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palestinian rights
California Public Records Expose Israel Lobby Censorship
I reviewed the appeals.
The CDE lacks authority to discipline school personnel, and the appeals I reviewed did not recommend teacher discipline. Teachers, however, have been told by their school districts to remove their keffiyehs and steer clear of stating as fact that Israel exemplifies “settler colonialism.” If an LEA or CDE finds a complaint has merit, it may order school districts to implement teacher training in antisemitism in consultation with a Jewish or Israeli organization. These orders open the door for Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to teach teachers that criticism of Israel is antisemitic and discriminates on the basis of national origin.
Teacher and Union del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said the district’s edict that teachers remain silent in the face of a US-subsidized genocide was like telling teachers in Nazi Germany to take a neutral stance on the Holocaust.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations based on someone’s birthplace or ancestry—but does not prohibit criticism of a sovereign state, which is protected speech according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The CDE’s release of files reflects the department and school districts’ tendency to conflate anti-Zionism (opposition to Israel) with antisemitism (bigotry toward Jews for being Jewish). Under AB 715 (D-Zbur) legislation that establishes an antisemitism coordinator to police instruction and teacher training, this confusion could get a lot worse because AB 715 incorporates the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which promotes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Teachers and their allies can, however, revolt: March on Sacramento, challenge Zionist teacher training, file their own complaints, and collectively teach Palestine across school departments and districts.
The following is a review of some of the CDE’s cases addressing allegations of antisemitism or discrimination against Jews or Israelis.
Banned!
Sammy Obeid speaks on "The Abortion Joke That Got Me Banned From High School" (Image via Comedy Calculus)
In 2025, the principal of Mountain View Los Altos High School banned popular Lebanese-Palestinian American comedian Sammy Obeid after he cracked jokes about Israel at an after-school on-campus event in 2025 hosted by the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The school investigation report (IR) read, "During the event, the comedian made antisemitic remarks: about the Israeli Prime Minister getting cancer, calling the Prime Minister a supervillain, and how Israel does not believe in abortion so it can bomb more Palestinians.”
Months earlier, on November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity in Gaza, including “starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Nevertheless, the district concluded, after berating the Muslim students for inviting Obeid—that the comedian’s performance was antisemitic. The CDE agreed and ordered the district to further revise its guest speaker policies to include strict vetting and get-off-the-stage intervention should an administrator believe the speaker’s conduct discriminated against a protected group on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, and physical or mental disabilities.
P.S. For the record, abortion is legal in Israel as long as women obtain approval from the Israeli Pregnancy Termination Board.
San Ramon Valley HS
In another example of conflation, the CDE ordered (11/24/25) San Ramon Valley High School to deliver teacher training on antisemitism to all social studies teachers after the department ruled a teacher’s class statements were proof of discriminatory bias against Jewish and Israeli students. The department’s fact finding said the teacher told students that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Hardly breaking news. Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Doctors without Borders, and the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry had all determined Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Nonetheless, the CDE said the appeal had merit because the teacher did not cite sources and present an opposing viewpoint. The Department ordered San Ramon Valley High School to provide the CDE with evidence by January 30, 2026 that the school had delivered training from someone not affiliated with the school district to ensure that classroom instruction “does not promote a discriminatory bias.”
Anti-Palestinian Racism
The Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) defines anti-Palestinian racism as a form of racism that “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.”
A CDE ruling involving New Haven Unified School District might serve as an example of erasing the human rights and worth of Palestinians. After teachers in the summer 2025 Ethnic Studies Social Justice Academy (ESSJA) presented a slide deck describing actions by Israelis against Palestinians as potentially constituting “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism,’ the department said instruction lacked adequate balance and historical context, and cast Israel in a negative light. The department acknowledged that the slides for students also discussed the horrific impact of the Holocaust, the ancient connection of Jews to the land also claimed by Palestinians, and how “the Israeli government is separate from innocent Israeli/Jewish people who stand for justice,” but still...
The department then ordered the school district to train ESSJA teachers and administrators in the “obligation to comply with Education Code 51500, which states that a teacher shall not deliver instruction, and a school district shall not sponsor any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias.”
Points for the MAGA team.
Teacher and Community Resistance
Oakland rank and file teachers included P Is for Palestine on their recommended list of resources at a December 2023 teach-in on Gaza; the Brandeis Center for Human Rights objected in a lawsuit against California.
Rank and file Oakland educators circulated an Open Letter in spring 2026 calling on the district “to resist the concerted attacks by political groups who slander as 'antisemitic' anyone who criticizes Israeli apartheid and genocide or Zionism.” Yet, the Oakland Unified School District, facing a lawsuit from the CDE, still mandated teachers watch and interact with an Anti-Defamation League 20-minute video “Antisemitism: What Do Educators Need to Know,” which defines antisemitism as “marginalization and/or oppression of people who are Jewish based on the belief in stereotypes and myths about Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel.”
