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.