Who would oppose a former Israeli hostage speaking to college students about his experience? Hamas?

No — it was UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council, theelected student government.

On April 14, the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, together with Hillel — a Jewish students’ association —hosted an event featuring Omer Shem Tov,a 23-year-old who was abducted by terrorists from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and held captive by Hamas for 505 days.

One week later, the Undergraduate Students Association Council released a statement condemning the event on the grounds that it “advance[d] incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence.”

The student council did not condemn a government action. Or a political rally. Or a military campaign. It condemned an event featuring a young person, just like them, who had survived 505 days in the clutches of internationally recognized terrorists, only because the event did not also focus on Palestinian suffering.

The recognition of Israeli and Jewish suffering, on the one hand, does not mean ignoring Palestinian suffering, on the other. That zero-sum thinking is one of the great failures of campus discourse today.

I served as president of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council from 2017-2018. I know that office. I know that gavel. I know what it means to represent a student body as diverse, passionate, and complicated as UCLA’s.

And as an Iranian American Jew, I know, painfully, how often Jewish students on that campus have been asked to justify their identities, swallow their grief, or prove that their belonging does not come at someone else’s expense.

During my four years at UCLA, I witnessed antisemitism in both overt and subtle forms.

As a freshman, I sat down at a communal table near the dorms and saw the words “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into the surface. That same year, I watched a Jewish student questioned for, and initially denied, a leadership role under the tired and dangerous accusation of “divided loyalty.”

Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos