On October 9, Georgetown University Students for Justice in Palestine organized a vigil to honor the victims of two years of genocide in Gaza, and to protest against Georgetown’s complicity in this atrocity. Among the primary demands:
Divulge and divest from all investments in arms and tech companies that do business with apartheid Israel.
End collaboration with Israeli programs.
Protect—not repress—the rights of students standing in solidarity with Palestine.
I spoke briefly on behalf of the GU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. Here’s what I said.
We are here today to honor the memory of the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But this is not our first vigil. Some of us have been gathering for two years to remember the hundreds of Palestinian university professors, researchers, teachers, librarians, and administrators who have been murdered, along with thousands of Palestinian college students—all murdered by the Israeli army. For two years we have been mourning these victims, who are our professional colleagues, and also for some of us here, our friends and family members. For almost two years, we have watched Israel systematically destroy every university and college in the Gaza Strip. This destruction has not been accidental; it has not happened during combat operations. Rather, the destruction of Gaza’s schools has taken place during careful campaigns of methodical detonation, bulldozing, and erasure.
This campaign of scholasticide has taken place in broad daylight and broadcast to the world, and its intent is no secret: they are trying to destroy knowledge and memory by killing those who study and teach and archive and remember.
It is a great shame to Georgetown University that until now, no one in our leadership has come forward to express any sorrow or regret for this slaughter even though it directly impacts our commitment to higher education, and has directly touched the lives of so many of us within the Georgetown community. Their inaction makes us here doubt whether they understand what cura personalis means. President Groves, and before him President DeGioia, have been silent about the murder of university presidents and provosts and deans in Gaza. Our Provosts, Deans, Vice Deans, Associate Deans, Regents, and Directors have endorsed that silence at the top. In this, they are no different from other leaders in American higher education. Until now, not one university president in this country has condemned this slaughter and destruction. Not one.
That is a lot of silence. It is a loud silence, and we hear it clearly. What I am saying is that genocide denial is alive and well at Georgetown University, up and down the ranks. This institution invests in genocide even as it acts as if genocide is not occurring, or as if we had no relation to it, or moral obligation to do anything about it. Even as it punishes students who have come forward to protest and ask questions about Georgetown complicity.
Denial is not a fixed, immutable position that people hold for all time. Rather, it’s a set of different stories people tell themselves at particular moments in order to feel good about themselves as moral people. Denialism is a slippery thing, and it shifts as people attempt to resolve the contradictions between the values they claim to hold, and their unwillingness to live by those values.
There are many Americans who still totally deny the fact of genocide. I know, because there are many in my own Jewish family who deny its existence: they truly believe that Jews are somehow incapable of committing atrocities. Baruch hashem.
But many deniers are beginning to shift. As they do, I expect them to invent new stories to absolve themselves of their own moral quiescence.
Some of them will tell themselves that it wasn’t a genocide a month ago, or ten months ago, but now it is. God bless them for thinking they’re authorities on the topic, and that genocide or famine or starvation starts or stops on a particular date. The truth is, the present moment is only a continuation of a century-long history of ethnic cleansing whose explicit intent has always been to transform an Arab country called Palestine into a Jewish one called Israel.
Some genocide deniers will try to hang all the blame on Netanyahu, or on Hamas. But the truth is that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis have enthusiastically applauded the destruction of Gaza, just as political elites have done in this country.
Others will tell themselves that yes, it’s a genocide, it’s a tragedy, but it’s too late to do anything about it. These same people will tell us tomorrow that we need to turn the page on the past so we can build the future. They will urge us to forget about bygones. Well, what does our recent history tell us? We forgot Vietnam, and got Iraq and Afghanistan. And we have forgetten Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a result are likely to get Venezuela or some other future atrocity done in our name and with our wealth.
I’m a broken record on this: Genocide is about the mass murder of people. Genocide denial aims to kill the memory of that murder, so as to leave the door open to other genocides in the future. Genocide denial is genocide acceptance and there’s a lot of that here on our campus, in our communities, and in our country.
But we are standing here together because we reject this politics of genocide, and genocide denial, now and in the future.
To conclude, I want to read some lines from a poem by the great Gazan poet, Mouin Bseiso, that have been translated by a Gazan student who is one of the brightest lights of our Georgetown Community. Bseiso wrote these lines in the 1960s—and they remind us that Gaza’s suffering, Gaza’s struggle, and Gaza’s starvation, did not begin on October 7, but many decades earlier, long before most of us here were born.
“The Besieged City”
by Muin Bseiso
Night knocks like a beggar
On the doors of Gaza
Doors shut on a grieving people
Night wakes the living
Who sleep upon the rubble of years,
As if they were a tomb
Disturbed by graverobbing hands.
Dawn speaks to the city
Confused, she does not answer.
Before her: the salty sea. Inside her: the barren sands.
Alongside her, the enemy steps ominously.
What does Dawn say?
Have the roads to home been opened?
Can we bid farewell to the desert?
Can we walk toward the fertile valley?
Here she is—Beautiful Gaza—wandering through her funerals,
Wandering between those who starve in tents
And those who thirst in graves.
And here’s a tormented man, with nothing but his own blood for nourishment, as he squeezes juice from roots.
These are mere images of indignity and degradation.
My Captive People: rise up in anger!
Their whips have inscribed our fate across our backs.
Have you read what their whips have written?
Are you still weeping over the lost homeland?
…
O you—you wretched of an earth roaring with light!
Sing the songs of struggle, and join the long march of the starving!
يا أيّها المدحور في أرضٍ يَضِجُّ بها الشُّعاع
أنشدْ أناشيدَ الكفاحِ وسر بقافلةِ الجِياع