Astonished and Afraid
Temple grapples with the war about the war
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WRITTEN BY: Jadon George
Zaydee’s had been transformed. Between the front walk and the seating area where diners eat their sausage-and-egg sandwiches, there stood a cardboard poster, basically a collage of the signs that have hung on telephone poles in Brooklyn and lit up the sides of trucks, taxiing their way through Philadelphia’s streets. Photographs. Names. Ages. KIDNAPPED BY HAMAS. Just like that—big white letters against a red ribbon, up top. Behind the security desk, a banner: “THE ROSEN CENTER STANDS WITH ISRAEL.” Earlier in the morning, an elderly man had wandered in and refused to present the badge that most of Temple’s buildings require for entry; no fewer than four staffers—besides the guard on duty—dropped what they were doing to see him out.
Mallory Kovit spied the camera before it was ready to shoot and scooted away from the cardboard posters. “I don’t know if I want to stand near those if you’re gonna take a picture,” she said. “Might be too sad.”
The Edward H. Rosen Hillel Center for Jewish Life is empty on Saturday mornings. Part library, part bagel shop, all Hillel outreach arm, there’s no reason for anyone to be inside on a weekend. Class is out of session. It’s either Shabbat or an off-day for Zaydee’s patrons. So, executive director Mallory Kovit and the Rosen Center’s members were apart when Hamas stormed from Gaza into Israel. They got the news—1,400 killed, hundreds more raped, injured, or dragged back across the intricate barriers as hostages—the way everyone else did.
“We all found out, for the most part, waking up in the morning, seeing text messages and the news,” Kovit said. “Whatever you opened first.”
Many of the students who frequent the Hillel have family in Israel. Ditto for the center’s staff, and the alumni who have gone from the granite-and-glass structure on 15th and Norris into the world. This wasn’t just the latest tragic salvo in an intractable, faraway conflict. The day reached straight into Kovit’s world and set it helter-skelter, through a gauntlet of hard phone calls and stunned text exchanges.
“On the morning of October 7, it was a very personal, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “Just this nightmare feeling.”
More Jews were killed in countryside kibbutzim on Oct. 7 than on any day since the Holocaust. The world was as stunned as Kovit: Germany, of all places, bathed the Brandenburg Gate in the colors of the Israeli flag as the U.S. president pledged to #StandWithIsrael through whatever would come.
But the day was still young, the bodies warm, when Kovit found out that not everyone was living a nightmare. Seemingly out of thin air, a patchwork of academics, commentators, and activists made clear they didn’t #StandWithIsrael at all. Al-Jazeera, the Arab news network, published an article describing Hamas as “the wimpy kid” who “got his punch” on land the Palestinians had inhabited before the first war with Israel in 1948. Several of Harvard’s student organizations signed a letter blaming “Israel, and Israel alone” for the attacks. And Susan Abulhawa—author, “human rights activist,” Pennsylvania resident—blogged that the assault was a “spectacular moment” in which “freedom fighters broke free.”
The Arab-speaking world had Al-Jazeera. Much to its surprise, the West had college campuses. By the time it was over, 31 of Harvard’s orgs had affixed their names to the letter; some of the college’s own administrators couldn’t believe the total. University of Penn had hosted a Palestinian literature festival the week before the attacks—with Abulhawa as an organizer. Their adults couldn’t believe it, either: John Huntsman, the former ambassador to Israel, cut ties with his “unrecognizable” alma mater when president Liz Magill held off on calls to condemn Abulhawa and the festival. Dozens of Penn’s trustees followed him out the door.
New York City is the vastest enclave for Jewish people on earth anywhere besides Israel itself. Even so, a Plot Against America-level aura permeated Cooper Union on an October night that saw Jewish students forced to barricade themselves in a campus study space for hours.
Israel’s critics have existed on college campuses for decades. Abulhawa has been one of the most-read Palestinians on earth since she wrote Mornings in Jenin in 2006, and Al-Jazeera has been the leader in Arabic newscasting since 1996. They surface, every once in a while, as they have since October 7.
But the current tensions aren’t just leftovers from 75 years of conflict. The Israel Defense Forces have struck back since, warring through the heart of the Gaza Strip in a blood-soaked campaign to finish Hamas and find the hostages. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, billed the push as a “mighty vengeance” against terrorism. But the IDF has also killed over 14,000 Gazans, according to the enclave’s health service. (Too important for a footnote: Gaza’s health service is administered by Hamas, and Israel’s allies—headlined by one President Joseph Biden—routinely question the tally’s accuracy.) Israel says the casualties come with the conflict; Hamas has long been dogged by accusations of bunking troops in hospitals and piling weapons beneath mosques and madrasas. If Israel ever convinces its critics of the latter, the former probably won’t be on its heels.
