Responding to Silence

On Feb. 28, 2022, the Smith College Provost Office released a statement titled “Responding to the Invasion of Ukraine.” The letter unequivocally labeled the events of Feb. 24, 2022 an invasion, which was urgently condemned and its “humanitarian consequences” recognized. The statement was clear; there was no potential ambiguity, no room for doubt or misinterpretation. In this case, history didn’t seem complicated and the conversations weren’t difficult. The discourse was not a mere clash or the latest episode in the convoluted conflict between Russia and Ukraine; it was unmistakably an invasion.

On Oct. 11, 2023, the office of the President Sarah Willie-LeBreton sent out a campus-wide email under the title “Responding to Grief.” While it initially appeared to be a response to the recent events on the Gaza strip, it was hard to tell, as the statement appeared to encompass various unrelated global incidents, including the “Ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Libya, and Ethiopia; war in Ukraine; mass shootings in the United States; and the latest violence in Israel and Gaza.” This email arrived four days after the breaching of the wall that had entrapped 2.3 million people. I think it came late, almost two decades too late. Nearly two decades after the Gaza strip had been subjected to an all-encompassing blockade by the Israeli military.

When it comes to the plight of Palestine, history is often portrayed as “complicated,” violence seemingly eternal, and any discussions surrounding it deemed “difficult.” It does not have to be that way. If various human rights organizations, global leaders and nations have denounced the actions of Israel, and labeled it an apartheid state, why can’t an email even dare to acknowledge Palestine by name?

On Oct. 13, 2023, the Instagram account of Smith Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posted a significantly more articulate response to the aforementioned statement, emphasizing the ways in which the email downplayed Israel’s colonial past and its continued occupation of Palestine. According to the post, the email “ignores the rest of your Palestinian students, erases the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and overlooks the violence Israel has and is inflicting.” Needless to say, the President’s statement was nothing short of disappointing.

In a conversation with Manar Alnazer ’24, who in the past few weeks has helped organize workshops on media literacy and other SJP events, the issue was brought into clearer view. “Passivity is not apolitical, neither is silence,” she asserted. “Remaining passive aligns one with the oppressors and, in this case, the identity of Palestinian students was ignored. The occupation was not even acknowledged; it was reduced to a sanitized ‘conflict.’”

During a recent protest, SJP vocalized their demands in front of College Hall, seeking to hold Smith College accountable. Their calls were not solely aimed at addressing the institution’s insufficient support, but also at shedding light on its direct financial involvement in the Palestinian occupation. This involvement was underscored by Smith College’s contractual ties with Sabra Hummus, a subsidiary of the Strauss Group, known for providing financial backing to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and investing in weapon contractors. “These demands are neither unreasonable nor impossible to meet,” Manar emphasized. “We implore Smith to cease its complicity. We are asking them to stop buying Sabra Hummus and to stop investing in weapon manufacturing companies, both of which directly help fund violence in Palestine.”

Further investigation into Smith’s public investment portfolio by SJP revealed troubling connections. Notably, and this is public information, Smith College invests in five Exchange-Traded Funds (EFTs), packages of investments that contain assets such as bonds and stocks. Two of the investments in one EFT are Vanguard and Ishares, which both invest in L3Harris along with other weapon contractors. The same L3 Harris that was directly involved in manufacturing Israel’s main battle tank, used in the devastating 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the repeated assaults on Gaza (there was no statement from Smith for this).

Again, this is nothing impossible. In 2006, Smith decided to ban investment in companies directly or indirectly supporting the regime of the Sudanese government, saying that the Committee on Investor Responsibility (comprised of faculty, staff, students and trustees) recognized that “the funds expended on the ongoing genocidal mission by the government in Khartoum come largely from foreign investment in the rapidly expanding Sudanese oil industry. Khartoum has armed and aided Arabic-speaking Darfuri militias who have murdered and raped their ethnic African neighbors and destroyed their villages.” The Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) should be committed to “ensure [that] the endowment continues to be invested in a manner consistent with—and supportive of—the college’s mission and values.” They are clearly failing at this. In 1979, the Board of Trustees explicitly voted to affirm that “the college’s moral mission must play a role in the investment of its endowment.” Where has this commitment gone? Is it not relegated to mere words in a mission statement? By cherry-picking the application of the college’s values and principles, the administration is revealing a disquieting preference for convenience over their foundational ethos.

In the absence of commitment, not only to Smith’s own mission and values, but also to moral conscience, apprehension of censure, or any other motivation, I implore you: prevent the further escalation of Smith’s financial involvement in this unfolding tragedy. As I am writing this article, the death toll in Gaza climbs relentlessly, surging past the threshold of 9,000 lives lost since the day we received that email. I refuse to beg the administrative body of Smith College, its board of trustees or any relevant authority to gravitate toward moral rectitude or to find themselves aligned with the right side of history. I do not plead for them to renounce their endorsement of what has been universally acknowledged as a genocidal campaign. Instead, I humbly propose a straightforward request: stop funding Palestinian deaths.