Palestinians receive food at a UN-run school in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip on October 23, 2023 amid ongoing battles between Israel and Hamas.(Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)
Dear President Minouche Shafik,
Thank you for your letter addressed to Columbia alumni and friends on 10 October. I read it carefully, pondered over it and discussed it with other friends who respect Columbia University, our alma mater.
These discussions did nothing to reduce a feeling of great disturbance at the core of my being.
I always have the hope that a university will lead from the front and provide an intellectual and academic framework that assists at times of great difficulty in this troubled world of ours.
Instead, your letter mentions only the attack on Israel and the sensitivities of the Jewish student organisation on campus.
By the time you had written the letter, Hamas had attacked Israel and Israel in turn had retaliated with an attendant loss of life. I am devastated that women, children and the elderly have not been spared.
I am sure you are aware that the current political dispensation is unjust and that the Palestinians have paid heavily with their lives over many years.
I would have liked you to be even-handed and recognise that Columbia University’s alumni and students come from a wide range of communities and countries.
I may be incorrect but I do not recall any of Colombia’s former presidents being devastated when Israelis massacred Palestinians.
I serve on the alumni board of the J-school of Columbia University and I trust that your letter will not mean that journalists will be cautious in providing the public with balanced and truthful information. I watched with alarm as only one international news channel, Sky News, challenged the fake news that Hamas had decapitated babies.
The credibility of our profession is on the line. If it were not so tragic it is almost funny how the story that dominates large sections of the media is devoid of context and history. Now is the time that all those who work for peace must educate that false narratives greatly disempower all of humanity.
I urge you to assure us as alumni and students that our alma mater does not support the illegal notion that it is in order to treat Palestinians as animals and to impose a collective punishment on them. To cut off food, water, fuel, electricity for over 2 million people must register as an act of great inhumanity, a genocidal choice.
Then there is the bombing of airports of neighbouring countries reminding me how the apartheid state unleashed terror in the Southern African countries when they dared to support the anti-apartheid fighters.
Perhaps, as a South African, this awful situation cuts very close to my heart. Nelson Mandela described the Palestinian issue as the greatest moral question of our time flowing from an injustice at the end of the Second World War.
A United Nations Resolution passed in 1982, when apartheid South Africa illegally occupied Namibia, provides a legal framework that is interesting. It read as follows:
“Gravely concerned at the continuation of the illegal occupation of Namibia by South Africa and the continued violations of the human rights of the peoples still under colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation,
1. Calls upon all States to implement fully and faithfully the resolutions of the United
Nations regarding the exercise of the right to self-determination and independence by peoples under colonial and foreign domination;
2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle;
3. Reaffirms the inalienable right of the Namibian people, the Palestinian people and all peoples under foreign and colonial domination to self-determination, national
independence, territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty without outside
Interference.
This international injunction guided us then and continues to remind us of our obligations to struggling people across the world.
A few years ago I was part of a human rights delegation that visited both Israel and Palestine. I had to accept that after witnessing the intense humiliation of South Africans by a minority government over many years and covering the genocide in Rwanda, I could no longer endure occupying a front seat, as a journalist, to an injustice of such great scale.
Even when I visited the doctor, I was told the story of how the local authorities were bulldozing the homes of Palestinians in Tel Aviv. After 10 years of waiting for his plans to be approved a local architect went ahead with the building of his family home. It was a double-storey home and near completion when the authorities arrived one morning and flattened the home to the ground. It was all just too much.
Your letter forced me to share with you a different view held by millions protesting across the world and in your country.
Now, more than at any other time, all of us have a responsibility to assist in bringing all this suffering to an end.
And it cannot be done by sending a message that only the pain and suffering of one side matters.
Journalists will be tested greatly and partly the end to this war will depend on the extent to which they tell the story fully.
In South Africa, we were always taught not to turn against white people but to turn against an unjust system that oppressed us. Similarly, I am not against the Israelis or Jewish people but I am strongly opposed to Zionism that seeks to paint Palestinians as less than human and traps Israelis in the role of oppressor. Surely all children, both Israeli and Palestinian, deserve to live in a just and fair system.
There is no fairness or justice currently and it is sad that Columbia University chooses to ignore that it had on its staff Edward Said, the great Palestinian intellectual, whose writing had always placed in context the nature of the crisis the world now faces. How too can the journalist fraternity forget that one of their own, Shireen Abu Akleh, was murdered by an Israeli sniper less than two years ago. She was a renowned American-Palestinian journalist who worked for Al Jazeera for many years. Those who killed her still elude prosecution, as her family battles on for justice.
I would like your leadership to be an awesome example of what a woman can do under difficult circumstances. It is for this reason that I have chosen to be forthright in the hope that you will not ignore a substantial part of Columbia’s alumni and friends.
Sincerely,
Zubeida Jaffer
Class of ‘96
Journalist, author, activist