The ADL training stands in dramatic contrast to a teach-in rank-and-file Oakland teachers organized in December 2023, two months after October 7, as Israel dropped 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. Objecting to district resources from Zionist-funded organizations, the teachers provided workshop participants with a recommended list of books, films, and lessons.
Across the bay, in San Francisco, in the fall of 2024, a dozen teachers declined to participate in district antisemitism training with the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist organization that boasts on its website, “We stand up for Israel.” Teachers instead chose to attend professional development with PARCEO, a non-Zionist organization anchored in the belief that ending antisemitism is part of an intersectional fight for collective liberation of all people.
Down in Los Angeles, teachers and community members rallied (5/16/26) in front of the Downtown Business Magnet to protest the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) decree that ethnic studies and social studies teachers remove “Stop Genocide” posters and Palestinian and Black Lives Matter flags, as well as undergo teacher training on the use of “neutral terms” to describe sensitive topics, including Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Gaza.
Teacher and Union del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said the district’s edict that teachers remain silent in the face of a US-subsidized genocide was like telling teachers in Nazi Germany to take a neutral stance on the Holocaust.
In another act of resistance, K-12 Legal Defense, led by attorney Liz Jackson, and San Francisco law firm Leonard Carder, LLP, filed a motion (5/11/16) to intervene in Brandeis v California on behalf of a group of 10 California families—Jewish and Palestinian parents and students enrolled in public schools.
For teachers walking a tightrope under the watchful eye of an AB 715 enforcer, there are some lessons that lend themselves to a “both sides” debate: South Africa vs. Israel at the International Court of Justice or Zionists vs. non-Zionists on school board adoption of the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism. In many instances, however, the “both sides” approach fails to acknowledge the power imbalance between Israel and Palestine to leave students confused.
History will not look back kindly on those demanding investigations of educators who dare to teach about Palestine during a documented genocide. Nor will history applaud those who conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism in lawsuits against states and school districts.
The Gate My Son Drew 30 Times
My house sits beside the road. Every day, I watch people approach the gate not knowing what they will find. Will it be open? Closed? Will there be a checkpoint? Will they be delayed for minutes, hours, or forced to turn back altogether?
For many families, the first question of the morning is no longer about work, school schedules, or the weather. It is simple: "Is the gate open today?"
No child should become so familiar with a barrier that it earns a permanent place in his imagination.
Entire WhatsApp groups have emerged around that question alone. Residents exchange updates throughout the day. Someone reports that traffic is moving. Another warns of delays. A third shares a photo showing the road blocked.
These groups were not created to discuss politics. They exist because people need to know whether they can get to work, attend university classes, reach medical appointments, or visit relatives.
The gate has become a permanent presence in people's minds. When it closes completely, the scene changes instantly.
The drivers park their cars along the roadside and continue on foot. Students hurry toward schools and universities. Workers walk to avoid losing a day's wages. People carrying groceries, bags, or small children cross the distance that vehicles can no longer cover.
In the evening, many return the same way—tired, frustrated, and uncertain whether they will find the road open when it is time to go home.
Sometimes people ask permission to leave their cars near our house because they do not know when they will be able to retrieve them. On more than one occasion, I have watched strangers park, shoulder their belongings, and continue their journey on foot because there was no other option.
The visible inconvenience is easy to describe. The invisible burden is harder to measure.
What does it mean to organize your life around uncertainty? What happens when a routine trip to work, school, or a medical appointment becomes a daily calculation involving alternate routes, unexpected delays, and the possibility that the road ahead may suddenly close?
Over time, uncertainty settles into people's lives. It affects productivity, family plans, social commitments, and mental well-being. Conversations become dominated by road conditions and access restrictions. Schedules remain tentative. Even celebrations, weddings, and family gatherings are planned with the possibility of disruption in mind.
The impact extends far beyond transportation. It reshapes the way people think. And perhaps nowhere is that impact more visible than in the way children absorb the world around them. My son is 8 years old. Over the past months, he has drawn the gate more than 30 times. No one asked him to do so. No teacher assigned it. Yet the yellow gate keeps appearing in his drawings. Sometimes it is closed. Sometimes cars are waiting in front of it. Sometimes people are walking around it. Occasionally, there are figures standing nearby, watching.
Some of the drawings done by Mahmoud Ibrahim's son are shown.
At first, I barely noticed. Children draw what they see. But as the drawings accumulated, I began to pay attention. The same image returned again and again. A gate. A road. Waiting.
Children are supposed to fill their notebooks with football fields, superheroes, animals, friends, dreams, and imaginary adventures. Yet among my son's drawings, the gate had secured a permanent place. That realization stayed with me.
The true cost of restrictions is often discussed in terms of economics, mobility, or security. Those discussions matter. But there is another cost that receives far less attention: the amount of mental space occupied by obstacles that become part of everyday life.
When adults constantly discuss whether a road is open or closed, children listen. When plans are interrupted repeatedly, children notice. When uncertainty becomes normal, children absorb it as part of their understanding of how the world works.
