We must use our voice for Palestine: A response to President Jones’ statement
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Since October 7th, according to reporting by Al Jazeera, Israel has murdered over 5000 people, over two thousand of whom are children. Israel has bombed Gaza, a 140 square-mile, open-air prison, and concentration camp with 2.3 million people, over 6,000 times. Over the course of 24 hours on Tuesday, Israel killed over 700 civilians with their continuous bombing of the Gaza strip, the highest death toll since October 7th. This experience of violence is not an outlier for the people of Palestine—it is the norm. It is the norm for Palestinians unable to mourn their losses because they continue to pile up in mass graves. It has been the norm since the 1948 Nakba in which 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians were displaced from their homeland. And it will continue to be the norm unless we lift our voices to unequivocally condemn genocide and drive a spoke into the wheel of injustice.
Unlike Bonhoeffer, President Jones made a statement last Wednesday on behalf of Union that failed to identify this genocide.
She failed to name the bombing of the Ahli-Arab hospital.
She failed to name specific incidents of Islamophobia that have happened within the United States, and in New York City, in the week before the statement came out. She failed to name Wadie Al-Fayoume, the six-year-old Arab boy who was murdered in Chicago on Sunday by an Islamophobic extremist and she failed to name the harassment and doxing of Columbia student activists by Zionists who have tried to promote events related to Palestine.
She failed to name the incidents of Islamophobic harassment that have risen in New York City as a result of the aggression.
She also failed to name any specific anti-Semitic incidents that have happened over the course of the week before the statement came out.
The United States has colluded, aided, and endorsed Israel’s tyranny with a military force immensely overpowering that of Palestine’s resistance, a fact that she also failed to name.
While she had no problem naming the “depravity” of Hamas, she failed to name the ongoing and incontestable depravity of Israel. A depravity evident in the withholding of essential life resources from Palestinian civilians.
She failed to name the impossibility of co-existence between a colonizing force and a colonized people that it seeks to ethnically cleanse.
She also failed to name the fact that Israel created Hamas by assisting Sheik Ahmed Yassin to create the organization Mujama al-Islamiya which would later become Hamas.
She failed to name the ways that Western media have orientalized the Middle East and conflated resistance against oppression as “terrorism” without considering the terror that the United States police and military conducts at home and abroad.
She failed to name that under international law, an occupied country has the right to resist against their occupier by any means necessary, including armed struggle.
Most importantly, she failed to mention that calls for peace and ceasefire accomplish nothing if those calls do not also advocate for ending the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land by the puppet state of Israel.
President Jones named the need to mourn the dead. But as Bonhoeffer said, it’s not enough to bandage the victims of injustices’ wheels.
Thus she failed to name these deaths as the consequence of imperialism and empire. They are propagated by systems of white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, Christian supremacy, Islamophobia, and especially, anti-Semitism. These systems have been upheld by Europe and the United States and contributed to the ideology of Zionism, which justified the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.
Because President Serene Jones has failed to name these things on behalf of the institution of Union Theological Seminary, we must lift our voices as students. Raising our voice will start driving the spoke into the wheel of injustice and I encourage those of us that are able to participate in the National Student Walkout today to show solidarity with Palestine.
This statement deserves strong condemnation for failing to name these crucial points I've brought forth as the heart of this injustice. President Jones has failed to use her voice to name the genocide as such. So I call on her to give a new statement which names the points I’ve brought forth to represent the genocide more accurately and better emulates the values of justice, liberation, and truth which define Union. For it is silence that keeps the wheel turning.