Amid all this, S.J.P.’s Temple chapter put together its first of many demonstrations. A thunderous, chanting, sign-waving crowd—several hundred students strong—gathered to pressure the U.S. government to rethink Biden’s stance. Among them: Susan Abulhawa. Together, they accused Israel of a decades-long project in “settler colonialism,” of an “occupation” that needed to end, and of waging a “genocide” against innocent families on the Gaza Strip.
Mallory Kovit was nonplussed. She thought terms like colonialism—or the even-more-potent apartheid—conjured images of racist white folks dominating people of color in their midst, a patently Western portrait that overlooked far too much about Israeli society.
“This is a very, very Western framework that you see people applying to a situation in the Middle East,” Kovit said. Most Israelis wouldn’t be white by Western standards, she went on; they were exiled from Africa, Indonesia, and the Arab states upon the state of Israel’s creation, and anyway, Arab Israelis—though impoverished and segregated—can vote and serve in the Knesset. But race rhetoric, riddled with the oversights so common on social-justice bandwagons, wasn’t even the thing that worried her the most.
“You had people saying things like, ‘Globalize the intifada,’” Kovit recalled. Intifada, an Arabic term which translates to English as “shake you off,” can (and, to many activists, does) mean shaking off oppression. Before the 1980s, it meant shaking off British rule or shaking off unruly monarchies. Since then, though, it’s meant shaking off Israel—its building houses in the West Bank, its segregation of the roads, its dual legal systems, its spartan bulwarks against the Palestinians. Intifada, in some circles, means standing against what Amnesty International once called apartheid.
But intifada has meant just about anything—especially when it comes to Israel: Street protests gone awry. Rocket attacks from over the fence. Bus bombings in the tourism districts. To much of the world, intifada usually doesn’t conjure sights akin to the Civil Rights Movement so much as the wanton bombings and abuses that dimmed the Irish sun during the Troubles. (“The Second Intifada,” Kovit recalled, “was a very, very scary time.”)
“Think about what you’re saying, when you stand a rally like that,” Mallory Kovit warned. “And, if you don’t know what you’re saying, look it up.”
Rallies held at the Bell Tower by Owls for Israel and Temple SJP
A little more than a block and a half from Broad Street is the Bell Tower. It’s Temple’s crossroads, jutting out between the business school, the liberal arts complex, and the science labs along the street in either direction. Directly north, in the tower’s shadow, sits the lip of a lawn known as Beury Beach.
And here, under the Bell Tower, Students for Justice in Palestine makes its presence known and felt.
There have been, as of press time, no fewer than three rallies organized by Temple SJP—besides the group-sponsored road trips to 30th Street Station and the National Mall in D.C. These are megaphone affairs, smack dab in the middle of campus. At the 30th Street protest, police locked up dozens of protesters and carted some to an outpost on North 17th Street. The third walkout, Nov. 17, saw an SJP-organized rally migrate from beneath the Bell Tower, onto Broad Street’s southbound lane, and south towards a second, larger event at Philadelphia City Hall… which eventually became a die-in in front of Independence Mall.
SJP’s social media presence is so widely disseminated and ubiquitous that you don’t even need to know who they are to see their content online. Keffiyehs, a neck scarf recognized as a symbol of Palestinian resistance, have become the statement garment de jour on Philadelphia’s rising streets and subterranean subways. The organization’s chapters, loosely connected as they are, have stutter-stepped across anti-violence tripwires in college rulebooks and state statutes: Brandeis, Columbia, and the entire state of Florida have banned SJP chapters by administrative fiat. (Florida’s ban, enacted by governor Ron DeSantis, proved so sweeping that the org saw a window to sue the state government in court.) Higher up, Andrew Bates, a deputy White House Press Secretary, declared on behalf of the Biden administration in October that campus activists’ demonstrations against Israel “shock the conscience and turn the stomach.”
“Delegitimizing the State of Israel while praising the Hamas terrorist murderers who burned innocent people alive, or targeting Jewish students, is the definition of unacceptable — and the definition of antisemitism,” Bates told The Times of Israel. “President Biden is proud to have been an enemy of antisemitism and hate his entire life, and he always will be.”
