University of Minnesota President Admits Agreeing to Anti-Israel Terms to End Protest Despite Not Understanding Language

University of Minnesota interim president Jeff Ettinger told the state senate on Tuesday that he signed an agreement to appease pro-Hamas student activists and end their illegal occupation of the campus despite not understanding the inclusion of an Arabic word justifying the use of violence against Israel.

The protesters and the university reached an agreement last month to end a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment — a collection of tents in which the students lived for several weeks and refused to leave unless the administration agreed to boycott and divest from Israel. In a statement issued by the university, school officials used the term “thawabet,” a key component of the ideology of the anti-Zionist movement, which asserts its intention to eliminate Israel and establish a Palestinian state in its place.

“That was a mistake by our administration,” Ettinger told Sen. Ron Latz (D), who questioned him about the decision on Tuesday. “The way things transpired that day, we ended up doing the final versions of that document at five in the morning. Those had been the topics — I mean they were kind of characterized by the students as their ‘demands’ — we looked at them as topics. But clearly, I didn’t even know what that word meant, so clearly to repeat that word then in a communication back was a mistake by the administration.”

In 2010, a founder of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Bilal al-Hassan, explained thawabet in an interview with the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada.

Al-Hassan explained that the concept historically represents opposition to United Nations Resolution 181, a decision rendered by the nascent body in 1947 which partitioned British Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and led to the establishment of Israel the following year. Thawabet, he continued, was central to the founding charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a terrorist organization which evolved to be recognized as the official representative and governing authority of Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. For al-Hassan, “liberating” Palestinians meant reversing the 1947 settlement and expelling Jews from the area.

In 1996, the PLO — led at the time by Yasser Arafat — voted overwhelmingly to remove the call for mass terror and elimination of Israel from its charter to signal that it was negotiating a settlement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in good faith. At the time, Arafat had met in person with two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, as part of the Oslo Accords, a peace process that was fervently supported by former US President Bill Clinton. Arafat lobbied for the move, saying, as reported by The New York Times in 1996, that failing to do so would harm efforts to establish a Palestinian state.

This, al-Hassan told Electronic Intifada, was an ideological and tactical failure.

“The PLO was destroyed with the alteration of the charter,” he said. “The reason that the thawabet now play an important role in our struggle is that it is now an expression of a politico-historical position against the path of the negotiated settlement — that we usually refer to as the Oslo process — and against the Palestinian Authority’s engagement with this process, its departure from thawabet, and its retreat in the face of the ongoing Zionist colonization of our country. It goes without saying that goals of the struggle such as the return of the refugees and the liberation of the land and people are central pillars of thawabet.”

It is not clear why the University of Minnesota incorporated what has been understand to mean a call for violence and rejection of peace between Israelis and Palestinians into an official statement which, in addition to apologizing to the pro-Hamas protesters, granted them amnesty and promised a meeting with top school officials to discuss the possibility of divesting from Israel. Latz noted during Tuesday’s hearing that the students had clearly stated their support for terrorism during the May encampment.

“I didn’t know what that word meant,” Ettinger repeated.

However, the University of Minnesota has given intellectual harbor to extreme anti-Zionist views before, appointing earlier this month an anti-Zionist scholar, Raz Segal, as director of the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — a decision that Ettinger walked back after community organizations noted that Segal justified Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities less than a week after they were committed.

Ettinger, who was subjected to a faculty no-confidence vote revoking Segal’s appointment, will soon leave office. The University of Minnesota’s incoming president, Rebecca Cunningham, will be inaugurated in July.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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