Jewish faculty at Stony Brook decry over-policing and the harmful weaponization of antisemitism on our campus
A Stony Brook official speaking to pro-Palestinian protesters at the Stony Brook Union with the University Police Department (UPD) on Feb. 22. The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter held banner drops around campus to protest the presence of Starbucks on campus. PHOTO COURTESY OF KAYLA GOMEZ MOLANO
The Stony Brook administration seems commited to upholding American complicity in Palestinian genocide
by Namal Fiaz
Since Oct. 7, 2023, pro-Palestinian college students across the United States have made their voices heard despite repression from universities and governments. I am the President of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Stony Brook University, which I co-founded last fall with close friends. Since then, Stony Brook has not recognized SJP as an official organization. Our reach has grown to thousands on campus via our Instagram (@sb4palestine) and news coverage.
The SJP began with a handful of undergraduate students organizing protests, from on-campus events to regional marches on Long Island and in Manhattan. SJP members are also on the steering committee for the SUNY Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS), a grassroots organization connecting students, faculty and alumni at SUNY schools across New York State (NYS) and urging SUNY institutions to divest from Israeli apartheid. A recent New York Post cover about the official SUNY BDS launch event held at Stony Brook and other SUNYs on Feb. 27, 2024 led to a cease and desist from NYS.
Currently, the greatest obstacle that student activists face on campus is Stony Brook administration’s commitment to upholding the American status quo: complicity in Palestinian genocide.
On March 26, Stony Brook made headlines when the University Police Department (UPD) arrested nine peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters inside the Administration Building during a sit-in held by SJP. The main demands expressed during the protest were for the University to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide and to schedule a meeting with the Stony Brook Board of Trustees about SUNY’s investments in Israeli apartheid.
Nearly 40 protesters entered the building shortly after 2:30 p.m. and were met with a warning from UPD to quiet their chanting, to which they obliged. SJP organizers reassured other students of their right to protest inside the building and communicated with UPD on behalf of the crowd.
Vice President for Student Affairs Rick Gatteau and other administrators claimed that the protestors were still “disrupting” University activities and threatened those who did not leave with arrest, so the crowd began to disperse. The remaining nine protesters — seven students, one alumna and one community member — refused to leave.
Gatteau, Dean of Students Ric McClendon, Associate Dean of Students Gareth Shumack and other University officials watched as UPD officers handcuffed and escorted the nine protestors into police vehicles. After hours of being held in UPD Headquarters with their hands restrained behind their backs, the protesters were released. All nine of them were given summons for criminal charges and a court date set for April 15.
UPD officers arresting students at the sit-in demonstration in the Administration Building on March 26. The arrests of nine Stony Brook students led to an emergency sit-in on March 27 inside the Administration Building again. PHOTO COURTESY OF DANIELA ESCOBAR
The arrests immediately caused an uproar in the University community. While the protesters were in police custody, a dozen of the largest undergraduate organizations at Stony Brook expressed solidarity by demanding that the University release the protesters and drop all charges against them.
Stony Brook faculty and the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) also demanded a dismissal of charges. On March 27, 2024, the day after the arrests, Stony Brook faculty held an emergency sit-in inside the Administration Building in solidarity with the nine protesters. In the next few days, the faculty released a petition condemning Stony Brook’s criminalization of student protests on campus and demanding a dismissal of charges. The petition gained hundreds of signatures in a matter of hours. A week after the arrests, USG passed a resolution stating that the behavior of the protesters “did not warrant arrest.”
The fact that Stony Brook is comfortable arresting peaceful protesters — mostly their own students — for the simple act of protesting during building hours should be alarming. By criminalizing and over-policing pro-Palestinian protests, Stony Brook contradicts its own anti-discriminatory policies and heinously fails to protect students’ free speech. Though the arrests are the most climactic measure Stony Brook has taken so far in response to the eruption of campus protests since Oct. 7, 2023, it is crucial to recognize that they are a steady culmination of Stony Brook’s hypocrisy when it comes to activism for Palestine.
The source of the hypocrisy in Stony Brook’s response to Palestine is the leadership of President Maurie McInnis and her administration. McInnis’ belief that institutions of higher education should use their resources to “address major societal problems” only seems to be applicable when the victims are not Arab or Muslim. In the last six months, two million Gazans have been forcibly displaced as their homes have been reduced to rubble by Israeli airstrikes. Palestinians in the West Bank have not been spared from the massacre either. Israeli forces raided the Jenin refugee camp, as well as the cities of Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem on Dec. 25, 2023.
Israeli violence has only escalated to new heights since then. As of March 15, 2024, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported that, at the very least, 31,490 Palestinians have been killed and 73,439 others have been injured by Israeli forces since Oct. 7. This means that over 100,000 Palestinians are now either dead or have been inflicted with injuries, leaving some permanently disabled.
Stony Brook has not explicitly condemned any of these events.
In 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, McInnis released a statement sympathizing with victims of war, stating that “the Ukrainian people both resist and suffer” in the face of their oppression. Interestingly, the term “resistance” is glorified in this context. The Statesman, Stony Brook’s official student newspaper, released an opinions article in the same month advocating that Ukraine has nuclear arms to defend itself against Russia; it remains uncriticized. This also shows open support for armed resistance from an oppressed people.
McInnis’ narrative drastically shifts when it comes to the resistance of Palestinians against Zionism. In an email sent out on Oct. 31, 2023, McInnis refers to Palestinian resistance as “terrorist attacks,” completely ignoring the historical context in which these events occurred. As a historian herself, McInnis contradicts her own academic integrity by implying that the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks occurred in a vacuum — thereby villainizing the resistance. The “terrorism” does not rest in resistance efforts but rather embodies the Israeli occupation itself.
