On a recent afternoon in Queens, Secretary of State John Kerry sat with Israeli and Palestinian representatives, chatting amiably. “It’s great to see you two side by side,” Kerry said to the delegates. “Now, have we agreed about these land swaps?”
The Israeli and Palestinian smiled and nodded — a historic agreement had been reached; it seemed there might be an end to the crippling decades long stalemated conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
But then the class period ended.
John Kerry, peeling off a nametag, introduced herself as Rachel Olshin, a Jewish student at Queens College. The Israeli delegate revealed herself as a young Muslim named Amer Ashraf. The Palestinian delegate was a Jew and onetime soldier in the Israeli army, named Jeremy Pitts. The three students were participating in a semester-long simulated peace process at City University of New York’s Queens College, one of a number of measures taken on that campus to ease religious and political tensions.
It is a scene that is markedly different from what has been taking place at four of CUNY’s other senior colleges in recent months. Student interactions on the Middle East have transformed several CUNY campuses into battlegrounds for pro-Palestinian and Zionist groups — sparking a heated debate about both free speech and the boundaries between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
The activist group Students for Justice in Palestine, a registered student organization, stands accused of anti-Semitism by the Zionist Organization of America. Right-wing politicians like State Assemblyman Dov Hikind are demanding that CUNY shut down the group, while free-speech advocates and SJP’s defenders worry that SJP is simply being silenced for speaking out against Israel. Amid this, the New York Senate at one point even threatened CUNY with massive defunding for, in its view, failing to respond adequately to alleged incidents of anti-Semitism.
In this politicized debate, one major CUNY school, possibly the city’s most diverse, has been left out of the heated discussions — Queens College.