A Year Without Empathy
On the anniversary of October 7, pro-Palestinian students celebrated while the Jewish community mourned.
How did we get here?
How did we reach the point where hundreds of students at one of America’s most intellectual universities decided they would commemorate October 7, 2023—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust—not with thoughts and prayers, but with celebration and jubilee?
For Jewish freshmen last year like myself, the shock from seeing our new community’s twisted reactions never wore off. Footage of the mass shooting at a music festival, the door-to-door slaughter of families, and the kidnapping of a ten-month-old baby collectively traumatized the vast majority of Columbia’s Jews, many of whom have personal connections to those murdered or endangered by Hamas terrorists. More than anything, we needed the support and empathy of our classmates.
Instead, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) wrote an open letter on October 9, 2023, praising the attack as an “unprecedented historic moment” and claiming that those who condemned the violence had “obfuscated Palestinian resistance as ‘terrorism.’” Meanwhile, Professor Joseph Massad called the attacks “awesome.” These justifications of terrorism would become the root of Jewish students’ fears for their safety.
Not much has changed since then. On October 6, 2024, Columbia SJP promoted their October 7 walkout on their Telegram channel with posters featuring an image of Hamas militants bulldozing the fence separating Gaza from Israel, which allowed terrorists to flood the surrounding villages. On Monday, the anniversary of the attacks, they posted a document titled “Commemorating One Year of the Strategic and Anti-Imperialist al-Aqsa Flood.” Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is what Hamas named the attacks.
A speaker at the pro-Palestinian protest on Monday glorified October 7 as the date “Palestinians took it upon themselves to break down their prison camps and reopen Gaza.”
“Resistance is glorious! We will be victorious!” protestors chanted as they marched around campus. They held up copies of the “New York War Crimes” with the headline “ONE YEAR SINCE AL-AQSA FLOOD: REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY!” They waved signs that said “LONG LIVE THE AL-AQSA FLOOD. GLORY TO THE RESISTANCE.” and “NO PEACE.”
On Instagram, Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted an infamous picture of a Palestinian man waving his bloodied hands after brutally lynching two Israeli reserve soldiers in 2000 (the photo has since been taken down). “The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation, and it is our duty to meet them there,” they wrote in the caption.
Some of this rhetoric is not new, but the most vocal among Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement used to condemn violence against all civilians, including Israelis.
“We condemn all war crimes, including the targeting of Israeli civilians that occurred on October 7th,” Columbia SJP wrote in a November 5, 2023 addendum to their open letter. That addendum was quietly deleted sometime before March of this year.
October 7, 2024, would have been a good time to backtrack, for pro-Palestinian protestors to focus on the civilian lives lost since the war began. Instead, the protests and rhetoric we saw are just the latest evidence that terrorism is what the movement means by “resistance” and “intifada.”
Many Jewish students have been begging the pro-Palestinian movement to practice some level of nuance regarding October 7. The loudest of the protestors, however, seem to believe that sympathy for Gazans is mutually exclusive with sympathy for Israeli victims—as one student put it, the art display on the West Lawn honoring the hostages Hamas took were “guilt tripping milk boxes.”
We can talk about the tragic death of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians. We can talk about what the path to peace looks like. We can even talk about whether the October 7 attacks were a natural consequence of Israel’s actions. But when one side celebrates the murders that the other side mourns, there is no shared moral universe where the two sides can come together for a good-faith conversation.
Monday was the chance for many in the pro-Palestinian movement to demonstrate humanity in their activism. They failed. We can only hope that one year from now on October 7, 2025, empathy will have prevailed.
Mr. Baum is a sophomore in the joint degree program between Jewish Theological Seminary and the School of General Studies. He is a staff editor for Sundial.
To respond to this op-ed, contact us at columbia.sundial@gmail.com.
I so admire your writings. I'm 86. I've had the good fortune to live in many areas and Visit even more. I've seen the cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, 9/11, messed up departure from Afghanistan and Vietnam too, lousy politicians only in it for power and money, bad government decisions at all levels of government, drugs, messed up southern border. Etc etc etc.
And now I have to add
.. im so totally ashamed of so many of our really messed up and confused young people. I just can't understand what is going on with them
.. not just with those who demonstrate against Isreal and the atrocious, sick actions of October 7th.. but with so many young people all around the United States.
My generation and my children's generation have not passed on so many important values which would make them good Americans. They appear easily led.. rudderless. A sad group of easily manipulated young people. This does not bode well for the future of this country .
But then I think there might be hope for the future when I read your editorial. Thank you very much. Hopefully there are more like you tucked away out there somewhere.
Everyone has to inderstand that behind all the hatred against Israel and Jews, the wormd organization of Muslim Brothers is more or less silently at work worldwide. All this is pretty organized . As soon as morning of october 8, hundreds of thousand people in the streets everywhere in the West chantind the same slogans, holding the same flags . Spontaneous ??????