An Israeli student at Cornell University whose home was hit by a rocket launched by Hamas from Gaza was told in a Facebook comment by a pro-Palestinian campus group to “quit complaining about how it ruined your brunch plans.”
The Facebook comment is part of a picture in a Facebook group called “Reject Radicals at Cornell,” in which the Cornell Collective for Justice in Palestine commented, “I don’t know what kind of astroturf operation you all are running here, but if you tag our group in another post I’m reporting you for harassment.”
“The story of my home in Gedera is not unique,” wrote Shir Kidron, a university senior whose home was stuck by a rocket in 2009, in TheCornell Daily Sun.
“It resonates with tens of thousands of Israelis who have been under a constant threat of rockets from Gaza over the past 18 years,” she continued. “According to the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, 40 percent of the children in the Israeli border town of Sderot suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. This is what happens when, at any moment, you could be given only 15 seconds to run for shelter.”
Kidron wrote that instances of how Hamas attacks Israel “are not meant to compare suffering with suffering, or military might with military might—a framing the BDS movement relentlessly tries to push. The people of Palestine are suffering and deserve a chance at a peaceful life with dignity. They need a country, but it doesn’t have to replace our own.”
However, she said, “Here at Cornell, the voices supporting BDS are getting more extreme.”
“A letter full of inflammatory rhetoric was sent to President [Martha E.] Pollack, while an aggressive campaign launched to pass a divestment resolution in the Student Assembly. This campaign is making Jewish students here on campus feel unsafe and unwelcome,” she continued. “It also contained crucial historical inaccuracies, like the statement in SJP’s teach-in that the Arabs accepted the 1947 U.N. partition plan supporting two states.”
Rena Nasar, StandWithUs’ Tri-State campus director and managing director of campus affairs, told the Jewish Journal, “It is inhumane to minimize the rockets Hamas shoots into Israeli civilian homes and nursery schools. There is no justification for such barbaric terrorism and Israel has a right to defend its citizens.”