The gate outside my window is made of metal. Yet its influence reaches far beyond the road it controls. It enters conversations around dinner tables. It dominates community WhatsApp groups. It influences work schedules, school attendance, and family visits. And, in my son's case, it appears repeatedly on sheets of paper scattered around our home.
Recently, I gathered several of his drawings and laid them side by side. There it was again: the yellow gate. In one picture it was closed. In another it stood across the road while cars waited. In a third, people walked around it.
I found myself asking a simple question: What would my son be drawing if the gate were not there? I do not know the answer. But I do know that no child should become so familiar with a barrier that it earns a permanent place in his imagination.
That is why I am writing this.
Not simply about a gate on a road near Bethlehem, but about how uncertainty seeps into daily life, settles into communities, and quietly shapes the memories of a generation growing up in its shadow.
If Opposing Genocide Does Not Align With Smith College's Mission, Values, or Priorities, What Does?
This is the second time that Smith’s Board of Trustees has refused to divest from genocide. In 2024, after a 13-day occupation of the College Hall administration building by some 50 members of SJP, the ACIR ruled that SJP’s earlier divestment proposal, “did not meet the threshold for taking action.” (To see, in their entireties, the November 2025 AJP-SJP Ethical Investment Policy and the ACIR rejection of it, as well as an alum sign-on letter pledging to withhold donations to Smith until it divests, please visit the linktr.ee of Smith AJP.)
Ongoing Slaughter in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran
A sign is seen on the grass at Smith SJP's People's University, Chapin Lawn, April, 2026. (Photo by Jennifer Scarlott)
As Smith AJP and SJP pointed out in a June 10 press release, the ACIR’s denial came amid the US-Israeli war against Iran; ongoing strikes in Lebanon and Gaza in violation of ceasefire agreements; and land theft and violent displacement of Palestinians and Lebanese by Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Between February and June 2026, US-Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,468 people in Iran and 3,371 people in Lebanon, displacing over a million in Lebanon. Since October 2023, the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has taken at least 100,000 lives and probably many more, a significant number of them women and children. New reports document Israel’s targeted killing of children in Gaza (under the age of 18) and deliberate reproductive genocide in Gaza. Between 9-10,000 Palestinians, including children, are imprisoned by Israel—often without charge or any legal recourse and under the direst of conditions including torture and rape. Earlier this year, the Israeli Knesset passed a racist death penalty law applying only to Palestinians.
Smith will celebrate its students, alumni, faculty, and staff who fought courageously for Smith’s future and for a just and safe future for Palestinians and all people. One day, Smith officialdom will cite it as a reason to attend the college.
Israel has damaged or eradicated more than 81% of built infrastructure in Gaza, including 22 of 38 university campuses. This scale of destruction is enabled by companies the AJP-SJP Ethical Investment Policy would have eliminated from Smith’s portfolio (see the United Nation’s list from 2025 for examples). Many of these entities are also guilty of human rights violations in the United States. Palantir, for example, is one of the largest contractors for the Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ending economic support for imperial violence around the world is “a necessary step to end the genocide and dismantle the global system that has allowed it,” explains Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories.
A close look at the June 4, 2026 ACIR statement rejecting the November 19, 2025 AJP-SJP Ethical Investment Policy provides a clear understanding of the failed leadership of Smith College:
Rejection of the Proposal: Trustee Claims vs. Reality
A sign is displayed at Smith SJP's People's University, Chapin Lawn, April, 2026. (Photo by Jennifer Scarlott)
1. Societal Significance & Impact: Human Rights and Genocide in Gaza
Trustee claim: In one portion of its response regarding the “societal significance” of the AJP-SJP proposal, the ACIR stated:
In explaining the societal significance of the issue at the heart of their proposal, the petitioners cite the broad impacts of global human rights violations tied to weapons production and proliferation and the relationship to harming women. [We] concluded that such human rights violations are significant to society at large and can cause broad economic, environmental, health, or social impact. This is true not only of the violations occurring in Palestine, but of similar violations occurring throughout the globe. The proposal aligns with ACIR’s principles and guidelines on this matter.
Apparently not entirely comfortable with this ethical assertion, the ACIR then rushed to contradict itself by denying the AJP-SJP contention that “academic institutions carry an outsized symbolic and structural role capable of reshaping market demands.”
“While Smith’s endowment could be considered large in the context of higher education endowments,” the ACIR opined, “it is not large enough in the context of the broader investment arena to influence demand in any noticeable way… [therefore we] conclude that the proposed action would not measurably affect social change.”
Reality: In making this remarkably limp, amoral, and contradictory assertion, the ACIR ignores a common-sense argument presented to it in the AJP-SJP proposal:
Smith has a chance to make history by taking a principled stance against mass atrocities devastating racialized peoples worldwide and becoming the first historically women’s college and "Seven Sister" to do so—joining institutions such as King’s College, Cambridge; the California Institute of the Art; and the University of San Francisco in committing to an ethical investment policy.
A current student said, “You cannot be an institution that raises up the voice of activist alums, using them as examples of what this institution creates and stands for, and continue to invest in the war machine that these activists spend their lives advocating against.”
