Despite wide-scale protests and requests for cancellation, Rutgers University in New Jersey will host a national pro-Palestine student conference in October.
The National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement will include sessions on how to pressure colleges to stop investing in companies that do business with Israel, as well as cultural events and rallies in support of an independent Palestinian state. Hundreds of pro-Palestinian student activists are expected to attend.
Organizer Charlotte Kates said that she, as well as the sponsoring organization, the New Jersey Solidarity Movement - an offshoot of International Solidarity - supports Palestinian homicide bombers. "Palestinian resistance in all its forms has been a very powerful tool of justice," Kates, a Rutgers law student, told the New York Post. "All forms, from armed struggle to mass protest... Israel is an apartheid, colonial settler state. I do not believe apartheid, colonial settler states have a right to exist."
The Post's Andrea Peyser reports that Rutgers will thus be the nation's third college, and the first on the East Coast, to harbor "a national anti-Israel hate-fest, featuring tips for destroying the Jewish state and speeches from notable anti-Semites."
Rutgers officials said the school received nearly 230 letters from Jewish activists across the country urging the university to cancel the forum. But they said that the event would go on "in the name of free speech." As a state school, Rutgers bestows public funding to Solidarity.
At the two previous conferences - at Berkeley, Calif., and the University of Michigan - pro-Palestinian rhetoric "crossed into virulent anti-Semitism," said Shai Goldstein, director of the New Jersey Anti-Defamation League chapter.