Letter to the Editor: Jews for Justice in Palestine responds to recent vigils and protest

Tal Shutkin, a second-year in the Department of Geography’s doctoral program, and Alex Kempler, a sixth-year in the Department of Sociology’s doctoral program, are members of Jews for Justice in Palestine, an Ohio State student organization on behalf of whom this letter was written.

We, Jews for Justice in Palestine, write this letter in response to the Sept. 4 Lantern article on the vigil organized by OSU Hillel and JewishColumbus on the Oval. As Jewish, Palestinian and allied Ohio State students, we share in the broader Jewish community’s grief for the hostages who were killed two weeks ago. Like our peers mentioned on the Sept. 4 vigil, some of us share connections to Hersh Goldberg-Polin. At the same time, we have relatives in Gaza and the West Bank who are also weathering “the worst possible hell.”

As The Lantern accurately reports, the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which is now spreading across the occupied territories, has murdered over 40,000 innocents. These 40,000 are people, too — children even — and like Hersh, each had their own dreams and “a whole life ahead” of them.

But this is not about counting the dead. Our Jewish tradition teaches that in every life, there exists an entire universe, and to end a life is to extinguish a world. We must be able to see a world in every life lost. It is people’s ability to put themselves in an Israeli’s shoes, but not in a Palestinian’s that makes so many deaths possible.

While this harms Palestinians most acutely, in the end, it hurts us all. The devaluation some Jewish students have reported in their grief over the loss of Israeli lives is real. As Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote in the aftermath of Oct. 7, “that devaluation [of Jewish grief] is itself a hallmark of the cycle of the diminishing value of human life.”

Under the reality of occupation and apartheid, all humanity suffers.

As the first-century sage Rabbi Hillel — yes, the same Hillel who the organizing student group is named for — teaches, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” Jews have repeated this lesson about solidarity and community care for 2,000 years, yet it seems to be missing when needed most in the rhetoric of our most vocal institutions. We don’t need to close ourselves off because “non-Jews don’t understand.” This sort of self-isolation can only feed the dehumanization we see today in Gaza.

Instead, we urge readers to practice seeing humanity in others. After all, for the world to recognize its full humanity, including the human right to self-determination, is all the Palestinian movement has been asking for.

A week after the vigil organized by OSU Hillel and JewishColumbus, Ohio State’s Students for Justice in Palestine, also known as SJP, held its own vigil on the Oval Wednesday. The community gathered in remembrance of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, Medo Halimy and Mohammad Zeubeidi, along with the countless martyrs throughout all of Palestine.

Though the Ohio State Office of Student Life granted OSU Hillel permission to hold its Sept. 4 event on short notice, SJP’s event was met with a police surveillance tower erected on the Oval, reflecting the general hostility of university administrators toward Palestinian students.

Two days later on Friday, the community returned for a National Day of Action, marching to demand the university’s divestment from companies aiding in this genocidal campaign. While the horror continues, the hunger for Palestinian liberation and the end to the normalization of Palestinian blood grows.

This story was updated Sept. 17 at 7:06 p.m. to feature photos that more fairly depict the Sept. 10 SJP vigil and the Sept. 3 OSU Hillel-JewishColumbus vigil, as they appear side by side.