‘Dear Martha’ — a letter to Cornell’s president on her statement on the alleged rise of antisemitism, and failure to mention Israel’s attacks
On May 26, days after the end of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, Cornell University President Martha Pollack issued a “Statement on Hatred and Bias” addressing an “alarming national rise” in antisemitism “amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East.” I wrote to her the following day to criticize her selective focus as a form of bad faith, erasing Palestinian history and the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim members of the Cornell community.
“Dear Martha,
“As a Jew, as a father and grandfather with a daughter and three grandchildren who are Israelis, as a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), as a teacher and scholar of the history of settler colonialism in Palestine and the Americas, and as your colleague here at Cornell, I am writing to say I am both angered and saddened at the missive you just sent to the Cornell community on May 26th, 2021, concerning the alleged rise in anti-Semitism, locally and nationally.
“My reaction comes in the first place because to date you have made no mention of Israel’s attacks on the Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and Eid, its support of the planned dispossession of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and of the subsequent bombardment of Gaza resulting in the deaths of 248 Palestinians, including scores of children, with close to 2000 injured, and 50,000 families displaced.
“These figures I cite are only a fraction of the death and destruction wrought by 73 years of apartheid rule in Israel/Palestine. As you know, both Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, among others worldwide, have characterized Israel as an apartheid society. And as you know, apartheid is grounded in racism, which you have rightly condemned in all its manifestations except Zionism.
“Yet you now write to Cornellians condemning a ‘national rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes, including several reports of bias incidents on our Ithaca campus, amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East.’ One would appreciate some evidence for these crimes both in Ithaca (have these ‘reports’ been substantiated) and in the nation. Your unsupported statement about the rise in antisemitism appears to follow that of the Anti Defamation League, which categorizes anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli pronouncements as expressions of antisemitism, when these pronouncements often are pronouncements in behalf of Palestinian rights. Thus, the effect of your statement is to equate antisemitism with Palestinian self-defense against and resistance to Israeli apartheid, a self-defense and resistance that many Cornellians support.
“In contrast to your unsubstantiated assertions, we have ample evidence of Israeli hate crimes against Palestinians both in the present moment and historically. Your reference to ‘tensions’ in the Middle East betrays the immediate fact that Israeli aggression at Al-Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrah was the cause of the present ‘conflict’ (the euphemism for historic Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid) and that to call the situation in the Middle East ‘complex,’ as you do, is to evade the fact of the founding of Israel under the zionist motto ‘a land without a people for a people without a land,’ which effectively erased in the mind of the West the 600,000 Palestinians who at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 were indigenous to Palestine, as are their millions of descendants in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza, and the diaspora. That ideological erasure has animated the whole history of Israel’s settler colonialism in Palestine from past to present. It is this erasure that characterizes your statement to the campus.
“As to anti-Semitism, I have as a Jew experienced it and am concerned with it. But I am more concerned at the moment with the conflation of anti-Semitism, officially and unofficially, with a criticism of the Israeli government’s zionist policy, a conflation that is now widespread both nationally and internationally, threatening both First Amendment rights to boycott and academic freedom. I miss any mention of this in your letter.
“In sum, I think your communication is in bad faith, bad faith in its misrepresentation to the Cornell community—Palestinians, Jews, and others—of what is actually transpiring in the Middle East and in the United States vis-à-vis the Middle East. Such bad faith, in its effective erasure of the history of the Palestinian people, is particularly dispiriting in an institution dedicated to education.
Sincerely,
Eric
In the two weeks since, I have had no response from President Pollack nor has she had anything to say about recent events in Israel/Palestine.
In that time, Palestinian high school students in Ithaca organized a demonstration for Palestinian rights, and I was invited to read my letter, and did so. I also attended a meeting of the Arab Graduate Student Association, which includes some Palestinian students; and as you can imagine, the students were both angry and demoralized by the president’s email and her lack of recognition for Palestinian suffering and grief.
Just before the president sent her email on antisemitism, the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine (CCJP), of which I am a founding member, sent a letter to her, signed by 20 of our members. We called on the university to speak out against “the unprovoked attacks by Israeli police and settlers on Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and Eid, and the planned dispossession of Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, followed by the bombing of Gaza…”
We have received no response from President Pollack. We also requested a meeting to which we have received no response.
I doubt the administration will ever acknowledge in any way Israel aggression in Palestine and Palestinian rights, even when this aggression impacts members of the Cornell community as it has most immediately in the last month. I say this because of Cornell’s partnership with Israel’s Technion institute and what I can discern as significant donors to the school (Seth Klarman), and given the fact that Pollack has rejected calls for the school to divest from companies doing business in Israel.
I gather that President Pollack’s letter was prompted in part by a Cornell alumni group, Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF-Cornell), that is seeking to have Cornelladopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism (because Jews and zionists allegedly feel unsafe: “Last week saw three anti-Israel rallies on campus and in Ithaca, reflecting a deeply antisemitic rhetoric that occurs amidst an onslaught of dehumanizing propaganda against Israel, actively promoted at universities across the globe, Cornell included.”)
I doubt the administration will adopt that definition because it cuts against Cornell’s academic freedom policy; and an attempt to get the definition passed, I think, would create the kind of widespread resistance on campus from students, staff, and faculty that the administration would not welcome.
Since the partnership with Technion and its other unholy alliances with educational institutions in Qatar (see: “Cornell in Qatar: Who Really Benefits?), China, and Saudi Arabia, the university strategy has been to fly beneath the radar. So, for example, I have never been approached by the administration about my class on settler colonialism in Palestine or my activism.
Cornell, like any corporation (universities included clearly), has no compunction about espousing social justice rhetorically and violating social justice in practice.
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