Jewish student arrested calling for ceasefire.
December 7, 2023In an exclusive interview with @MiddleEastEye, Ariela Rosenzwieg, a Jewish American student at Brown University, criticised the school’s stance on Israel and Palestine.
She was one of the 20 students who were arrested during a peaceful sit in at the university’s administration building demanding the university divest from Israeli companies and join the growing call for an immediate ceasefire.
The university dropped all charges against her and the other protesters after Brown student Hisham Awartani was shot and critically injured alongside two other Palestinian students, in what their families and advocacy groups say was a hate crime.
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Credit: @middleeasteye
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English Script:
Ariela Rosenzwieg: I’m one of 20 Jewish students that was arrested during a sit-in, in the Brown University administration building, calling for our university to materially support a ceasefire by committing to, considering divestment in front of the corporation at its next meeting. So the night before, we were supposed to appear in court for our arraignment, we got word that Brown had decided to drop the charges in entirety and not to go forward with asking for any sort of community service or fine, any sort of retribution for our act of doing the sit in.
And, you know, the president of the university, President Christina Paxson, said explicitly that her hope and during this was to refocus community attention on issues that are important rather than to be distracted by things that are divisive, specifically referencing our demand for divestment as something which is divisive to the community and referencing Hisham’s shooting as a thing which prompted her to drop the charges.
It was always possible that Brown would drop the charges and our community support was definitely not nothing here. The way that the charges were dropped and that we didn’t need to show up for our arraignment, the swiftness and President Paxon’s own words about this being a time for the campus to focus on things which are important, we want to reduce tensions, we need to not focus on things which are divisive, we need to, you know, lean into our community, make it clear that, you know, the way that charges were dropped is what is. There’s sort of a direct line of causation between that and this horrific act of violence upon one of our peers. Three young Palestinian men, all students at American universities, were in Vermont. They were on fall break.
They’re walking down the street speaking to each other in Arabic. They’re wearing their keffiyehs and as a result, they were victims of a really horrendous hate crime. Every single statement about anti-Palestinian racism and solidarity that has come out of the university has been a response directly to one of its students getting shot and I think that there’s a sense among many that it’s just too little, too late.
I think that as Jews for Ceasefire Now, we reject the notion that pushing for a divestment, pushing for our university to stand for justice is what’s divisive. It’s actually the refusal to engage with this, the refusal to hear Hisham’s voice and the voices of other Palestinians on campus that have been asking for serious recognition of the violence that is being inflicted on them and on their families and on their homeland.
That’s what’s divisive and, you know, reducing tensions on campus while refusing to make a public stance on these things and all, refusing to seriously consider divestment is not a possibility and it’s not what anyone is asking for. I think that the rhetoric in this country, much of which has been fueled by false conflations of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, has led to a situation in which being Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh is inherently a risk.