Despite all the publicity, Students for Justice in Palestine works with an astonishing amount of anonymity. At their events, SJP officers and members are rarely introduced by name. There’s no organizational president listed on SJP Temple’s website. And interviews? Starting in October, WHIP reached out to SJP’s Temple chapter via email; through the group’s Instagram DMs; in person, at their offices; and through intermediaries.
There are practical reasons why pro-Palestinian activists might avoid the press. After the letter made its way through Cambridge, a cluster of Fortune 500 companies swore never to hire from the clubs who had signed Harvard’s anti-Israel epistle. Susan Abulhawa’s adult daughter, Natalie, found herself blacklisted from phys ed gigs across greater Philadelphia after a blog pointed out her past involvement with SJPT. Whatever the reason, the lone response we got was an email, in which SJP offered to answer queries in writing. We sent them a list on Nov. 17, and followed up the next Tuesday. When they get back to us, we’ll let you know.
In Israel, the casualties have crossed the tens of thousands—Israeli attack victims and the Gaza war dead, killed both in the field and in the mouths of those who “cry aloud for bloodshed.” On college campuses, the war has shattered an uneasy peace between the DEI-curious administrators who spend their lives crafting quality education and the students who find their voices within these institutions’ gates. And, in Europe and South America, the familiar sight of death in the desert is blending into a resurrection potion that’s delivered the alt-right from its years of exile.
On October 22, a white man allegedly stabbed a Palestinian tenant in her Plainfield, Ill., residence over a dozen times with a “military-style knife,” and plunged the same weapon into her six-year-old son 26 times. The prosecutors who charged the man said he had a “hatred of Muslims,” and his wife told USA Today that his attitudes towards Palestinian Americans had turned violent in the weeks since the war began.
A computer science professor at Ventura County Community College was arrested Nov. 16 after police accused him of killing a Jewish man at dueling protests in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Capitol police clashed with pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., barricading several members of the party’s congressional contingent well into the night.
Yes, anti-Israel sentiment is at a fever pitch on college campuses. Antisemitismand Islamophobia, though, are rising off campus—enough so that FBI director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that such incidents are hitting “sort of historic levels.”
“This is not a time for panic,” Wray said on the stand, “but it is a time for vigilance.”
Nothing reminds us that our fates are tied together quite like a war. Yet, nothing tempts us to forget that we’re so hopelessly connected like the desire for war.
For Ori Magid-Slav, an Israeli student at Temple’s College of Science and Technology, the necessity of vigilance has transformed her everyday life.
Magid-Slav was standing on the sidelines of a pro-Israel demonstration at the Bell Tower on Nov. 16, less than a day before SJP was slated to return to the streets. Raz Shermister and Sharon Dahis, of Owls United for Israel, had managed to put the event together with the help of a local rabbi, and the crowd was compact enough to cluster around Shermister at the tower’s western base—out of the walking path.
“I understand what they’re protesting,” Magid-Slav said, “but I felt a little scared walking to class and seeing protestors right outside. I thought to myself, ‘If they knew I was Israeli—if they knew I was Jewish—what would they say?’”
A word I’d heard before among Temple’s Jewish dissenters was trendy. On the record, Mallory Kovit had used the term to refer to the burst of activism among college students since Oct. 7. Did Magid-Slav think things would return to normal, eventually?
Sure, Magid-Slav said, for the cellphone warriors, “the people who are posting on social media.” But that was the cellphone warriors. “For the Jews, the Israelis, the Palestinian students, I don’t think we’ll ever be the same.”
Temple SJP marching in the southbound lane of Broad St toward City Hall
Some might suggest that the wrong event to get a feel for Students for Justice in Palestine is a vigil. Their other gatherings—marches, class walkouts, field trips to protests in West Philly and D.C.—affirm the reputation for in-your-face, in-these-streets activism that made S.J.P. an overnight sensation. Those events unfold mostly as Kovit describes them: Red-streaked posterboard emblazoned with “THEIR BLOOD (✡) IS ON YOUR HANDS” and crimson block characters reading “INTIFADA UNTIL VICTORY” in English and a second phrase in Arabic. Speakers raising their voices above the roar of the throngs. Spectators and students gazing on while the crowd moves as one from the sidewalk to the street.