SJP noted that the ACIR recently added a new statement to its website: “The endowment is not a tool for responding to global events.” In fact, however, the ACIR itself was created because of student organizing to combat global climate change—which in turn led to Smith’s announcement in 2019 that it would divest from fossil fuel companies within 15 years.
And what about SJP-AJP’s expression of explicit concerns, throughout the Ethical Investment Policy, about the genocide in Gaza? Here, the ACIR doubled down on its hedging. While it acknowledged that SJP and AJP expressed concern about the genocide in Gaza, it deflected, noting that there are many human rights violations “occurring throughout the globe.” This is an all-too-familiar talking point used by Zionists trying to deflect attention from the Gaza genocide.
At this point, the ACIR threw on the brakes, refusing to refer to the Israeli-US slaughter in Gaza as a genocide at all. Instead, it referred to the genocide as "violations occurring in Palestine" and "the issue," and then stated that those “violations” and that “issue” fail to rise to a level of sufficient alignment with the “values” and “priorities” of the college.
The UN Special Committee on Israeli Practices, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Against Genocide, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, B’Tselem, and other organizations have officially concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Is the leadership of the College unaware that numerous expert global organizations identify the war on Gaza as a genocide?
Do the Trustees know better than the organizations listed above?
Does the leadership of Smith College deny that genocide is occurring in Gaza?
2. Financial Impact & Fiduciary Duty
Trustee claim: In the June 4 rejection, the ACIR argued that 1) because Smith’s weapons investments are commingled with other stocks, divestment “would force the college to exit premier, diversified commingled (investment) funds…; 2) “Additionally, the endowment does not include direct investments in any businesses, so divesting from specific businesses is not possible”…; and 3) [divestment] would impair the Investment Office’s ability to retain top-tier asset managers, a direct conflict with the board’s legal obligations to steward the financial health of the endowment in perpetuity.”
Reality: All three parts of the above statement are an obfuscation (arguably, deliberate attempts to mystify the investment process), amounting to outright falsehood. And, it would seem, Smith’s Trustees are laboring under outdated understandings of ethical investment practices—which they don’t seem to be laboring under where divestment from fossil fuels is concerned.
We interviewed an investment professional who confirmed what all honest investment professionals know and that can easily be researched—Smith’s assertion regarding commingled investments is a “red herring.” “A competent investment manager,” she said, “can readily create accounts that filter out weapons makers and other corporations that are complicit in genocide.”
In addition, the expert pointed out, “Investing in corporations implicated in ‘grave human rights abuses’ fails commonly accepted ESG (environmental, social, and governance) risk assessments intended to protect investors and society at large.”
Among the genocide-complicit companies Smith invests in through commingled funds are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon RTX, L3Harris (now partnering with Palantir on various projects), Northrup Grumman, Hexcel, and General Dynamics. Case closed.
A further reality around financial-fiduciary ethics and responsibility must be grappled with by the Smith College community: In rejecting the November 2025 AJP-SJP Ethical Investment Policy, the ACIR failed to acknowledge that at least 10 of the 30 members of the Board of Trustees have financial connections with Israel. The following sample is indicative of this reality among at least one-third of the Trustees:
- Susan May Molineaux, chair of Smith’s Board of Trustees, is a member of the board of directors of Geron biopharmaceutical company. Geron’s largest shareholders—RA Capital Management, BlackRock, and Soleus—invest in Israeli firms. BlackRock is a major investor in arms corporations providing weapons to Israel.
- Anu Aiyengar, vice chair of the Board of Trustees, is the global co-head of mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan Chase, which, the company says, has been “committed to serving clients in Israel since the 1960s.” (J.P. Morgan Chase is the world’s leading investor in fossil fuel companies. Aiyengar’s position is also notable given that Smith began the process of divesting from fossil fuels in 2019.)
- Andrea Auerbach, chair of Smith’s Investment Committee and ACIR, is a partner in and head of global investment for Cambridge Associates, a firm that provides investment services in Israel and is partially owned by two entities doing business in Israel: the Belgian investment firm Sofina, and, according to Cambridge Associates, “the Rothschild family.” Ms. Auerbach is also on the board of the UCLA Investment Company, managing UCLA’s $5 billion stock portfolio. UCLA has refused to divest from genocide despite an active campus movement in favor of divestment.
3. Community Consensus
Trustee claim: In its June 4 rejection of the divestment proposal, the ACIR contended that it “does not meet the necessary threshold of community consensus,” apparently at least in part because some in the Smith community do not support it. This begs the question, how does one define consensus?
Reality: The Ethical Investment Policy was developed by Smith community members over the course of more than 14 months. This process was led by current and former students in direct consultation with faculty and other Smith community members, as well as via meetings with the administration throughout the summer of 2025. During the 14 months that the proposal was being developed, including in the six months after its submission in November of 25, Smith community members took many actions demonstrating support for it. In so doing, they established broad-based consensus for both divestment and for an ethical and transparent investment policy that culminated in an eight day People’s University on Chapin Lawn in May.
