New student association wants to advocate for Jewish students

He did not watch the Screams before Silence film beforehand, says Jacob (a pseudonym, his real name is  known to the editor), the Chair of the newly established JSAD (Jewish Student Association Delft). As his good friend is still being held by Hamas, it touches a nerve, he says. He let another board member watch it beforehand so that they would know what they would be showing to the visitors.

It is a Thursday evening, and in the C lecture hall in the Aula about 40 people are enjoying bread rolls with falafel and grilled vegetables. It is the first public activity by the JSAD after the association really got going at the beginning of this academic year.

A Jewish association is pleasant as you share the same background, says Jacob. “We kind of have a baseline understanding of one another without even needing to talk so to say.” Since Israel was attacked by Hamas last year and responded strongly, the need for a group like this has grown, says Máté Oszkó, a co-board member who is Hungarian, Jewish and a fourth year student at TU Delft.

Tented camp

The idea was born during a dinner in May. A few pro-Palestinian demonstrations had been held on campus, and at the end of May the activists had put up their tents around TU Delft Library. “We heard from Jewish students that they no longer felt safe on campus,” says Oszkó. “Some of them said they were too afraid to even come to campus for a few months.”

Oszkó and Jacob both say that there was hate speech. “When they approach us and call us Zionists, and then they chant, ‘Zionists are not welcome here’, that feels like they’re attacking us” says Oszkó. Jacob recalls the intifada slogans. “The intifadas were mass terror campaigns against Israeli citizens in the 1990s and 2000s. When I hear chants like that, the way I understand it as a Jewish person is that it’s a call of violence against me.” The ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ slogan feels threatening too. “From our point of view it is not advocating for a two-state solution, it’s not advocating for peace, it’s advocating for destruction of Israel and with that the elimination and violence against the majority Jews.”

The founders felt that something or someone was needed to stand up for the Jewish people at TU Delft. “Our board wants to advocate for the safety and security of our members and the broader Jewish community on campus” says Oszkó.

Measures

The meetings of the new association, which will in any case include a monthly Sabbath dinner on a Friday evening, will require some effort to be arranged. For every activity, the JSAD will have to make special arrangements, as is the case with several Jewish organisations. The location will be secret unless it is a public event, and the exact number of members will not be divulged, not even to Delta. TU Delft security officers were present at the public screening of the film on Thursday. Nevertheless, Jacob believes that the advantages of gatherings outweigh the risks.

When everyone has a bread roll and a drink, Jacob opens the evening with a speech in which he commemorates the victims of the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023. He paints a picture of the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon in a few sentences. He ends with a warning: if anyone finds the film too emotional, they can go to the reserved lecture hall close by to talk to specially invited care providers. Only a few attendees do so. When the lights go on again after the film, the Board members light three candles and everyone stands up for a minute of silence.

Between Jacob’s speech and the remembrance, the people present watch Screams before Silence, a documentary by the American filmmaker Sheryl Sandberg about the suspected rapes by Hamas during the bloodbath on 7 October. On the account of eye witnesses, the film shows how Hamas allegedly perpetrated systematic and widespread sexual abuse that day. While there is evidence for some victims of rape, United Nations researchers have as yet not been able to deliver evidence of mass abuse.

Criticism

Despite this, the JSAD board still chose to show the film. He knows about the criticism, he says, but he believes that it is not valid. “My opinion on this is that when women say that they’re raped, I believe them. I think the testimonials that these people provided based on their experience during this awful attack speaks enough volume as to what they experienced, heard, or what they were able to understand from what was happening.”

Screams of Silence is among the many films released within a year after the fatal day, including #Nova and Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance. In an essay in The Guardian the influential journalist and activist Naomi Klein writes that the many production about October 7^th fit perfectly in a ‘simple tale of good and bad, in which Israel is blameless and deserves unconditional support’. Witness stories, like in Screams of Silence, could become ‘a way to avoid looking at the harsh realities of those atrocities, or of actively justifying them’. “ At its most extreme, it can provide rationalizations for genocide”, she writes in The Guardian.

Using films as a justification for Israel harsh counter-attack is something Jacob is brief about. “I think that a sad reality of war is that innocent people are affected by it. Innocent people die. But I don’t think that by using media to document the atrocity that happened is pretextual justification for waging war against someone who attacked you and then abducted your people.”

No objection

After the JSAD had requested TU Delft to hold the event, the film was watched by a team of people from the Integrity Office, Safety and Security Department, Legal Department and Communications, says a TU spokesperson. Despite the controversial nature of the film, there were no objections from TU Delft. In contrast to this, a meeting of pro-Palestinian activists had been partly stopped (see below).

A spokesperson explains the conclusion. ‘TU Delft does not judge the content of the film other than that it falls under the freedom of expression: declaring political and social positions. […] Holding a meeting in which you show controversial content falls within the freedom of expression. This should be allowed at universities.’