Contrasting Oct. 7 anniversary events held by pro-Palestinian and Jewish students at the University of Maryland were calm and peaceful — but the divide between them seemed wider than ever.
After a federal judge ruled the university couldn’t prevent pro-Palestinian students from holding a vigil today because of safety concerns, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) gathered yards from Maryland Hillel’s Hostage Square Memorial. The reaction to the former’s presence on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel was mixed.
“I think it’s really sick to do something like that, especially when you have all the other days in the year to mourn the lost lives of Palestinians but we have today,” said Jewish student Alexis Chavez, who has relatives in Israel.
Junior Rivka Silinsky called today’s SJP events “absolutely egregious.”
“I think it’s the equivalent of KKK protesters going around a school that has a quarter of Black students and saying, hey, I have a freedom of speech,” she said.
Sophomore Shamai Frenkel said he respects freedom of speech but also feels empathetic toward both groups of students hurting from events before and after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
“It’s been very sad to me to see how a war very far away, even though it’s very real and that suffering is very real, can tear apart people that should be very close,” he said.
At the SJP community gathering ahead of the evening’s vigil, board member Daniela Colombi told NBC News that today marks a year of an “escalated genocide” after 76 years of occupation.
“It’s just really critical that we don’t allow the day to be monopolized by one viewpoint,” she said. “It would be a betrayal of our humanity to erase the genocide like that, like that is genocide denial.”
Colombi said SJP sued UMD for its right to demonstrate out of concern that a public university’s creating a 24-hour free speech blackout could set “a very dangerous precedent.”
Last week, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore released a statement respecting the rule of law regarding free speech but called Oct. 7 an “inappropriate date” for the pro-Palestinian student group’s event.
