Last Friday at San Francisco State University, the atmosphere of Malcolm X Plaza was thick with music and cheers. The sun was out and so were students. Spontaneous circles of hora dancing erupted in the quad. Students and Israel fellows wearing brand new, bright blue shirts with a tri-lingual peace logo blazing across the chest in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The Sf State Hillel had created a mini-shuk, to see photos of the real deal, the Jerusalem shuk, my favorite spot in the world for sweet nuts, bourekas, and tiny chocolate pastries, check this out , with rows of stations leading down towards that quad in front of the Cesar Chavez student center. The stations of the mini-shuk gave out free Elite coffee and lemonade, cds, reusable peace/shalom/salam tote bags. It had a station for arts-and-crafting your own personalized door decoration, and of course, food galore.
There were pastries, nuts, and pickles, candies, bags of Bamba, crackling seeds, and it even had an array of woven sacks overflowing with mounds of colorful spices. All denominations and races of the SF State population wandered through and enjoyed learning how to spell their name in Hebrew and tasting the free foods. The shuk was a constant wave of excited voices, all leading up to the plaza where the circles of dancing students and one dude shimmying in what I think passes these days for tie-dye, were raging it in front of the drum circle.
This went on for several hours. You might think that one could have only enough energy for a few good enthusiastic horas. Oh no. The shuk coffee and lemonade must have been spiked with rocket fuel. That cheering and the twirling and the circling never slowed or quieted for a minute, driven forward by the thumping rhythm of the 15ish DRUMMMers.
Many of the students wore or danced with Israeli flags that fluttered behind them in the wind. This was, after all, a celebration of Israeli Independence day, smack dab in the middle of campus. “I love it. It’s Israel’s birthday and we’re here to celebrate,” said Adam Maman, a freshman at SFSU with a round, warm smile. “I go to Israel almost every summer,” he told me. “I have lots of family there, lots of friends. It’s like my second home. It’s like my first home actually.” He smiled again. “Everyone is here to celebrate. It feels almost like Israel.”
But not everyone was there to celebrate. A spattering of non-Jewish students stood stoic behind the circle of dancers. These student were holding banners which read: “End U.S. aid to Israel,” “Terrorizing Palestinian Civilians,” and “Destroying Crops and Olive Trees,” as well as several Palestinian national flags. Every once in a while a lone female or two holding Palestinian flags would saunter through the crowd of dancing Jews before returning to the cluster of GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students) students and their supporters. But for the most part the GUPS students never interacted with the celebration, except that a few of them sampled the shuk food. They did not shout or chant or even glare. Their protest consisted mainly of taking up space. The Jewish students pretended not to notice.
“I don’t think its right. We don’t go to their stuff and hold flags. They usually come to a lot of our stuff,” said Maman. “We’re just trying to celebrate.” Rumor has it that past generations of Jewish students felt too embarrassed to publicly celebrate Israeli independence day on campus. But that the new generations of GUPS students are much less hardcore and so now Jewish students feel comfortable celebrating in public.
When asked why she was protesting the celebration, first year GUPS member Gabriella Kaiyal-Smith told me: “I want to recognize the fact that the Israeli independence is a day of great pain for Palestinians. It signified the loss of our national identity in the eyes of the international community and led to the martyr of many Palestinians.” When asked if GUPS students had ever done collaborative events with Jewish student groups at SF State, Kaiyal-Smith said never with Hillel and not recently with any other Jewish group.
There’s a similar stalemate going down at UC Berkley. Student groups with opposing political inclinations, concerning Israel, concerning Palestine, concerning people hood, statehood, and all that jazz, don’t intermingle and don’t cooperate. The politics of education have developed yet another set of barriers, dug like ditches, dividing campus communities.
It looks to me like the state of campus dialogue up here in Nor Cal, between students, is in pretty dire condition. How can students learn and flourish in an environment were there is no healthy, well-meaning exchange of ideas and even less listening?
