Wake Forest students on the Hillel and Chabad student executive boards created an online petition early this week urging the administration to cancel an event scheduled for Oct. 7 featuring speaker Rabab Abdulhadi. The petition, which has garnered over 7,000 signatures, pushes for the event to be canceled due to claims of Abdulhadi spreading antisemitic rhetoric and supporting Hamas.   

The event, titled “One Year Since al-Aqsa Flood: Reflections on a Year of Genocide and Resistance,” will be held in the ZSR Auditorium on Oct. 7. The date marks the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israeli towns bordering the Gaza Strip, resulting in the death of 1,200 Israelis and the capture of more than 200 hostages. Israel’s counterattack has resulted in the death of over 40,000 Palestinians, according to the official Health Ministry.  

Five departments are sponsoring the speaker event — Wake Forest University’s Humanities Institute, the department of history, the department of politics & international affairs, the Middle East South Asian studies program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Chabad Student President Isabelle Laxer, Hillel Student President Andrew Orfaly, Hillel Treasurer Jake Shulkin, Chabad Executive Board Member Ben Sharon and Hillel Religion & Education Chair Maverick Cortes created the petition in hopes of gathering support for the event’s cancellation through digital signatures. 

“We felt we had to do something to draw attention, not just within our community, but also put pressure on those that have the power to make change,” Orfaly said.  

Abdulhadi is the founding director and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas studies program at San Francisco State University. She is also on the advisory board of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League and Campus Watch have denounced Abdulhadi for being antisemitic, pushing an anti-Israel agenda and promoting terrorism. She came under fire for organizing a virtual event on Zoom in 2020 featuring Leila Khaled — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which, like Hamas, is a designated foreign terrorist organization by the United States. Khaled is well-known for hijacking a commercial airplane in relation to this group in 1969. The virtual event was eventually canceled by Zoom for violating the platform’s terms of service.

In the first 48 hours of the petition being live, it surpassed 5,000 signatures. The Old Gold & Black could not confirm that Wake Forest students were the only signatories. The undergraduate population is made up of approximately 5,500 students. At the time of publication, the number of signatures on the petition surpassed 7,000.

“We know that a petition alone will not do anything. However, we believe it is a starting point of conversation and awareness,” Laxer said.

  According to the Director of the Humanities Institute (HI), Dr. Jennifer Greiman, the lecture was proposed by one of the HI’s interdisciplinary faculty seminars made up of seven faculty members from four different departments. The group researches the topic of “genocide and memory studies.” As the Israel-Hamas war continued, the seminar members felt it was necessary to examine the question of genocide in Gaza and engage with the work of Abdulhadi. 

“The seminar then put together a proposal, listing Dr. Abdulhadi’s qualifications and the importance of her scholarship to their seminar, which was evaluated and approved by the Humanities Institute’s faculty committee for co-sponsorship with other departments,” Greiman said. “Such co-sponsorship involves helping to pay travel, lodging, modest honoraria and other expenses.”

A member of the faculty seminar and Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Barry Trachtenberg, told the Old Gold & Black holding the event on Oct. 7 is an opportunity for scholarly growth. 

“Over the last 12 months we’ve heard the claim repeatedly that this was the worst of violence that Jews have suffered since the Holocaust, and I get that — I’m a scholar of the Holocaust; I am Jewish. Oct. 7 was an incredibly horrible day” Trachtenberg said. “We also must recognize that, since then, at least 42,000 Palestinians have been murdered, the vast majority of them being noncombatants. It is the largest loss of life in Palestinian history ever, and I believe that makes it worthwhile for us to be able to talk about it.”

He also expressed his disappointment in the statements being made against Abdulhadi.

“I have seen some of the comments on the petition, and it is heartbreaking to me to see such vile, racist, sexist, Islamophobic statements made without any kind of pushback against a highly respected scholar simply because she’s a Palestinian woman who speaks out about the experience of Palestinians living under Israeli rule,” Trachtenberg said. “I think there’s no place for that in a university setting. I think accusing her of being a terrorist supporter is an extreme form of Islamophobia.”

Greiman explained that she was slightly surprised by the reaction of community members towards the event.

“In the 13 years since the HI was founded at Wake Forest, it has demonstrated a deep and longstanding commitment to Jewish Studies scholarship at Wake Forest, funding about three dozen projects in the broad fields of Jewish studies […],” Greiman said. “I am surprised that there are members of our community who would deny the value of gaining such perspectives on Palestinian society and culture from a Palestinian scholar at this moment in time.”

Laxer and Orfaly shared their concerns that the content of the event would reflect antisemitic sentiments.

“Posters were put up with the Wake Forest logo onto our campus and were being seen by Jewish students,” Laxer said. “Jewish students were getting emailed about this event, and the language in the title was blatantly antisemitic and pro-Hamas. That’s when we felt like we needed to do something and that this event had ventured over from the realm of free speech into the realm of hate speech.”

Laxer continued to emphasize the positive responses that she has received from the petition since it has gone live. 

“I’ve felt like I have received an outpour of positive feedback from students feeling that their views have not been heard, and students who didn’t know this was even occurring and are now very upset and want to take action,” Laxer said.

The Old Gold & Black has reached out to administrators for comment and will continue to cover the development of the event. 

This is a developing story. The Old Gold & Black will update the article with any new information and statements.