In the spring of 2024, after the SJP occupation of College Hall, a campus-wide student body referendum was held in which 89% voted for divestment. AJP circulated a statement among alums in which signatories pledged not to donate to the college until it agrees to divest—over 830 alums representing 50 years of graduating classes have signed the pledge thus far.
SJP circulated two petitions for divestment, one in November of 2025 and one in the spring of 2026. Each petition was signed by slightly more than 500 people. In the second spring 2026 round, 56 campus organizations also signed the petition.
Repression on Campus
A sign announces Smith SJP's People's University, Chapin Lawn, April, 2026. (Photo by Jennifer Scarlott)
It is important to note that since the 2024 occupation of College Hall, the Smith administration and Board of Trustees joined with the leadership of many US colleges and universities angered by student activism for Palestine in the spring of 2024 by taking steps to limit speech and “expressive activity” on campus. In October of 2025, president Sarah Willie-LeBreton issued a new “Policy Governing Time, Place, and Manner of Expressive Activity.” The euphemistically titled policies are repressive and draconian. According to many at Smith, they were not developed in full consultation with the Smith community, as Willie-LeBreton claimed in a campus-wide message. Fourteen members of the editorial board of The Sophian objected to the policy and its manner of development and implementation.
The new policy, the impact of which the ACIR does not acknowledge in its rejection of the Ethical Investment Policy, has instilled fear among Smith students and the broader college community and dampened activism.
An example of the impact of the new policy: During the eight day SJP-established “People’s University” on Chapin Lawn in May of this year, students faced intimidation tactics by the college. Some Smith Campus Safety officers and administrators followed students entering and leaving the People’s University; used surveillance cameras, student card readers, and cell phone locators to track student movements; and addressed students by their names despite their use of face masks and head coverings to shield their identities from the administration and its Conduct Board.
One student stated: “We remain committed to pursuing change at Smith, despite efforts to silence us. The school has begun the process of punishing individuals and Smith SJP as a whole for the People’s University. On June 4, three minutes before communicating the ACIR’s rejection of the November 25 proposal, the school emailed SJP that we would be required to appear before Smith’s ‘Conduct Board’ in the fall to determine our punishment. The Conduct Board process is a very isolating experience, but we are working hard to protect our community in the face of administrative attacks.”
Where Does Smith College Go from Here?
It is difficult not to conclude, both from Smith’s repeated rejections of divestment from genocide and from its punitive responses to student activists, that the leadership of the college hopes to produce graduates who will fit smoothly into the current US ruling class, with all of its racist, imperialist, militarist, extractivist, and even genocidal values.
We are horrified that the Smith administration and Board of Trustees are comfortable with limiting their students’ First Amendment rights and seeking to deter them from the justice- and human-rights-based consciousness and activism so deeply needed on campus and in the wider world the students will soon move into.
As residents of the Western Massachusetts communities in which Smith is embedded, we are profoundly concerned with the future of the college and its students. We are urgently committed to the popular uprisings—so often led, throughout history, by students—needed to end the mass killing by Israel and the US in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere. Tragically, however, through the June 4 ACIR statement, Smith College expresses,
- A lack of concern about genocide, apartheid, and occupation;
- Disinterest in the ways in which the refusal to divest lead to Smith’s complicity in genocide, apartheid, and occupation; and
- Dismissal of conscientious and courageous student activists and alums.
We echo Katherine Sullivan, class of 1975:
I can’t think why a liberal arts institution like Smith College, founded on lofty ideals and now committed to such noble aims as equity, inclusion, diversity, and excellence, would want to be invested in weapons or technologies of war, genocide, and environmental devastation. Ever. Let’s put our money where our mouths are. Let’s invest in green technologies, innovative health and medical initiatives, and other activities that benefit humankind. Let’s be a light in this dark world.
Ultimately, we know, as author Omar El Akkad stated in the title of his 2025 book on Gaza’s genocide—One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This—that Smith will celebrate its students, alumni, faculty, and staff who fought courageously for Smith’s future and for a just and safe future for Palestinians and all people. One day, Smith officialdom will cite it as a reason to attend the college. May that day come soon.
But it will not come under the college’s current leadership. At this juncture, nearly 1,000 days into the current genocide in Gaza, we call on the Smith Board of Trustees to resign, and for the college to undertake a process that will lead to truly democratic and ethical governance and education.
When Hate Trumps Healing: How I Joined the Blocked-by-Israel Club
My grandmother, Sylvia, was a genuinely beautiful soul. She was born in 1928 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in London. I was born on her birthday, and we lived two houses down the street from each other, so naturally she and I became best friends. As a child I had tea with her almost every day after school. She loved to be silly and to laugh, but she also shared the pain of her childhood. She once told me about British Nazi sympathizers throwing rocks at her grandfather on his way to synagogue. Imagining her as a little girl, seeing her grandfather violently dehumanized like that, I wondered how anyone could be so cruel to another human being.
Because of my grandmother’s stories, visiting the DC Holocaust Memorial Museum as a child was deeply personal. What I experienced going through the museum shocked me, and I was left wondering what my grandmother couldn’t bring herself to tell me about that time in her life.