But the candlelight vigil, held two Thursdays ago beneath Temple’s Bell Tower, was smaller and quieter than the protests that rock Pollett Walk in the daylight hours, its audience filled with students in traditional Middle Eastern garb, who mostly sat in solemn silence as speakers took the microphone.
Despite its low profile, there was a law enforcement presence on the vigil’s fringes. Standing on the west side of the Bell Tower’s Lenfest Square, at the bottom of the steps to Beury Hall, Temple police captain Edward Woltemate stood sentry with a handful of his colleagues. Was he there for any specific reason? No, he said. No rowdiness, no imminent risk of violence.
“We’ve gotten reports of things happening at other campuses—harassment, threats, and so forth—but we’ve been good here,” Woltemate remarked.
Even when one of S.J.P.’s leaders took to the mic and began to speak of the war, of “genocide” and the “evil” she said was meted out by the I.D.F., the crowd stayed somber as the speech made its way through the night air. For them, this wasn’t a moment for public consumption, at least not the way the rallies were. It was personal.
“I’m here because I lost a brother,” said one attendee, who declined to give a name. “Events like this, events like what we’ve been doing the last few weeks, have helped me through a really terrible time in my life.”
Jay Bergen, the pastor of Germantown Mennonite Church, was one of the few speakers to introduce themselves by name. “We are focused on the fact that so many of the dead are children,” the pastor said, “but the truth is that every Palestinian, and every Gazan, is a child of God.” It was the collision of two conflicting worlds at Temple, for Jews and Palestinians alike: Deeply, deeply personal grief, experienced squarely in the public eye.
There’s a handy term for what’s happening on college campuses right now.
America has opened the umbrella of “the culture wars” wide enough to cover the earth. We’ve whipped it out when we need words to describe the painful evolution of language—what’s a woman?— In just the last decade, it’s slipped through the bathroom doors at Target, hauled an NBA All-Star game from one end of the South to the other, and poked around the part of the library where “Sula” and “Harry Potter” sit on the shelf. But now, we’re left to debate irreversible changes to human lives: What’s the line between collateral damage and genocide? What separates a nation of refugees from a colonial outpost? And when does an attack on an ethnostate become an attack on a broader people? On college campuses; in Congress; and across the world, we’re suddenly immersed in a culture war over a literal, tangible, devastating war over culture.
The allure of culture wars is that they usually offer the language of armed conflict without the full force of its consequences. Not this time: Wards worth of premature babies, teetering between life and death, have had to move from incubators at Al-Shifa to hospital rooms in Egypt. Most of Gaza’s 2 million people have had to flee their homes with what they can stuff in their trunks or between their elbows. And hundreds of people from all over the world are still in Hamas’s grip after Oct. 7’s kidnappings. This suffering is not an abstraction; its consequences aren’t distant. An actual war, with all its horrors, is here.
Still, the real war on the other side of the world has spawned a patented culture war in our own backyard, one where the likes of DeSantis and Biden have entered the fray, where jobs and relationships hang like a holiday ornament on our deftness at saying the right things.
Rick Perlstein knows a thing or two about culture wars. Perlstein, the New York Times bestselling author of four books tracking America’s postwar political fissures, explained to me how the present crisis maps onto the history of higher education. “The Israel-Palestine issue is a particularly interesting one, because, politically, I see such a big generational divide on it,” Perlstein said.
“A lot of kids, Jewish and otherwise, have grown up only seeing Israel for the awful things it’s doing,” Perlstein, who calls himself an “anti-Zionist Jew,” went on. “Older people see it as a refuge from genocide. That makes the encounters one has over these issues particularly dramatic, because universities are places where the generations come together.”
When an issue is as hot as the Israel-Gaza war, Perlstein went on, the clash can be a spark in kerosene.
“People are willing to take more aggressive action about what’s happening on campuses,” Perlstein explained. “A lot more willingness to censor speech, for example. There’s a lot more public language around speech as something that causes un-safety, harm—it’s almost like a perfect tinderbox for these kinds of debates.”
Joe Biden’s honeymoon ended in the Middle East a little over two years ago. The third straight president to enter office atop a pledge to get out of Afghanistan, Biden bore the brunt of the blame as images of the withdrawal ping-ponged across the globe. He’s been something of a hawk alongside America’s allies ever since.
