stands against terrorism, murder and antisemitism. But at Stanford, Harvard and a number of other campuses, leaders issued weak initial statements — followed by more forceful ones only after they were under pressure — while some students have treated horrific violence as just another ideological debate. Perhaps most chilling is that things are likely to get worse, soon, in Israel and Gaza. What will people say then?
A number of students at Stanford expressed to me fears for their safety. On Thursday, the interim dean of Stanford Law School announced that Friday’s classes would be held remotely in response to student concerns about perceived threats.
For Alma Andino, events on campus have already reached a breaking point. After begging her housemates not to hang the banner, she said the group debated for hours, with the implication they would desist only if a suitable justification for Israel’s existence could be given.
They told her they felt that as student activists, they needed to display a message that would put them on the right side of history. We should be advocating for marginalized communities, they said. “Except for Jews?” Alma replied. The group scoffed.
“When the war started, my being Jewish was held against me, and my mourning of the dead isolated me,” Andino told me. She had joined a social justice co-op precisely because it had aligned with her Jewish values. “All I wanted was humanity and a space to grieve, and I was put on public trial by my friends over whether the deaths of my family would be deserving of their empathy,” she said. “People were so entrenched in being ideologically correct that they were unable to see me as a human deserving of compassion.”
In an academic atmosphere in which people can be divided between colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, with individuals judged by their identity, many students don’t seem to understand that you don’t have to be Jewish or Zionist to recognize terrorism. That you don’t have to be right-wing to denounce the slaughter of women and children. Condemning violence and the barbaric rape and murder of civilians doesn’t require taking a side.
It takes basic morality. Everyone at Stanford should know that.
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