I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for.
What did it feel like to be dehumanized like that? To know that powerful “others” regard you as disposable? Grandma was the most childishly playful person I’ve ever known. Still, when I heard her talk about her own childhood, and what it was like to live in Jim Crow America, it was impossible to miss the pain of her own childhood.
Grandma knew nothing about the United States when she arrived here, and she quickly learned that her new country was far from the bastion of freedom she was expecting. Discrimination against African Americans in particular shocked her. Having been on the receiving end of European antisemitic racism, she simply couldn’t understand why people would hate others in this way. She would often remind me, “We all bleed the same color.” Despite—maybe because of—her having little formal education, Grandma could see toxic ideas for what they were.
Jennifer Arriaga's grandmother is shown as a young woman in London.
Since childhood I’ve cared deeply about the fight for human rights in my own country and the state of Texas. But before October 7, 2023, I paid no attention to Israel or the Palestinians. As much as I loved my grandmother, neither Judaism nor Israel were important in my upbringing or my adult life. But as I watched the assault on Gaza through my phone, I became disgusted by political leaders and those around me who blindly “stood with Israel.” In 2024 a neonatologist I worked with, Dr. Yassar Arain, volunteered in Gaza. When he returned we spoke about his time there, and about the complicity of the United States in the genocide.
Yassar’s descriptions of the conditions in Gaza were beyond anything I’d ever imagined. In my mind the kind of vicious dehumanization that allowed people to kill babies had been left in my grandmother’s past. Today we have the Geneva Conventions and iPhones. But as the assault on Gaza seemed to reach ever higher levels of depravity, I couldn’t take it any longer. By December 2024, I answered a call to volunteer for a medical mission to Gaza.
Gaza was my first time volunteering internationally. My family, friends, and co-workers were worried, but once I saw the call for volunteers I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t really consider my distant Jewish heritage, but more so what Grandma would say about what I was doing. I guessed it would be something like: “The world has forsaken these children, just like it did my family. Go help them.”
As a nurse and a human being, it is ingrained in me that all people have a right to live. Seeing the attacks on innocents, even within the walls of hospitals, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for rather than as “an infrastructure to be destroyed.”
Blocked
Israel controls all access in and out of Gaza. With the Rafah Crossing closed, entry for all humanitarian workers starts in Jordan. On January 22, 2025, I landed in Amman and met the team for the first time.
“We’ll get the final list late tonight,” our mission coordinator told us. “Someone always gets denied, so just be prepared for that.”
“Sorry,” I cut in. “Denied?”
“COGAT” she explained, referring to the Israeli military office, “will send a list of who was approved. Everyone else is denied.”
To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.
I didn’t know how to respond. Israel tells doctors and nurses where they can and can’t go? Who they can and can’t help? That night we learned three physicians and one nurse from our team would be blocked from entering Gaza. I was allowed in.
The effect on my colleagues was devastating. One might think it would be a relief to be blocked from entering one of the most violent places on Earth. But the moment one learns that their name is not on “the list,” issued by an unaccountable and faceless entity, is the moment a healthcare worker realizes something about themselves. Healthcare workers help people. We devote not only our careers but our whole selves to this pursuit. To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.
One of those blocked was Sandra (name changed). Sandra is a pediatrician, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin. She was enthusiastic and kind. Her smile was incredibly warm, and I could picture children responding to it and feeling safe with her. She and I were sitting next to each other at dinner when we were told she had been blocked.
I’ll never forget the shock and devastation on Sandra’s face. She tried to stay calm but burst into tears, trying to speak through them to say she was glad at least I would be able to go. More than a year later she still does not understand: “Why was I blocked from entering? What did I do?” She doesn’t understand that the simple fact is there’s only one reason to stop a pediatrician from doing their work: to enhance the suffering of children. In Gaza, my bunkmate was also a pediatrician. I remember her coming to our room at the end of every day, exhausted, and telling me how badly pediatricians were needed. After all, half of Gaza’s population is children, and by many measures they are the sickest and most traumatized kids on the planet.
John (name changed), a family doctor and wound-care specialist, had been to Gaza twice before. He left his wife and two toddlers to volunteer a third time. His first two trips showed him just how much damage Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza’s healthcare system had done. Hoping to bring back useful solutions, he spent the eight months between his last trip and this one investigating wound-care techniques in resource-limited settings, knowledge he was eager to spread to his Palestinian colleagues.
John was so devastated by the news that he was being blocked from Gaza that, while everyone was focused on Sandra, he silently got up from the table and left to see his family in Amman. We did not see him again until we ran into him at the Jordanian border the next day. Instead of going with us to Gaza, he was going to attempt to visit Jerusalem.
This state of affairs seemed so outrageous that I couldn’t sleep that night. Sandra, John, and the others were not allowed to… heal people? Lying in bed I tried to convince myself: It can’t be just because we were going to heal Palestinians specifically. Right? There must have been some kind of security concern! But as I dragged my bags across Kerem Shalom, I had to face reality: That morning, both Sandra and John visited Jerusalem as tourists. How could they be security concerns in Gaza but not in Jerusalem?
