I’m grateful to the students for inviting me to come to speak here today, in this university within a university that you have created since the beginning of the genocide. Although a big part of my scholarship for the last thirty years has focused this place between the river and the sea, the university where I’m teaching never reached out to me about my views on the current situation.

The university administration has sent several messages in the last couple of months indicating that they consulted members of the Jewish community at Brown. It was never me. Who are the Jews that they consult? Do they have any expertise in the history of Palestine? Or is their experience only in the Euro-American history of Zionism?

They consult “Jews” because since the late 18 century in Europe, and after WWII also in the US, when the West decided to support the Zionist project which prior to that moment was marginal – yes, marginal! – they relate to us, diverse Jews, as members of a homogenous group with its own representatives. ADL (Anti-Defamation League) is considered one of them. This is why they invited him to campus to tell us that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. We do not have representatives. Jews never had representatives. Not until the Zionist movement acted as if it represents all Jews. , And it is only after the Holocaust, when the Allies decided to support this rather marginal movement, ignored by the majority of Jews, and to integrate its claim for statehood into the new world order they imposed.

We were always diverse communities. And more importantly, until the creation of the state of Israel, Arabs and Muslims were never the enemies of the Jews. Imposing Zionist-Jewish leadership on diverse Jewish communities served Western imperial interests, meaning its global struggle against Islam and Arabs.

We non-Zionists or anti-Zionist Jews, whose histories were stolen from us by the Zionists supported by the West, were for a long time the silent majority: Jews of all kinds, colors, beliefs, forced to be identified in histories and memories and actions that were not ours.

No one will speak for us regarding what Israel-funded-by-the-West is doing. – We see genocide and we will not be silent! We are here to name it for what it is and to protest against the genocide and against the complicity of our universities in gaslighting the genocide.

Did we see any task force created by the university? A research group with the scholars teaching here who work on genocide, Palestine and the entire area between the river and the sea? Any dean hired to provide you, our students, with the proper study program to understand this genocide?

Since the beginning of the genocide, they only created task forces to silence us, to limit protests, to deprive us from spaces for gathering and thinking. They enacted policies that intimidate faculty, staff and students, that threaten them so that they will be afraid to say that it is a genocide. But we are not afraid!

This is a genocide and it has ought not to have happened. No excuses. It will never disappear from our minds, hearts and our scholarship, even when it will end, if ending has any meaning to a disaster of such a scale. With this genocide against Palestinians, Zionist Jews are the mercenaries of the white supremacist imperial order which continues to fashion the world in which we live in, a world where such a genocide could unfold for over 200 days and where people are expected not to see genocide when there is one. But we see genocide and this is why we are here. We are horrified every day anew by the genocide and by the language that is being installed to tell us that it is not.

What are we doing here when we demand ‘Divest’? We are actually asking for the truth, we insist that the truth should be said and shared with others.

We are here in a university and we want our university to act like what we believe a university should be – to facilitate learning and raise questions with no fear of penalty AND be in solidarity with other institutions of higher education when they are being destroyed as we know all of them were destroyed in Gaza.

In our understanding– those who gather here week after week – a university should not invest in weapons AND should protect the education system from the interests of weapons companies.

In this sense, in relation to our expectations from the contract we have with the university, this institution betrays us at this critical moment of genocide – today in Gaza and Congo, tomorrow elsewhere.

When we demand divest, we actually force the university to acknowledge the obvious – in order to produce true knowledge about the world and the genocide, the role of weapons paid for by the university in facilitating the genocide should be recognized.

When we demand divest, we insist on our right to seek the truth as part of what was promised to us as the mission of higher education.

Let’s make it clear – it is not about freedom of speech – it is about truth telling. There is a genocide in Gaza and all this campaign of repression is to deny that this is a genocide. I wonder if in 1943, 1944, or 1945 – when it was clear that Jews were being exterminated, how did American universities behave?

The question that we have to ask is why do we have to struggle for the truth? Because everything universities and many other institutions are doing since it started, is to camouflage the truth and use various means to make it hard to say the obvious, to call things for what they are.

Why aren’t hundreds of our faculty here today? Are all of them blind and do not see the genocide? No, they are being intimidated by these institutions, they are worried for their jobs, for their livelihood. Otherwise, they would have joined the truth telling of these encampments.

These encampments are encampments of truth telling!

These encampments respond and amplify the truth telling of hundreds of journalists, photojournalist and media workers in Gaza, the prophets – who are risking their life to broadcast the truth of what is being done to them and the truth of the genocidal regime responsible for it.

When they consult “Jews” when it comes to the genocide, they want to make the world believe that all Jews support this genocidal regime.

We do not!

I’m a proud Muslim Jew, Arab Jew, Berber Jew, Algerian jew, Palestinian Jew, all these unruly identities that they want to eradicate to make of us those who are represented by “the Jews.”

Let me end with Rosa Luxembourg writing from the prison, imprisoned for her militantism toward total divestment from weapons companies, her uncompromising anti-war activism

“The only way to rebirth is the school of public life itself” – keep running this school of public life.