If diplomacy requires me to shake hands with those who allow me to be hated, I will be a diplomat no more

(Note: this essay is still in the editing process so it may seem to be missing parts or have underdeveloped ideas.)

“At the camp gate we were greeted by a sign reading, “Arbeit macht
den Menschen frei,”--work will set you free.
It soon dawned on me that the sign meant that
laboring in this murderous camp frees you and strips
you of your humanity.”
-My great-grandfather, Opa, upon his arrival to Bergen-Belsen
from his privately published memoir To My Dear Children

There is a sign in the Palestinian Club room at Hunter that says, “History Repeats: Look What Hitler Taught Some of His Victims.” The letters on the sign are dripping, as though of blood. Under the copy is a star of David morphing into a Swastika. That’s right, not an Israeli flag morphing into a Swastika or Ariel Sharon learning from Hitler--a Magen David--the emblem of Hitler's victims, the Jews, on the sign.
I know this because I saw it. I walked into their club space one day after hearing about the sign and saw it up close. My heart sped up, my breathing stopped, and my eyes were trying not to look at the one thing they couldn’t stop looking at.
My grandmother spent her young teens barely living in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in northwestern Germany, during the Holocaust. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “50,000 Jews and other prisoners died of disease, brutality, starvation, and sadistic medical practices” at Bergen-Belsen. My grandmother and her family were some of the few fortunate survivors. My grandfather’s entire family was killed when their shtetl in Lithuania was massacred during the Holocaust.
I tried to consider the possibility that the people who made the sign and the club who hung it on their clubroom wall hadn't realized what it might be like for a grandchild of Hitler's victims to see a sign that calls her Hitler. Maybe the Palestinian Club didn't mean to call me a Nazi, but intended, rather, to make a political statement. Of course, while I had to consider that, I feel that regardless of their intent, they took it too far.
After months of going back and forth between the Leadership Council for Jewish Student Life, the Palestinian Club leadership, and Dean Escott, we finally had a meeting at which two delegates (me and Steve) were going to tell the Palestinian Club how we felt about their sign and have them vote on the necessity of having it hanging in their room.
I was waiting in Room TH 105 with Steve Yuniver, the president of HIPAC, for the Palestinian Club to come and begin the meeting at which they were supposed to vote on the fate of the sign hanging in their club room. Palestinian Club members trailed in a few at a time until we were really just waiting for the leadership to arrive.
I saw Dean Escott walk in with the Palestinian Club leaders and sit down at the head of the three small, round tables we had pushed together. He put a copy of an article I wrote for CampusJ on the table and addressed me concerning it. Apparently, there is a difference between a legal right and a moral right. I wish I would have known about this when the first issue--that of the sign in the Palestinian Club room--came up. Now that I’ve been thinking about it a lot, I think I can remember him telling me and another Jewish student that while it may not be morally right for the sign to be up there, it is legally right. This time, however, I got the flipside of the argument.
I explained to him that as this is an issue that pertains to all students on campus, all students had a right to know what was going on. When I was at that meeting last semester, I was there as a representative for the Jewish community, not for myself alone. It was well understood at the beginning of the meeting that we Jewish leaders would leave and report back to our community and that the Palestinian Club leadership would report back to their club.
Then Dean Escott told me that it was wrong of me to make this known to people in other schools, too. What I didn’t say but should have was that if there is something that he doesn’t want other people knowing about it should be a situation. It’s okay that I left that out, though, because there is so much more I did say on the topic.
I told him that when we originally approached him, he explained to me that he was aware of the situation, but that the Palestinian Club had a right to free speech. He then warned us that if anyone were to rip the sign down he would be the one in a position to expel the student and he wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Our meeting lasted no more than 5 or 10 minutes.
I didn’t end there, though. I went on to explain that near the end of the meeting that Jerrell Robinson moderated between us and the Palestinian Club, he and Dean Escott were trying to convince me and the HIPAC officers present that maybe it was time we “looked beyond the sign” and worked with the Palestinian Club anyway. They implied that we were being silly in getting worked up over the situation and should act mature and swallow our misgivings. I felt that I was being told that I didn’t have a right to be offended by the sign and that my feelings about it were not being allowed validity.
“And that, Dean Escott, is discrimination.”
He argued that he worked hard to make that meeting between us and the Palestinian Club possible, but I could argue strongly against that. When we first went to him he really had no interest in getting involved. I think he saw it as a student affair to be settled between the students. It was when I saw Dean Schachter, the Dean for Diversity (God bless her!), that I was told that the President’s office had only recently been made aware of the issue and that a meeting would happen very soon--she’d have Dean Escott on it.
Between when I saw the sign hanging on the wall of the room until today, three months later, my intolerance for it has grown. Originally, some friends criticized me for not being enraged enough (others, of course, thought I was nuts to get excited). But I figured then that it was just a sign. Words don’t mean the world and I haven’t seen the students who hung it up attack any Jewish students yet. But then I tried doing something about the situation and felt that I kept running up against a brick wall. The Palestinian Club wasn’t as cooperative as I would have liked and the Dean of Students did not have any interest in helping us arrive at a conclusion until an authority above him made him get involved.
I started wondering if the sign had been a direct attack on any other minority, whether it would have been considered as acceptable as this one. It doesn’t seem very likely that if the Conservative Club had a Confederate Flag with racist slurs painted onto it, or a sign proclaiming that all practitioners of Islam are suicide-bombing Fundamentalists, that it would still be around.
I am a strong believer that it is not history that repeats itself but human nature that doesn’t change. When we stop allowing a group of people to feel a certain way, and strip their feelings of validity, we are not too far from not considering them as human as we are.
While at a recent conference, I heard Rachel Fish of the David Project speak about a similar situation she faced at Harvard Divinity School when she was a graduate student there. She said she found herself having to say, “words have consequences, so it does effect me,” to people who thought she was overreacting. I think she’s right. The sign my Opa was greeted with at Bergen-Belsen was just a sign. The sign in the Palestinian Club room is just a sign. But pictures speak a thousand words and a person’s reaction to a picture speaks even louder about their society.