Letter to the Editor: Alumni weigh in on student protests

Letters to the editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the S&B or its staff. Letters to the editor can be submitted through email at newspapr@grinnell.edu, or mailed to the College at box #5886.

Dear editors and Grinnell community,

As Jewish, Israel-supporting Grinnell alumni, we want to express our support for

pro-Israel Jewish students on campus who may feel unsafe and unwanted. We affirm

that no decent person should celebrate the terrorist Hamas slaughtering of Jews in the

worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

We also want to express our concern about very one-sided reporting by the S&B, with

little attempt to speak to people on campus, among the Grinnell Board of Trustees or

among the many Grinnell alumni who support the right of Israel to exist as an ancestral

homeland for the Jewish people.

Many of us pro-Israel alumni are also pro-Palestinian and have been critical of the

policies of the current Israeli government. We all believe in saving human lives, today

and in the future.

But we worry about the blurring of lines between legitimate criticism of Israel,

demonization of Israel and plain antisemitism which is happening on college campuses

now. We believe all Grinnell activists should condemn Hamas raping, torturing and

killing Israelis, including babies and college-aged Jews at a music festival. We

believe that activists who care about human rights should demand that Hamas release

the 240 hostages.

The history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is long and complex. Some facts overlooked by the false racialized settler-colonialism narrative that pro-Hamas activists apply to Israel —

1. Jews have been indigenous to Israel for 4,000 years, since around 2,000 BCE. In

fact, both Jews and Palestinians have DNA from the ancient Caananites who

lived in Israel before 2,000 BCE.

2. Jews have lived in Israel during Jewish empires and through the Greek, Roman,

Persian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Ottoman empires, etc.

3. The majority of Jews in Israel are not European. They are Jews, and the

descendants of Jews, who were expelled or fled from their homes in the Middle East and

North Africa, including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia

among others. Israelis also are Black Jews, including a large community of

Ethiopian Jews, plus Latin American Jews, Asian Jews, Arabs and Christians

from the region and around the world.

4. Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005, and Palestinians elected Hamas soon

after Israel left. Hamas won a bloody civil war against other Palestinian factions.

Since then, there have been no elections, and Palestinians risk death if they

criticize Hamas.

5. For members of the LGBTQ+ community, Hamas would want you dead

regardless of where you lived.

You can believe that Palestinians deserve statehood, as we do, without chanting, “From

the river to the sea,” which means the extermination of Jewish Israel. That is not

coexistence. Iranian-backed Hamas has repeatedly said it does not want coexistence. It

wants to kill all the Jews of Israel and calls for the slaughter of Jews worldwide.

As painful as it was for us as alumni to watch the oversimplification of the conflict by

many progressives, we can only imagine how painful it must be to be a Jewish student

at Grinnell College right now who loves Israel and believes that Jews have an

indigenous right to their historic, ancestral homeland.

Please consider printing articles that represent more diverse views, including this letter.

Sincerely,

Sharyn Obsatz `93

David Silverman `93

Rebecca Lansky `92

Ron Medvin `73