TUCSON, ARIZONA, March 29, 2011 (USA) -- Students at the University of Arizona made history last week by erecting the largest mock apartheid wall in the US to divide their campus for ten days.
Their aim was to cast light on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and US border enforcement policies targeting migrants and indigenous peoples. They had hoped to avoid any harm to the display, but those hopes were at once dashed to pieces in a shocking act of racist violence and vandalism over the weekend.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, Officer J. Cotton of the University of Arizona Police Department (UAPD) called in a report that the entire Palestinian-represented section of the mock wall was violently uprooted and strewn across the roadway of 3rd Street in a mesh of loose barbed wire and steel barriers.
The act followed numerous threats leveled against the wall and against the organizers throughout the week.
Bryan James Gordon, co-coordinator of AZ Jewish Voice for Peace and a Linguistics and Anthropology graduate student, witnessed an unidentified man who was irate over the material on the Palestine portion and threatened to “tear down” the wall if the students didn’t do it first.
“It’s pretty clear which element was responsible for this act of violence,” stated Gordon. “I don’t believe it was Minutemen, I don’t believe it was College Republicans, it was those motivated out of silencing the Palestinian voice or voices that present the Palestinian narrative. And we consider it a hateful act. The institutional response to call this act a ‘hate crime’ would be swift, indeed, if it the target was an exhibit about anti-Semitism.”
An official in the Dean of Students office, Kathy Adams Reister, has called the act “malicious” but will not make any further comment until all investigations are completed. Considering the number of security cameras in the area, the investigations should already be complete. In fact, police will not even release photos of the destruction given to them by witnesses at the suggestion of the Dean.
In a statement filed over the weekend and released Monday, addressed to the Dean of Students office from organizers of the ASUA Women’s Resource Center, AZ Jewish Voice for Peace, UA No Más Muertes, UA Students for Justice in Palestine, the students urge the Dean “to recognize the vandalism as racially motivated and to denounce the violence as a hate crime” targeting Palestinian people, culture, and society.
Students are emphasizing the vandalism as a violation of human and civil rights. Elizabeth Dake, UA student and Women’s Resource Center Health and Sexuality Chair, stated: “Had the violence perpetrated against the Palestinian section of the mock wall been carried out against a Black History Month memorial or a (LGBTQ) Pride Alliance demonstration, the vandalism would have been recognized as racist or homophobic. Unfortunately, mainstream US consciousness has yet to denounce attacks on Palestinian self-determination for what they are -- racist. Instead, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is veiled under the guise of a ‘complicated political issue,’ rather than being exposed for what it really is -- the racially motivated destruction of human life. The vandalism done to the mock border wall must also be seen for what it truly is -- a hate crime.”
M.A.
