The last few weeks on Clark’s campus have been chaotic and stressful, marked by the harassment and bullying of student workers who did not participate in the recent strike and who expressed fears around voicing alternative opinions. I have witnessed all this as a firm supporter of unionization, a strike participant and a fifth-year student worker who would be covered by the union currently seeking recognition. I have seen some of the harassment firsthand and heard about worse from friends and coworkers, and it has been documented in The Scarlet. While I have been disappointed and dismayed, I have not been surprised: we have seen this before.
The most stark example if it has, for years, been directed at students who are Zionist or who are labeled “Zionist” by their peers.
Clark students who are Israeli or otherwise affiliated with Israel have experienced Clarkie bullying for years, ranging from subtle stigma to overt threats. People have encouraged their friends to be “more mean” to these students and to “keep bullying” them, left threatening notes under their doors and on their dorm-room white boards (and stolen said white boards), torn their flags down, mocked them on social media, called them “genocidal freaks,” and driven them out of student clubs and friend groups.
Students even staged a protest against a vigil meant to grieve loved ones lost and kidnapped on October 7, which consisted of a silent die-in and was followed by shouts of “Free Palestine” at students who had just finished crying and sharing stories of friends held hostage or murdered. One anonymous post on the Fizz app last year made unprintable threats against Zionists, whom they called “subhuman vermin.” Here, I am not arguing whether or not these incidents constitute antisemitism, but that this is bullying and harassment. The threat inherent in slipping a note under someone’s door that says “Zionists are not welcome here” is blatant.
Multiple students have expressed fear in voicing alternative opinions about the strike or the union. Students have experienced this for years when it comes to Israel, and until recently, I avoided mentioning my own Israeli family for fear of backlash or ostracization. There is a broader pattern here: students latch onto a cause they feel is just, associate it with their identities as good people, and weaponize it against others, who must align with the belief du jour to join the ranks of the “good.”
The targeting of those who stray from the doctrine is then justified, sometimes with relish – bad people deserve whatever happens to them. Perhaps those who disagree with this, who recognize the wrong being done, neglect to call out their peers for fear of becoming the next target.
Clark students are passionate. This is one of the things I love most about the student body, and it is what inspires us to pursue meaningful work. However, there is a fine line between Clarkie passion and abuse, and it has been crossed too many times. While I agree that the recent union-related abuse was unacceptable, I hope those who rightfully recognize this can also notice the pattern and consider whether they contributed to or allowed the bullying of their peers when the victims were (or were perceived to be) Zionists.
Some may argue that this comparison is unfounded because Zionism is the belief that Jews should have an ethnostate from the river to the sea, and therefore we should be hostile to Zionists because that viewpoint is unacceptable. Luckily, that definition of Zionism is a lie (and bleeds into Kahanism, which directly opposes Zionism in many ways), and most Zionist Jews – including Zionist Clarkies – do not subscribe to it.
Instead, we subscribe to the core definition of Zionism, self-determination for the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. Even Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, did not imagine an ethnostate in his utopian novel, Altneuland – his utopia was a pluralistic, semi-socialist, autonomous society within the Ottoman Empire.
Regardless, no one deserves bullying, harassment, or other harm due to an assumption made about them because someone claimed it was true. Yet, in the case of both the strike and the anti-Zionist push on campus, this has been a consistent pattern at Clark.
I will leave you, reader, with a plea for humanity. Understand that not everyone thinks the way you do, but that this difference of thought is not synonymous with evil. Many of us are here at Clark because we share values like justice and empathy. The University’s motto, which many like to poke fun at, is “Challenge Convention, Change Our World.”
If the current convention is to scream at each other until our throats are sore and everyone loses, perhaps our challenge is to humanize each other and have the hard conversations until we can come to real solutions, together. The Clarkie penchant for activism, perseverance, and radical thinking is exactly what equips us to meet the world ahead with courage and determination, but it can get ugly fast. If we combine it with a radical form of love, empathy, and curiosity, we will be unstoppable.