Months later, John still refused to believe that anyone would deliberately stop a doctor from providing care. “Clearly I’m not a threat,” he told me, just before trying to return to Gaza again. “I was approved to enter Israel! It was just a mistake.” He signed up for another mission. On August 18, 2025, Israel blocked him from Gaza again.
I wonder if whatever Israeli bureaucrat at the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs came up with this particular assault on human dignity is proud of themselves.
“You Can Sleep Here or in Jail”
When I left Gaza, I promised my Palestinian colleagues I wouldn’t forget them and would bring their stories to my family, friends, and community in Texas. I organized speaking events at local churches to reach people who, like me, knew nothing about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians with our tax dollars and weapons. I signed an open letter to President Donald Trump, along with 151 other American healthcare workers who had volunteered in Gaza, telling him what we had seen with our own eyes.
Then, in August of 2025 I connected with a nurse practitioner who was looking for a neonatal ICU nurse to go to East Jerusalem for the JHPIEGO educational mission. I quickly signed up. As the trip drew closer, the possibility of being blocked started to worry me. I had come to know dozens of other healthcare workers who had been denied entry into Gaza, and Israel had started blocking healthcare workers from volunteering in the West Bank as well.
I entered Israel through Ben Gurion Airport with little difficulty. Meanwhile my co-volunteer Heather (name changed), a British physiotherapist who had never been to Israel or Palestine, was blocked from entering. At the end of that trip, JHPIEGO asked me to come back and teach again in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, just one month later. I happily agreed, especially since it seemed that I was one of the few people who could enter consistently.
How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others?
Five weeks after this educational mission ended, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport again, on January 28. I presented the visa I had been given in December. The agent asked me a series of questions and then told me her supervisor would like to speak with me. After two hours, I was called into a small office with one unidentified man, asking questions and writing my answers down on a scratch piece of paper. I was asked exactly the same questions as before and gave exactly the same answers.
Then I was taken to another holding area and told to wait. After about one hour the same man came over and handed me a piece of paper telling me I was being denied entry to Israel. The organization I was volunteering with, he said, was “blacklisted.” I explained that it was not blacklisted; they had an established office in Jerusalem. He insisted they were indeed blacklisted and told me to proceed with him to a detention area.
I called my team’s handler in the United States. “They’re saying JHPIEGO is blacklisted,” I told him. No, he explained, it most certainly is not. Another physician had entered with JHPIEGO one week prior and had been told the same thing. At that time JHPIEGO contacted Israeli border control, cleared up the misunderstanding, and she was allowed entry. I explained this to the nameless Israeli agent, who said it didn’t interest him. I contacted an Israeli lawyer who has helped international volunteers enter Gaza, but before I could explain the situation a new nameless Israeli agent showed up and demanded that I follow him to security for inspection.
It was now late at night, and the airport was mostly empty. The nameless agent took me, along with two elderly people who were also being deported, to an empty gate and told us to stay there until the morning. I managed a laugh and asked, “We’re sleeping in the airport?”
“You can sleep here or in jail.”
“Okay,” I said, taken aback. I would be fine, but it seemed like cruelty for its own sake to require an elderly couple to sleep on an airport floor. “Do you know how we can get our luggage?”
“Your luggage isn’t my problem.”
At that moment, my team called and said they had called the American embassy and asked them to explain to the Israeli government that JHPIEGO is not a blacklisted organization. “But”—my hopes were raised, only to be dashed—“the embassy wants nothing to do with this.”
After exhausting every avenue, reality started to set in. My Jewish heritage and my American citizenship wouldn’t help me help people, because I was there to help the wrong people. Suddenly I was overwhelmed, the same way Sandra and John had been when they were blocked from Gaza. Oscillating between anger and sadness, I broke down crying.
On May 18, a colleague of mine texted me, “I joined the club for people not allowed into Israel.” A blonde, blue-eyed, American-born nurse practitioner in her late 60, she has been working with the Palestinians since the 1990s. She has flown through Ben Gurion Airport more than a dozen times. This time, at the request of JHPIEGO’s East Jerusalem office, she was on a team of six healthcare providers traveling to the West Bank to teach the pediatric Fundamental Critical Care Support course offered from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She would have taught Palestinians how to save the sickest children’s lives. Israel blocked 5 out of their 6 teachers. “No real explanation—except our visa was not the right one for a volunteer mission. Totally false.”
How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others? Would she even believe someone who told her that a self-declared Jewish state denies sick infants access to volunteer nurses and doctors?
Ali
In January 2025 I worked with a nurse named Ali Al-Najar in the pediatric ICU (PICU) at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, a city in the middle of the Gaza Strip. We were caring for a 3-year-old boy, Ibrahim (name changed), who had been shot. The physicians decided Ibrahim needed a CT scan, requiring us to transport this incredibly sick child to another building and back.
