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By Morton A. Klein, President, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Liz Berney, Esq., ZOA Director of Research & Special Projects
The “Palestine Writes” event at University of Pennsylvania this past Yom Kippur weekend was not a “celebration of art and culture,” as claimed in a recent Daily Pennsylvanian article. Rather, as we feared and predicted would occur, a stream of speakers who have called for “Death to Israel” and Intifadas (anti-Jewish terror wars), incessantly libeled and incited hatred against Jews and Israel.1
Mocking Jewish Students Concerns While Attacking Jews and Jewish Students: It was evident that “Palestine Writes” could engender antisemitic attacks and harassment against Penn’s Jewish students and Jews across the country. This was unfortunately immediately borne out: Penn’s Hillel center was vandalized twice near the time of the event. We will be contending with the aftermath of the anti-Jewish hatred fomented at Palestine Writes for years.
Yet, disgracefully, in the event’s opening speech, Palestine Writes executive director Susan Abulhawa mocked and derided Jewish students’ legitimate and unfortunately well-founded concerns about the presence of many documented terrorism supporters and even a convicted terrorist at Palestine Writes. Abulhawa called these appropriate Jewish student concerns “hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas. Again, this is an old, well- worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage [Negro/unclear], which I will not dignify with a response.” Wild applause ensued.
But Abulhawa was not finished with directly inciting against Jewish students at Penn. Abulhawa also declared in her opening salvo: “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents. All so they [Jews] can have an extra [sic] country that they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists have their so-called Birthright trips, propaganda tools to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and lords.”
Abulhawa further attacked Israeli Jews on Penn’s campus as “actual Israeli war criminals, who have come to speak on this campus.”
Notably, even though Abulhawa’s speech was full of such hateful propaganda and incitement against Jews on Penn’s campus, and against the one Jewish state [there isn’t an “extra” one, as Abulhawa implied]; and even though Abulhawa attacked named Jewish organizations (including ZOA, Hillel, and Jewish Federations) and attacked powerful major donors (meaning Jewish donors) for trying to prevent anti-Jewish terror-supporters from appearing on campus, Abulhawa had the temerity to then deny that any of this was antisemitic.
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