This Tuesday, Furman YDSA and five other organizations released a joint open letter to the Furman administration and Board of Trustees demanding concrete action in solidarity with Palestine against the ongoing Israeli genocide. The signatory organizations—YDSA, the Furman Middle East and North Africa club, Afrikiya, the Furman International Student Association, the Environmental Action Group, and the Furman Pride Alliance—represent a broad cross-section of progressive social movements and marginalized communities at Furman. This coalition has united on the basis of programmatic unity around the following demands:

1. Pledge to never again send MayX or study abroad programs to Israel or facilitate internships with Israeli firms.
2. Open Furman’s financial records to the public and terminate all investments linked to Israel.
3. Formally distance the university from pro-Israel statements and release an official statement unequivocally recognizing and denouncing the Israeli genocide.

These demands are the product of lengthy deliberation between members of multiple organizations. It is fair to say that each signatory is committed to them wholeheartedly. They represent a critical merger between the existing the movement for Palestinian justice and the emerging movement for democratic socialism, in the sense that they simultaneously apply the principles of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement to conditions at Furman and point towards the issue of democratic control over our university’s finances. Any advance in this coalition’s fight for Palestinian liberation will advance Furman YDSA’s ongoing campaign for a democratic Climate Action Plan (which necessitates student-worker control over financial affairs), and vice-versa.

The difference between this coalition’s activities and the activities of the Furman Justice Forum is night and day.

While the six-member coalition was busy finalizing its plans on Monday night, the FJF released its own statement in an effort to pre-empt the impending open letter. We can only speculate as to the true reasons FJF decided on this course of action, but we know from communications with the group’s executive leadership that it was done with the knowledge that there was already a bold, action-oriented statement being prepared with the support of groups representing broad layers of Furman’s progressive student population. In that context, it is difficult not to interpret the FJF’s actions as cynical. Perhaps it alarmed the FJF to know that a consensus was emerging among student social justice and identity-based organizations without its input, but a thorough read of its competing statement should make it clear why the working group which drafted the coalition’s open letter did not approach the FJF during the drafting process.

The opening lines of the statement are telling: FJF refuses to use the word “genocide,” referring instead to the vague “actions of the Israeli government” which it describes as merely “leading to” the deaths of Palestinians. FJF then switches its focus to Hamas and the October 7th attacks—perhaps understandable on October 8th, but absurd and inappropriate 38 days, 12,000 murdered Palestinians, and 1.4 million Gazan refugees later—before remarking on the “complex” and “nuanced” nature of the situation. This would be equivalent to a statement about the Holocaust dedicating equal space to addressing the Nazi program of genocide itself and the retaliatory Koniuchy Massacre of German civilians by Jewish resistance fighters. Neither should be celebrated, but condemning one is a matter of moral imperative for all people of conscience while going to great lengths to condemn the other in this context can only serve to draw a false equivalence between the violence of a genocidal occupation regime and the desperate violence of its victims. In both cases, declaring the situation “complex” and “nuanced” to justify refusing to take a side is the height of moral bankruptcy.

FJF goes on to proclaim that “one of the most significant acts of justice we can do right now is to listen.” Listening is hardly ever the wrong thing to do, but it is hard to believe that it ranks anywhere among the most significant things we can do as people who do not face obliteration by a bloodthirsty colonial army and are in fact immersed in a sea of institutions directly or indirectly footing the bill for said colonial army’s world-historic killing spree. Nevertheless, FJF concludes its letter with a call to attend a meeting on Thursday to collaboratively “formulate a statement inclusive of all voices,” which might have led those reading prior to Thursday night to assume that the FJF’s commitment to listening could at least help generate something of political substance, perhaps even something emancipatory, with enough community input at the meeting in question.

Though there may well have been attendees who derived some personal value from the conversations that took place at FJF’s meeting, the event can only have been a profound disappointment for anyone who believed it had the potential to catalyze meaningful collective action. The primary purpose appeared to be to encourage us to exchange platitudes while discouraging discussion of how Furman students might wield our collective power to help turn the tide for Palestine. When the agenda finally turned to discussing action, “we” statements and normative statements were forbidden—attendees were repeatedly reminded to only speak in terms of what they were willing and able to do as individuals. Thought-terminating liberal cliches disorganized the flow of conversation before it went anywhere consequential. For instance, the sin of “speaking for others” was invoked against both the assertion that Palestinians do not see their own genocide as “nuanced” and a denunciation of the intimidation of faculty for being critical of Zionist narratives. At the end of the event, the presiding FJF executive unilaterally decided that it was not the right time to collaboratively draft a statement as had been promoted. One factor in this decision may have been the fact that a majority of attendees seemed likely to move to endorse the existing open letter, or at least draft a similarly strong anti-Zionist and action-oriented one if given the chance.

With the FJF choosing to situate itself in opposition to what might be described as the nascent organized left at Furman, it is time to ask what purpose its continued existence serves. Certainly not to live up to its name and serve as a vehicle for justice, not if it goes on refusing to take a firm stand for Palestine. The issue of anti-Zionism has separated the wheat from the chaff on the organized left across the country, easing the burden of identifying who is truly on our side and who is not by inviting them to do it for us. It appears poised to do the same at Furman. The six signatories of the November 14th open letter might all benefit from displacing the FJF by founding a true united front of organizations interested in pursuing justice by collective action rather than sinking into the mire of dialogue fetishism. Such a united front would act as a forum where its diverse member organizations could share skills, experiences, and resources to mutually strengthen one another. It would also act as a practical alliance based on the same kind of programmatic unity around which the coalition for Palestine revolves, allowing us to more effectively combine our forces to fight for student-worker power on campus and beyond.