by Anonymous
In September 2023, Penn hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, “the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists”. But if all you read was the coverage of Palestine Writes by the mainstream media and the Daily Pennsylvanian, you’d think it was a completely different event: nothing but a mob of Jew-haters and card-carrying fascists. This false portrayal is not new, but rather a standard tactic used by Zionists to smear and undermine any attempt to highlight the suffering, occupation, and apartheid in Occupied Palestine. This article charts the various ways in which the beauty, solidarity, and resistance of Palestine Writes was dragged through the mud by Penn’s administration, donors (read: ‘owners’) and its propaganda arm.
Before the Festival even began, then-President of Penn Liz Magill was pressured by donors to publish a (now deleted) statement ‘condemning anti-semitism’ on campus while maintaining the University’s responsibility to uphold free exchange of ideas. While Penn’s relationship with free speech is tenuous at best, as the past year has proven quite clearly, this statement was fundamentally harmful. By publishing this statement, Magill and Penn primed the media to expect anti-semitism at the festival, when there was no legitimate reason to believe that this would be a concern. Magill’s statement bought into the false narrative that any and all criticism of Israel’s occupation is antisemitic. This was an attempt to shut down discussion before it even began, to enforce a worldview held by Penn’s donors. It is a clear example that Penn does not act at the behest of its community of students and faculty, but at the behest of the dollar bill.
Running from September 22nd to 24th, Palestine Writes conducted a series of panels, exhibitions, and performances to bring to light the struggle of the Palestinian people under Zionist occupation. The festival included a screening of the film ‘Farha’, which shows the reality of the 1948 Nakba, where 85% of the total Palestinian population had their homes stolen and were evicted in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the land for the new Zionist state. The Zionist regime seeks to erase this history and supplant it with the immoral myth that Palestine was a “land without a people”. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) came out with a statement that Farha contained ‘antisemitic tropes’, was ‘blood libel’, and was ‘distortive’. These perverse and loaded statements not only create a false history that manufactures consent for the colonisation of Palestine, but also undermine the history of the struggle of the Jewish people – equating the very real suffering and stereotypes imposed on European Jews in 19th and 20th Century pogroms and the Holocaust with Israel’s colonial violence. It undermines the idea that ‘never again’ means ‘never again for ANYBODY’, instead acknowledging only Jewish peoples’ history of oppression and leveraging it to justify their own oppression of Palestinians.
There was an additional uproar because the Festival included a Zoom appearance from Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters, on the basis that he wore a Nazi uniform at a concert in Berlin. Organisations such as the Jewish Leadership Project even commissioned propaganda trucks to circle Penn’s campus (seen below), claiming that Waters was an antisemite and that Penn was ‘sponsoring antisemitism on campus’. In a statement in May 2023, Rogers explained his wearing of the uniform was satirical, saying that it was “quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms… The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980”.
In a statement to CNN, organiser Tala El-Fahmawi said “[Waters] has stood as an opponent to war crimes and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians which as we know does not equate to antisemitism”. This is an especially enlightening example of the ways Zionist narratives hold statements from Israeli colonisers and Palestinian allies to different degrees of scrutiny. When Zionists consistently call for an open genocide against the Palestinian people, this is protected speech. When supporters of Palestine use irony to indicate the evils of the Zionist regime, that is called hate speech. This double standard does not aim to uphold the safety of Jewish students, it instead aims to absolve Israel of any guilt for its crimes by shutting down any conversation.
Billionaire and famed exploiter Ronald Lauder claimed that he had sent people to take pictures of and listen to the festival, and stated that the speakers were ‘antisemitic’, yet provided absolutely no specificity on what specific statements were antisemitic, nor how many speakers made such statements, nor which specific speakers made these statements. Additionally, attempting to infringe on the educational mission of the University, Lauder said “I do not want any of the students at The Lauder Institute, the best and brightest at your university, to be taught by any of the instructors who were involved or supported this event,” adding “We know who they are and what they did.” What it actually was that this ephemeral “they” did, we will never know. Lauder also personally flew into Philadelphia to attempt to bully Magill into cancelling the festival. At Penn, Zionist donors flex their money muscles whenever they see an opinion they don’t like, and use the power of academic censorship to make it go away. It doesn’t matter what is true, all that matters is whether Penn’s donors agree. This makes one thing clear: there is no room for intellectual discourse and pursuit of justice at an institution where money shuts mouths.
Marc Rowan, one of Penn’s largest donors and chair of the Wharton board of advisors, published a hit piece masquerading as an op-ed in which he claimed that multiple speakers (who, predictably, were not named) spoke blood libel, and that one speaker (again unnamed) called for ethnic cleansing of Jews and gathering Jewish people into ‘Cantons’. These statements were so blatantly false that even Scott Bok, then chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees and no friend of Palestine, publicly refuted Rowan’s claims. At this point, however, the damage was already done and Bok’s statement was fundamentally toothless. It did nothing to push back against the tide of anti-Palestinian sentiment that Rowan’s statement created and legitimised. This is indicative of a clear pattern, where donors no longer just have control over the University’s image, but also over what knowledge its students are given access to. This is but one episode in the shameful saga of Penn throwing away its intellectual responsibilities to the truth in favour of fattening its endowment.
The response to Palestine Writes also clearly indicates that Penn cares about its Jewish and Zionist students more than Palestinian, Arab, and allied ones. Magill put out a statement saying that these speakers’ presence on campus was ‘painful’ for the Jewish community, yet there has been NO such statement before or since that recognizes the pain of Palestinian, Arab, and allied students who have had to see the Zionist entity ethnically cleanse their own friends and family, place innocent people in concentration camps like Sde Teiman, and argue that IDF soldiers should have a right to sodomize Palestinians to death. Nor is there ever any statement discussing the feelings of Arab students when Zionist speakers are brought to campus, or when Penn Hillel sponsors ‘birthright’ trips that conduct the colonisation of their homeland in real time. To Penn, Zionist feelings matter far more than Palestinian lives.
In response to Magill’s statement, 36 Penn faculty members published a statement saying that ‘Instead of valuing some lives over others, the University should make a clear distinction between the affirmation of Palestinian rights, culture, and literature, and the practice of antisemitism’ and asked that Penn ‘immediately amend your statement so that it is clearly in support of a diversity of views and diversity of religious, racial, and cultural communities on campus.’ Of course, no such amendment was ever made. There was also a published statement by members of Penn’s Jewish community who were in favour of the festival carrying on, explaining that Penn’s statement “further marginalises Palestinian experiences on campus, while supporting attempts to conflate Palestinian liberation with antisemitism.” Neither of these statements were given any credence or airtime by Penn’s administration – clearly demonstrating where their priorities lie.
The Palestine Writes saga demonstrates that the Zionist tactic is a plain and simple one: because they know they cannot win by truth, they have to silence any discussion about Palestine by preventing it from happening in the first place. This is one instance in a long line of silencing Palestinian activism on campus, and Penn is thereby responsible for every single dead child, raped civilian, and starved person in Gaza – because it shuts down or undermines the voices of anyone who even wants to call attention to this genocide.
Palestine Writes did, eventually, go ahead as planned. But this should not be considered an instance of the University allowing free expression on campus. Rather, it is the tale of an unrelenting organising committee persevering in spite of dehumanisation and attacks, donor intervention, and Zionist puppeteering.
written Summer 2024
Penn Disorientation Guide 