Language at Iowa State protest amounted to incitement, hate speech against Jews, Israelis
We are writing to express our deep concern for language that was used in the Gaza solidarity protest at Iowa State University on May 1.
We unequivocally support the right of Iowa State students to protest on campus. Amid the heartbreak and horrific images from the conflict, we deeply empathize with the intentions of those students who want to see an end to this tragedy, which is why we were so dismayed by what we saw last Wednesday.
Many of the chants and some of the signage of the rally embraced language that crossed the line from advocacy for and solidarity with Palestinians into incitement of violence and hate speech toward Jews and Israelis. We were shocked and deeply concerned that the use of inciting language was not covered in the media and feel compelled to bring awareness to the wider community in Ames.
The ISU protesters’ repeating chants for “Intifada Revolution!” explicitly evoked two periods of prolonged violence in the 1980s and early 2000s that killed many thousands in the region. Many of us viscerally remember attacks like the Sbarro Pizza bombing in Jerusalem, which killed children and a pregnant mother, or the Park Hotel bombing that killed over 30 men, women, and children celebrating the Passover holiday, and wounded over 140. Besides the undeniable fact that the violence of the intifadas explicitly targeted Jewish civilians, this terror brought trauma and disaster to Palestinians and Israelis alike. It is difficult to imagine anyone at Iowa State celebrating or calling to replicate these dark chapters in the conflict. It is even harder for Jewish minority communities in Ames not to hear in these chants a very sinister threat.
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Some ISU protesters displayed signs containing the phrase “All Resistance is Justified,” including one placed conspicuously close to a local rabbi tabling on campus, which also reflected a deeply concerning embrace of violence. These signs started to appear on college campuses immediately following the gruesome attacks on Oct. 7 that triggered the current escalation of violence, and notably before Israel's military response, often alongside honorific representations of Hamas terrorists descending on Israel. It is hard to square the juxtaposition of the phrase “all resistance is justified” with the sadistic massacre of 1,200 people, especially at a rally that claims to be seeking a cease-fire. Surely the intentional targeting of civilians and their torture, rape and murder are not justified resistance. Again, for vulnerable Jewish communities, this language is deeply threatening.
The protesters’ use of the catchall term “Zionist” at ISU as a derogatory epithet concerns many of us for its vagueness and broad strokes. Most American Jews consider Zionism merely as the belief that the Jewish people have the right of self determination and safety in our historic homeland — including our friends and family in Israel — but not in exclusion to the rights of Palestinians. Not only are chants of “we don’t want Zionists here” unproductive in excluding potential allies in calls for cease-fire, but they also parallel deeply problematic historic chants against Jews. In some rallies elsewhere in the country, protesters have explicitly yelled at Jewish students to “Go back to Poland!” revealing the conflation of Zionist and Jew, despite the fact that the majority of Jews do not come from Poland.
We sincerely hope that the students involved lacked the historical context to understand what the phrases they used evoke. Most students were born after both of the intifadas. This is why our purpose in this letter is not to punish or impugn the intentions of the protesters. Rather, our purpose is to clarify that the escalatory and inciting chants of this protest are intolerable. In fact, they likely meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance standard for antisemitism, which is the definition adopted in Iowa law and is likely soon to become part of federal law under Title VI. We hope that the media and community leaders in the future will be better aware, should this language resurface in Ames.
We stand behind unrestricted free speech on campus, including language and actions that are challenging and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, that does not absolve our wider community and the ISU administration of the responsibility to speak out when that speech turns to hate and incitement.
Dr. Christina Gish Hill
Dr. Matt Wetstein
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Language at Iowa State protest amounted to incitement and hate speech