Palestinian resistance is an act of survival. According to the history of the region, the system of Israeli apartheid has been ethnically cleansing Palestinian villages and wiping out entire bloodlines since the Nakba in 1948. For far too long, Israel has weaponized Holocaust exceptionalism and the collective suffering of Jews to commit similar atrocities against Palestinians. These ideas are echoed by Jewish activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace who compare Israel’s genocidal tactics to those of Nazis during the Holocaust. Under such conditions of mass slaughter and illegal occupation, Palestinians have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary; this is not up for debate.
It is also crucial to note that in her statement about Russia and Ukraine, McInnis claims she is “horrified” by Russia’s militaristic attacks, calling them “brutal atrocities.” Meanwhile, Stony Brook consistently fails to publicly denounce the Israeli military’s war crimes that are considered illegal under international law. All of this is unsurprising given McInnis’ lack of care towards addressing the plight of Palestinians both on campus and overseas.
The double standard created by the University’s response to the struggle and resistance of white European victims versus ones that happen to be the darker skinned and largely Muslim population in the Middle East does not escape us.
Under McInnis’ leadership, Stony Brook also fails to uphold values of intellectual integrity that should govern the basic foundation of every academic institution. Countless experts and scholars from around the world have exposed the Israeli state’s genocidal motives and actions; however, the University refuses to acknowledge any of these findings.
Craig Mokhiber, a former director for the United Nations (UN) and specialist in international human rights law, calls the assault on Palestine a “text book case of genocide.” He resigned in October after citing the UN’s failure to halt Israel’s “wholly … horrific assault” on Gaza, of which he writes that the U.S., United Kingdom and the rest of Europe are complicit. In his last letter, he attributes the “wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people” to Israel and its “ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology.”
We can also look to Dr. Gabor Mate, a Holocaust survivor, physician and author. Mate talks about previously identifying as a Zionist before he learned about the state’s origins of “extermination, expulsion, and massacres” of the Palestinian population. He admits that he was raised by Zionists — which influenced his views — but his education exposed him to the reality of land theft and colonization.
Stony Brook has not condemned or acknowledged the fact that all of the universities that once nurtured the young minds of Gaza have been reduced to rubble. Palestinian children could not continue the school year as of November 2023 due to deliberate Israeli bombardment of schools — not to mention many of the children’s classmates were dead. These man-made tragedies were all preventable.
If we do not listen to the educated about the nature of this massacre, then what is left for us?
Over the past few months, it has been made abundantly clear that the trend of universities violating the First Amendment rights of SJP chapters on campuses has not skipped SUNY’s flagship University. The Stony Brook administration and UPD frequently use intimidation tactics to repress pro-Palestinian voices on campus. University administrators voiced their disapproval of SJP Stony Brook’s Instagram page, @sb4palestine, to our faces upon its creation in November 2023. UPD detectives began monitoring our account shortly after. It’s no secret other groups on campus do not get this same treatment.
From UPD threatening protestors with “criminal mischief” — a serious misdemeanor in NYS — for simply putting anti-genocide stickers on doors of a building and claiming that protestors “vandalized” school property by drawing pro-Palestinian art on the ground — with Washable Crayola Chalk — their role is clear. UPD continues to serve as an accomplice to the administration’s attempts to suppress student voices and beliefs.
Last month, SJP held a banner drop to protest the presence of Starbucks stores on campus for the company’s attempted silencing of pro-Palestinian union members. In the Stony Brook Union, a UPD officer immediately approached my fellow organizers and me as we held our banners over the railing of the second-floor balcony. Not a minute later, a University official appeared and reprimanded us for alleged “violations of the code of conduct.” We recited the policies back to him reaffirming our right to protest. He returned two more times, with different reasons intended to remove us. After standing our ground, we were told that we could resume our demonstration.
It is undeniable that the University had no basis to interrupt our demonstration in the first place. This is just one recent anecdotal example of Stony Brook’s deceptive attempts to not only infringe on our rights as students but our constitutional rights as well. Stony Brook or any other SUNY institution cannot present a misleading version of free speech rules simply because they do not like the students’ speech and want to silence them. It does not work this way under the First Amendment.
Two months after Oct. 7, 2023, the University attempted to maintain a “neutral stance” on the violence. Reactions to a mention of “Palestine” at University meetings evoked a response reminiscent of the McCarthy Era. Besides a few outspoken students and faculty, the Stony Brook community had largely grown indifferent to the genocide. There was a clear need to generate visibility for the Palestinian cause on campus through a historically effective method: public disruptions.
In December 2023, during the last University Senate meeting of the year, SJP and other pro-Palestinian students and faculty disrupted the agenda. A student delivered a speech about McInnis’ refusal to address the Palestinian genocide — specifically the University’s economic ties to companies directly connected to Israeli violence, proving their complicity in genocide.
For example, the Advanced Fluid Dynamics, Propulsion, and Energy Lab affiliated with Stony Brook’s Department of Mechanical Engineering collaborates with Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These three companies directly fuel Israel’s assault on Palestinians. Boeing aided the establishment of the state of Israel after the Nakba when Palestinians were initially displaced and massacred, while Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman produce weapons that Israel fires at Palestinians.
Unlike other universities that recently divested from Israel, Stony Brook continues to deny economic ties to Israel despite overwhelming evidence that proves otherwise. Palestinian students on our campus should not have to live with the knowledge that their institution fuels the American war machine responsible for the death of their family members.