FEBRUARY 28, 2013
BY AKANE OTANI
BY AKANE OTANI
Jewish students are decrying the anonymous distribution of anti-Israel posters in the Noyes Community Recreational Center last week. The pro-Palestine group that later took credit for the posters has defended its actions, calling them an act of necessity as tensions in Gaza continue to boil over.
More than 20 posters that were left in a newspaper bin in Noyes last week showed a defaced promotion for a Cornell Hillel event that brought Israeli soldiers to speak on campus. The posters, which were marked up with red scrawlings, denounced the “exclusively Jewish” soldiers — asserting that they engaged in “war-crime[s],” not “combat,” and served in “massacres,” not “missions.”
On Sunday, Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that describes itself as being dedicated to “raising awareness of the Palestinian experience,” took credit for making the posters. SJP claimed it produced the posters to “condemn the nature of Hillel’s event.”
The event “normalize[d] an illegal military occupation and illegal wars of aggression that have cause[d] immense suffering and death in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon,” the organization wrote in a statement to The Sun.
“We wonder why a putatively religious organization such as Hillel would choose to step into this issue,” the statement said. “Did they consider how their glorification of military occupation and apartheid might affect Palestinian, Arab or any other students who identify with the populations living under attack and occupation?”
Although SJP said that it deliberately decided to produce posters rather than picket or interrupt Hillel’s event, some Jewish community members reacted to the posters with feelings of fear, disappointment and frustration.
When a friend told her that she had found “anti-Semitic posters” in Noyes, Jordana Gilman ’14, president of Cornell Hillel, said she felt like she had been “attacked.”
“This felt scary. There is someone on this campus who is threatening to me,” Gilman said.
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