Steely resolve went well enough in Ukraine, stalemate notwithstanding. Israel, for Biden, has been more of a mixed bag. The White House’s refusal to stay Netanyahu’s hand, even as the bodies pile higher and higher, has come with an unbelievable political markup. Biden’s approval ratings are now consistently sub-40, and many of his supporters from 2020 have dove headfirst into the ever-deepening pool of presidential challengers on the eve of his re-election bid. The White House’s main dissenters in the war effort? Young voters.
So began the diplomatic posturing. The list of participants stretches on: Qatar, where Hamas’s senior leadership resides in relative luxury; Thailand, who counts several of its farmworkers among the taken of Oct. 7; Iran, whose coffers are ever open to Hamas; Egypt, where some of Gaza’s refugees have found a temporary safe haven; the U.S., whose aid has helped build Israel into a regional military power; and the belligerents themselves—last in the line of communication, yet the only voices with final say.
The deal that Netanyahu brought before the Knesset and Hamas brought before, well, themselves—they govern Gaza without input from voters or legislators, for what it’s worth—would free several hundred Palestinians from Israel’s prisons and return dozens of the Oct. 7 hostages to Israeli soil. In exchange, the gun and missile fire would cease for four days. (Netanyahu is adamant the war will continue.)
(Too important for a footnote: Why these Palestinians, mostly women and children, are in Israeli prisons in the first place is in dispute. The New York Times said that they’d mostly been seized in raids throughout the West Bank—which sits clear on the other side of the region—in “anti-Hamas” operations that have serendipitously swelled the military’s supply of people to use as bargaining chips in talks like the one outlined above.)
Israelis are, by all accounts, as angry at Netanyahu as America’s pacifists, if not more so. Some 80 percent blame the prime minister for the seventh—he was somewhat tied up in his own legal troubles before Hamas breached the barriers—and support for his ruling Likud movement has crashed through the basement and begun hurtling towards the mantle of the earth. This was not an offer Netanyahu could refuse; the Knesset doesn’t think it can afford to supplant him right now. So, after some finagling, it was finally agreed that the guns would go silent—and the exchange would begin—the morning of November 23.
A quick scan of SJP Temple’s extensive social media presence revealed dissatisfaction. “A FOUR DAY PAUSE IS JUST THAT: A PAUSE,” read one vanishing Instagram blast.
“WE DEMAND A PERMANENT CEASEFIRE”
Another, reposted from the Palestinian-American author Hannah Moushabeck, lamented the scourge of antisemitism and Islamophobia before declaring, “You know what sucks more?” and detailing civilian suffering in Gaza: Bombings. Dirty drinking water. C-sections without anesthesia. “White phosphorus burning your skin to the bone.”
“Why,” asked Moushabeck, “are we even talking about these things in the same [sic] breathe?”
With or without press comment, SJP was making hay. Why stop now?
Temple University has so far avoided the fate of the Harvards and Cooper Unions of the world. President Richard Englert has put out no fewer than four statements as of press time: One acknowledging the grief of Temple’s Jews on Oct. 7, another blasting Hamas by name, a third after SJP’s second trip to the Tower that affirmed students’ right to protest while condemning “antisemitism and Islamophobia,” and a fourth, following the Nov. 17 demonstrations, that, again, broadly lamented the scourge of bigotry.
Statement No. 3 smoked SJP Temple out. In a wall of text that got posted to a vanishing Instagram story and reprinted in Temple’s student paper, the org lamented that the university “is clearly not supporting its Palestinian students and faculty equally and is sending a clear message that their grief for loved ones does not matter.”
Edward Woltemate—official title: Captain of Investigations—is a constant presence at the war-related events on campus. He was at the vigil; he’s at the walkouts; he was at Owls for Israel’s daylight events. Same spot, same stance, same supporting cast, same answer to the same question. Other campuses pass under the shadow of the specter of violence, places way up north or several dozen blocks west. At other universities, students and faculty worry about violence, vandalism, and glowing words on library walls. Elsewhere, grown-ups and growing-ups lose sleep over the war about the war.
Here? At Temple? “We’ve been cool here,” Woltemate says. Pause. Shrug. “So far.”
Editors note:’ We’re committed to telling this story as fully and as truthfully as we can, and that means getting a full, first-person perspective from Palestinian and Israeli voices alike. These are dangerous times, and we understand the hesitance to speak on the record. But, our lines of communication are always open for feedback or additional comment. You can contact the News team at WHIP with your questions and concerns at prouco@whipradiotu.com and jgeorge@whipradiotu.com.
