the outside agitator

When I decided to study abroad in Israel, I didn’t know I had signed up to live in an apartheid state. An Israeli program promised to teach me about cross-border environmental cooperation on a socialist kibbutz, where politicized identities would dissolve through a shared concern for the environment. With little knowledge of the land’s history, I arrived in Palestine wearing green-tinted glasses.

Once I became friends with Palestinians and visited their homes in the occupied West Bank, I tossed those glasses out. What I saw was impossible to depoliticize. In Bethlehem, I beheld the 30-foot-high apartheid wall and saw Israel’s militarized power over Palestinians’ movement within their homeland. Driving from Ramallah to Nablus on segregated roads, I viscerally felt the terror of occupation as Israeli soldiers pointed their assault rifles at my friend. Israel could police every moment of his life simply because he was a Palestinian living in Palestine. There was no doubt I was witnessing apartheid.

During that semester, the Israeli military murdered journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, terrorized Palestinians praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, and bombed Gaza for three days. Every moment revealed another atrocity that Israel commits against Palestinians, not only with impunity, but with active support from my country. I was disgusted with the state of Israel and ashamed to be participating in a study abroad program that maintained the power Israeli Jews wield over Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Two and a half years later, Israel has escalated its project of ethnic cleansing by committing a second Nakba in Gaza, a catastrophe rivaling the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Israel has killed at least 186,000 people in Gaza since October 2023 and is starving the entire Gaza Strip, half of whom are children. The atrocities are endless. My disgust for Israel is second only to my disgust for the United States, whose military aid, political cover, and economic entanglements allow this modern-day Holocaust to continue in flagrant disregard for international law and the protests resounding from every corner of the world.

I am proud of UNC Students for Justice in Palestine for organizing in solidarity with Palestinians before October and with relentless devotion since. In March, I was honored to speak at a die-in organized by SJP, where members read the names of children killed by Israel with American bombs. I voiced my support for SJP’s demands that UNC join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement by ending its study abroad programs in Israel and divesting from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. I am ashamed that I studied abroad in an apartheid state, and I want UNC to feel that shame too as we see the horrific truth of what it means to financially and academically support Israel.

If I had known in January 2022 what I would learn over the next five months, I would not have studied abroad in “Israel.” I should never had had the option to study abroad in an apartheid state. UNC, it’s time to end your support for genocide and join the rest of the world in standing for a free Palestine.