Dear President Kornbluth,
We, the Jewish students, staff, faculty, and alumni who are not represented by the so-called “MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance” (JAA), are writing to you to contest the recent open letter purporting to speak for all Jewish MIT alumni. This letter contains absurd and insidious fallacies. We address these below.
But first, some necessary context setting:
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We are writing this letter two days after Israel broke its ceasefire agreement by commencing a brutal bombing campaign — dropping bombs onto a starving people (starving, because Israel has illegally imposed a blockade on food and aid, in direct defiance of the agreement). Israel mercilessly slaughtered over four hundred people in one night. Many of those killed were children (Israel’s most popular news channel labeled them “operatives”).
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This renewed mass-scale-murder campaign comes after nearly a year and a half of ceaseless bombardment of one of the most densely populated areas in the world, resulting in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, numerous displacements of millions into ever-smaller refugee encampments, the destruction of homes, the wrecking of infrastructure, and mass starvation caused by one cruel food blockade after another.
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All of the events noted in the original letter constitute business-as-usual academic engagement. They do not broach any form of willful civil disobedience or disruptive forms of expression.
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We are a group of Diasporist Jews, which means we practice creating religious, cultural, social, political, and economic homes wherever we, as Jews, find ourselves. This practice has existed far longer than the Zionist and Christian-right’s obsession with an ethnostate (interesting how those claiming the historical roots of Jews in modern-day Israel are so ignorant of our historical, shared, Diasporist roots). Read more about what we stand for here.
Back to the letter at hand.
We are embarrassed that a group attempting to speak for us is so willfully ignorant of the plain-as-day motivations of the US federal government. No, the US government’s hostility to what it labels as “antisemitism” is manifestly not a good faith effort. If it were, we would see fewer sieg heils and fewer posts by the US government’s “antisemitism chief” retweeting neo-Nazis. A serious conversation about “Jewish safety” would encompass the full spectrum of Jewish voices, including the many that do not identify with or support Israel. In reality, the US government has furthered the agenda of antisemites, and materially backed war-monster Netanyahu, who, as we write, has engaged in a new, horrific bombing campaign on an unarmed, trapped people. It is clear that Jewish safety is not the true aim of the US government.
In their open letter, the JAA decry academics using phrases like “expansionist violence of settler colonialism in Palestine,” and words like “apartheid” and “genocide,” on the grounds that these terms are “justifying antisemitic violence.” This cynicism is vile: the supposed issue for the JAA is not the horrors beset upon the Palestinian people, but that the factual descriptions of events cause harm to Jews. But it is not the words that are harmful. Israel’s apartheid system and 530-day-long genocide of Palestinians — in other words, the “expansionist violence of settler colonialism in Palestine” — IS the harm. Forcibly removing a people from their land to make way for Israeli settlers, building a wall and then a surveillance state, and commencing a horrific genocide of a poverty-stricken populace — destroying their medical system, reducing infrastructure to rubble, subjecting a people to untold horrors like having to bury tens of thousands of babies (imagine if ONE of those babies were your baby) all the while claiming this unfathomable violence in the name of the Jewish people — is what creates the inevitability of resistance. Telling an oppressed people that their struggle against an unthinkable campaign of terror is terrorism, degrading human life so systematically — it is that, which makes us all less safe. We must resist a world that does not treat life and humanity as sacred.
Secondly: Dictating that academics refrain from defining something accurately is, plainly, ridiculous. Academics have a mandate to be informed by factual analysis, and to engage in its definitions, debates, and discourse.
We agree that this is a moment that requires MIT to make clear-eyed choices. And we, too, are disappointed by what we have seen from its administration, which has sought the path of least attention by remaining silent on matters as varied and relevant to its community as academic freedom, immigrant rights, gender and race equality, diversity, inclusion, equity, and yes — Israel’s genocidal campaign that wiped out every last university in Gaza. We fundamentally differ, however, in what we would like to see the MIT administration do. While the letter-writers advocate for a McCarthyite witch hunt for anyone who disagrees with Israel’s genocide (a.k.a. wrongthink, a thoughtcrime) we instead call on the administration to stand up for moral righteousness and humanity by ending its complicity in the Nakba that has been ongoing for over 75 years.
What does it mean for the MIT administration to stand up for what is right? It means protecting MIT students and members of the MIT community from arrest, deportation, and persecutions by an authoritarian government. It means divesting from the Israeli Ministry of Defense. It means shutting down collaborations with companies such as Elbit Systems, which is responsible for supplying Israel with the weapons used to murder Palestinians in Gaza; Maersk, which is responsible for shipping weapons and military equipment that facilitates the ongoing genocide; and other war-mongerers and profiteers which MIT contracts with.
We urge the JAA and future government spooks sweatily combing through our emails to consider rethinking this false binary of “us” or “them,” Jews vs Palestinians: antisemitism rises WITH anti-Palestinian hate, it rises WITH Islamophobia. In the words of Mahmoud Khalil – a Palestinian refugee, activist, and legal green card holder who has detailed his unconscionable detention by ICE since March 8th – “The liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.”
As a genocide is being waged to ensure a Zionist, Jewish ethnostate in perpetuity, we urge the readers of this letter to ask, is banning uncomfortable words and phrases the solution to hate? How many students must be suspended, expelled, arrested, deported, in the name of Jewish “safety”? How many bombs must fall, how many children must be murdered? Where is your limit?!
To Jews of conscience in the MIT community: we welcome you to join us.