Student responds to Marzec chaos.
Rabbi Danielle,
Remember me? I do not believe that we have ever spoken face-to-face, but we once exchanged a few messages back in July 2011. I was spending my second summer in Israel. You must have heard from another Ohio University student that I was there alone working for the summer. You sent me a message on Facebook: “Who are you, Tyler Barton and should we be saying hello in Tel Aviv? I’m happy to meet!” I was pretty lonely, so you can imagine my excitement when you invited me on a trip to Kibbutz Gezer and my equal disappointment when the trip was canceled due to transportation problems.
As a person to whom you once offered genuine support when I needed it, I was disappointed to see your public letter lending credibility to the intimidation campaign against the current Student Senate president, Megan Marzec, for her actions supporting the oppressed people of Palestine. Your letter mentions how some Jewish supporters of Israel have responded, but Palestinians are not even mentioned. Not once. The parents of Palestinian students have no pleasant suburbs from which to call their children home when they feel unsafe. There are no influential Palestinian alumni who can threaten to withhold donations when OU offers a Tel Aviv study abroad program excluding their kids who must face Israel’s apartheid laws. There is no well-funded Palestine advocacy group on campus for national organizations to call and demand more support. When Palestinian students are already ignored on campus, and then further marginalized by a Hillel-funded Facebook ad in which a student calls Palestinians and all Arabs “uncivilized,” there is no organized support for them as Palestinians. There is no public sympathy campaign on campus for them after they’ve spent a summer praying that their family members in Gaza will not become one of the thousands of dead civilians in Israel’s latest round of aggression. For them, there is nothing.
These are precisely the reasons why Megan’s bold and brave gesture in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine demonstrates the kind of moral clarity and leadership that this world so desperately needs. These are the reasons why multiple Palestinian students on this campus have reached out to thank Megan for giving them a voice on a campus, where they are regularly overlooked in a conversation about their own people’s extermination.
You seem to think that you have the right to speak on behalf of all Jewish people on this campus when you call for Megan’s resignation; but, you do not. Alongside many thousands of messages of hate and vitriol that Megan has received in the wake of the Hillel-organized backlash against her, Jewish students and faculty members, as well as national Jewish organizations have bravely come to her defense. Some of them are understandably too uncomfortable to do so publicly because those who already have were met with insults and intimidation by their fellow Jewish students.
I wish this letter would help you realize the harm you inflicted when you attacked Megan for defending students on campus who have very little support. I wish you could see a Palestinian student on this campus the same way you saw me in July 2011, as an isolated student in a foreign country without much support. Perhaps then you would reconsider whether Megan did anything worthy of the intimidation campaign, in which you decided to participate.
I was impressed to see the email message President McDavis released calling for civil dialogue on campus about this issue. In his defense of the right of students to engage civilly in difficult dialogue, he demonstrated the kind of leadership we need at this time. I know that your organization, Hillel, has a fairly strict ban on supporting dialogue in which the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement is discussed, but will you join me in supporting Dr. McDavis’ call for civil dialogue? I hope you will.
Tyler Barton is a 2014 graduate of Ohio University.
