With the ongoing loss of life in Gaza, many have denounced Israel’s merciless slaying of the Palestinian people, homes, and land. This includes human rights experts, politicians, academics, activists, ordinary citizens, and some of our very own here at Syracuse University.

In October, SU's Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) department released a statement in solidarity with Palestine, attributing the position to “their long-standing feminist commitments to anti-racist education, emancipatory politics, and de-colonial praxis.” But prior to clarifying the basis of their stance, the department wrote they “mourn the lives claimed by violence in Palestine and Israel” in the opening sentence.

Not just Palestinian. Not just Israeli. Not one over the other.

Despite the WGS department addressing Israeli deaths and affirming they “oppose antisemitism unequivocally,” backlash swiftly emerged. On October 25, a Change.org petition titled “Demand the removal of Professor Himika Bhattacharya for inciting Jew hatred” began to circulate, calling for Bhattacharya, who also serves as the WGS chair, to be fired as a result of the department's collective support for Palestine.

Courtesy of Syracuse University’s Women’s and Gender Studies department

As with either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli speech, pushback is to be expected. However, the petition’s demands go beyond free speech—which campuses must protect—into a targeted campaign with McCarthyist echoes and false cries of antisemitism. Equally concerning, the petition is an insult to scholarly feminist work and intersectional, transnational theory.

Intersectional theory examines “where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Explained in “Women Worldwide,” transnational feminism “is both a liberatory formation and a practice that continuously resists forces of colonialism, racism, and imperialism rather than being complicit with these historic forms of oppression,” which goes beyond exclusionary mainstream feminism. Thus, the WGS department uses these frameworks to holistically approach all their teachings, including those on Israel-Palestine.

Knowing this, it is disappointing the petition was created by a WGS major. The SU senior behind the petition claims the WGS statement shows an “alarming level of antisemitism, inciting hate rather than promoting understanding,” yet fails to describe any antisemitic language, references or actions. Moreover, there is no description of alleged antisemitic behavior that can be ascribed to Bhattacharya either; only that that statement was sent out under her leadership. The petition merely attaches the solidarity statement as implied evidence of hate.

SU also did not find the statement to be antisemitic nor constitute as any form of hate speech. In an internal message from senior administration to the WGS department, they were told “regarding the issues related to the petition and the various calls for disciplining or removing faculty members, it should be noted that no heed has been given to such calls.” Bhattacharya’s positions as department chair and professor, as they rightfully should, will remain.

One aim of SU’s WGS statement was to reframe university messaging which has inaccurately suggested a starting point of October 7.

“We are not supporting any form of violence against any group of people,” Bhattacharya said. “That said, it is important to contextualize and historicize different forms of violence and those that are differently enacted and received. In this case state violence as well as different forms of resistance and militia. There’s a feminist critique of both.”

As civil as the petition tries to appear, it masks an insidious violence. Attempting to silence one of the few SU institutional spaces acknowledging Palestine is a gross misuse of the tools of protest. It’s fair to believe the petition would also attack other feminist thought leaders if they were our professors. If Angela Davis were at SU, the petition would certainly demand her removal for saying “the important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid” as quoted in “Freedom is a Constant Struggle.” The WGS statement rejects “such narratives [which] conceal the realities of Israeli settler colonialism which is over 75 years old, by using the killings of civilians in Israel as a justification for the collective punishment, massacre, and annihilation of people in Gaza'' which mirrors Davis’ perspective.

Aside from the internal email, SU has offered minimal direct support to Bhattacharya nor issued a community wide redress of the petition’s defamation. Since its circulation, Bhattacharya has been the victim of doxxing and harassment.

“There was a time when I had no idea who was calling me,” Bhattacharya said. “People were yelling horribly racist things, violent things and rape threats.”

Further, countless signers of the petition cite deplorable reasons for their support, such as that “Western countries are surrounded by Islamist terror...if we allow this, if we even think it's good or justified, then we can soon crush our Western way of life” or “Israel is the only country in the Middle East that actually has Women & Gender studies”, both racist anti-Arab and Islamophobic comments. Others directly attack Bhattacharya, such as one which calls to expel her from the country and misgenders her as a woman of color; the commentator ordered to “deport Professor Himika Bhattacharya on a raft with a bottle of water and two saltines. We do not need him [her] in our America.” While the creator may not hold the views of fellow signers, they are culpable for creating a petition that encourages false and bigoted sentiment.

Other signers, while not so blatantly ignorant, can be classified as “progressive except for Palestine” (PEP), which writer Ruqaiyah Zarook describes as “figures on the left of American politics who seemingly support racial justice and economic justice and are left-leaning on issues of immigration, LGBTQIA rights, and women’s rights,” such as a WGS major might. But the same person becomes “struck with some debilitating stupefaction when asked to extend their politics to the question of Palestine” as it requires interrogating their beliefs beyond what is comfortable. Instead, PEPs are willing to forgo the values they once co-opted; when they are no longer a convenient way to give themselves a pat on the back. As a WGS academic, the petitioner will be critiqued on their work as standard practice. Parroting Western feminism, which disregards the plight of those in the Global South, would certainly be considered unacceptable.

Despite attempts to demoralize the WGS department and herself, Bhattacharya wants to remain focused on centering Palestine.

“What really troubles me is that all of this distracts us from what is really going on. Look at the numbers. Look at what is still happening. Look at how many Palestinians have died and are continuing to die.”

The view of the feminist lens does not stop when its gaze lands on Israel. To restrict professors’ critiques on colonialism and apartheid to exclude Israel, as the petition demands, imprints a myopic view on Syracuse students and weakens our ability to recognize injustice. The WGS statement defects from SU’s silence to say “to you, our students, we pledge to continue to teach what is unteachable elsewhere.”

The compassion that the WGS solidarity statement extends towards Palestinians has brought on hateful anger—an ugliness that needs immediate dismantling. When you stand against those who oppose injustice, especially one as grave as genocide, the elasticity of your compassion shrinks in ways it can never return to. All that remains is hoarded up for yourself and those exactly like you. It’s dangerous, and right now it is killing the Palestinian people.

Include Palestine in your feminism