This is risky work under controlled circumstances. But in Gaza, where the elevator and electricity frequently fail and human resources are stretched thin, it seemed to me like an impossible task. But Ali reassured me: We can do it together. So, we made a plan: He would guide us down the stairs and through the hallways, while I would monitor Ibrahim. I would care for Ibrahim; Ali would care for me.
Ali picked Ibrahim up and placed him on a transport stretcher. I held onto the breathing tube in his throat, pushed oxygen into his lungs with an Ambu bag, and slung the intravenous drips of medications keeping Ibrahim alive and asleep over Ali’s shoulders. We carried Ibrahim down the stairs of the pediatric building, outside into the utter chaos of the strip, into the main hospital building, and over to radiology.
In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward.
While carefully walking down the many staircases, over the broken and uneven pavement, and trying to balance the stretcher with one hand and push air into Ibrahim’s lungs with the other, all the while blindly trusting Ali, my mind flashed back to when I saw Ibrahim rushed into the ED. I had watched him go through surgery for his gunshot wound and performed chest compressions on him when his heart stopped after surgery. He had been through so much in his short three years of life. “He survived all of that,” I told myself. “We will get him to radiology.”
When Ali placed Ibrahim into the scanner, the tech reminded him to avoid the bullet fragments lodged in the machine’s bed. Ibrahim was sedated and certainly wouldn’t comprehend English, but I talked him through what was happening anyway while continuing to push air into his lungs. Anywhere else in the world a lead apron would have been available to shield me from the scan’s radiation. When the scan was finished, we did the whole exercise in reverse, bringing Ibrahim back to the PICU. The excursion took well over 90 minutes, an eternity of risk for this fragile, grievously injured toddler.
My mission in Gaza ended before Ibrahim awoke, but on my way out of Gaza, as I was processing all the emotions from the trip—an impossible task, as one cannot exit Gaza without driving through the largest fields of rubble on Earth—I received a text from another nurse. It was Ibrahim, awake and smiling, drinking juice.
Transporting Ibrahim was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. In the United States we would have had a mobile ventilator, a respiratory therapist, and both myself and a nurse assistant. We would have had a working elevator, dependable electricity, a clear hallway, protection from radiation, and a CT scanner that worked reliably and hadn’t been shot. In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward. His family was displaced and homeless. He couldn’t assume he or any of his loved ones would be fed or alive when he returned “home” to his tent. But despite all of that, he dedicated himself not only to Ibrahim but even to me, making sure that I felt I could provide the best care possible in this healthcare nightmare.
A few months later, in Fort Worth, I took another patient to the CT scanner. As we raced through the halls of the hospital I couldn’t help but think of my time in Gaza with Ibrahim and Ali. I told my astonished co-workers what it was like to do this in Gaza, fondly recalling Ali’s guidance and care.
After my shift I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali. I texted him but got no response. I figured he was busy. But a few days later I saw a post about him on Instagram. On May 2, 2025, Israel murdered Ali and his brother, blowing them up with a drone.
Sylvia and Ali
Working with the Palestinians taught me more about the world than I expected. My grandmother was everything I knew about Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. I simply cannot recognize her in the unnamed and casually cruel men at Ben Gurion Airport. I don’t see her in either the drone operator who pushed the button that ripped my friend Ali to shreds or in the state organizing and carrying out the genocide in which he was killed.
I see my sweet grandmother’s face in my memories of Ali. I see her in the nurses and doctors I met in Palestine, and in the mothers of Gaza who deprive themselves of everything to keep their children alive for just one more day. The beauty, resilience, and dignity that my grandmother carried in her heart and soul is found today in Gaza and throughout Palestine. And the ugliness of the neo-Nazis who threw stones at my great-great grandfather for being Jewish is manifest nowhere more than in the ultra-racist arrogance of Danny Danon, Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Daniella Weiss in Israel, and Ted Cruz and Randy Fine here at home.
A fanatically Jewish supremacist, “super-Sparta” state of Israel, serving as American gendarme over the people of the Middle East forever, is no solution to the problem of Jewish safety. Neither the United States nor this distorted and perverse conception of an exclusively Jewish state act to keep Jews safe.
We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.
I’m hardly the first person to say so. Jewish thinkers from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Benjamin Balthaser, and Palestinian intellectuals from Walid Khalidi to Edward Said, have all argued as much far more convincingly than I can. Josh Nathan-Kazis recently noted that “Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves” to the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran despite the obvious fact that “they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do.”
I hope my experience can help others, especially those who can’t work directly with Palestinians, to see these simple truths. I’ve seen what occupation and genocide are, up close, if only for a few weeks. They are systems that prioritize state power and control over the welfare of children and the lives of healthcare workers. Israel’s own behavior convinced me that even the most cynical argument for why all of this is necessary—without it, the Jews will never be safe!—is absurd. We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.
Our real allies are the people who want what everyone wants: to live their lives in peace, to watch their children grow and thrive. Our real allies are the nurses at Nasser Medical Complex, not the thugs in Tel Aviv’s airport.
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