Jewish Students Meet Hostility at Yale A university-backed event promotes denial and justifications of Hamas’s atrocities. By Sahar Tartak and Netanel Crispe
New Haven, Conn.
When we found out about Monday’s anti-Israel event at Yale, “Gaza Under Siege,” we scrambled to produce fliers offering some context. They detailed Hamas’s atrocities, its anti-Jewish charter, its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Our classmates awaiting the event weren’t interested. They yelled, “don’t take the paper!” and tore it up or threw it back at us.
Organizers refused us entry because we weren’t registered but waved others through who also weren’t on the list. The lecture hall was filled, and we resorted to sitting outside and pressing our ears against the door to listen.
What we heard was two hours of denial, lies and incitement. Speakers referred to the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the sanitized language of “civilians killed,” not beheaded, raped or kidnapped. They called the terrorist group “militant,” and one observed that “violent resistance movements often emerge in colonized spaces.”
Nobody mentioned the Hamas charter’s call to “fight Jews and kill them,” but somebody asserted that Israel aims to “inflict as much harm, damage, and death as possible.” One panelist remarked, “The one most important part of our conversation here today is that Israel is still occupying Gaza.” Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
One of the speakers flatly declared: “No matter what the solution is—a two-state solution or a one-state solution—the Israeli state cannot remain the state of the Jewish people.”
This event had broad institutional support from Yale. “Gaza Under Siege” was co-sponsored by the American Studies, Anthropology and Religious Studies departments; the programs in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Middle East Studies; the Black Feminist Collective (co-directed by the head of Pierson College); the Ethnography Hub; the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and Yalies4Palestine. The head of Jonathan Edwards College promoted it in a weekly email. The heads of Yale’s colleges had previously been instructed not to advertise a post-Oct. 7 Shabbat dinner invitation. That event was controversial, an administrator told Ms. Tartak.
In the past month, Yale has become a hostile environment for Jewish students. We’ve seen multiple protests with hundreds of students yelling “resistance is justified”; a petition with 1,200 student and staff signatures accusing Israel of genocide and Yale of “criminalizing” Palestinians’ “right to resist”; the words “I [heart] Gaza” and “love 4 Gaza” written in chalk throughout campus, and Instagram posts by the student group Yalies4Palestine declaring “the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence” and calling on “the Yale community to celebrate the resistance’s success.”
After the speeches ended on Monday, we entered the hall. Our stomachs dropped at the sight of nearly 200 fellow students, some of whom we had regarded as friends, along with professors we had looked up to in esteem. We asked the moderator and two of the speakers if they were willing to denounce Hamas unequivocally. All three turned their backs on us. So has our university.
Ms. Tartak is a sophomore and Mr. Crispe a junior at Yale.
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