To the Editor,
I was dismayed to read the September 12 letter to the editor by David Rullo, a Point Park alumnus and staff writer for The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. The ostensible purpose of Rullo’s letter was to criticize the journalism found in The Globe. Rullo picks apart two articles and line-edits grammatical mistakes and typos, as if he were the student-reporters’ professor. For an accomplished journalist to nit-pick the writing quality of student reporters in a public forum is inappropriate, disrespectful and unprofessional.
He could have easily offered such critiques through private correspondence. Such feedback, if given constructively in the safe environment of an email message or phone call could have been a valuable gift from a local reporter to students, who are still eager to strengthen their craft. Instead, Mr. Rullo’s public critique comes across as bullying, something for which we as a community should have zero tolerance.
While Mr. Rullo couched his letter as a critique of the writing quality found at Point Park’s student newspaper, the primary purpose of his letter seems to be to complain about The Globe’s publication of facts that challenge right wing perspectives on Israel, something that is rarely if ever found in his own newspaper. Mr. Rullo’s complaints, which focus on a Globe article about a lecture I gave on Palestine/Israel in April (which Mr. Rullo did not attend), are themselves riddled with factual errors and misguided, right-wing talking points. There are too many to respond to within the spatial confines of this newspaper, so I will address only the most glaring and dangerous ones here.
For starters, Mr. Rullo falsely claims that “‘Occupied Palestine’ does not exist” and that “the Palestinian territory is not a state and should not be classified as one.” This is nonsense, according to international law and longstanding popular understandings. Palestine has been recognized as a non-member observer state of the United Nations General Assembly since 2012. And “Palestine” has been used by its indigenous inhabitants (including, until 1948, its then small Jewish population), as well as most of the rest of the world, to refer to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for more than 2,000 years now.
Mr. Rullo also repeats a tired falsehood that “‘occupied’ hasn’t been a corrective adjective for [Gaza] since 2005, when Israel pulled its troops and residents from the territory.” According to the United Nations, Gaza and the West Bank are still both “occupied Palestinian territory,” meaning that Israel exercises military control over them. When I visited Gaza in 2015, I was greeted at the Erez crossing into the territory not by members of Hamas or any other Palestinian official, but by uniformed soldiers of the Israeli military who had the exclusive power to deny or grant my admission into the territory. The visa I needed to do so, moreover, was issued not by any Palestinian entity, but rather by the state of Israel.
Indeed, Israel (and on its border, Egypt) has controlled the movement of everything and everyone who wants to enter or leave the territory since it began its occupation in 1967. Israel’s occupation army, in coordination with the Egyptian military, has virtually paralyzed the residents of Gaza since 2007, prohibiting all but a tiny privileged few from ever exiting the territory, thus creating what many residents told me was effectively an “open air prison.”
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are permitted by Israel to leave the territory through Jordan, but even long before Oct. 7, the Israeli military has placed extreme limits on their movement within Palestine. Traveling from one Palestinian village to another usually means passing (or being denied passage) through inhumane Israeli military checkpoints. While Palestinians are not permitted to move freely in their own land, they are often not allowed to stay there, either.
The Israeli military regularly demolishes Palestinian homes under the pretense that they were not built with an Israeli-issued permit, permits that are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain. During my most recent trip, I witnessed Israeli soldiers bulldozing Palestinian farmland to make way for a new Israeli settlement. My colleagues and I met with an elderly man in occupied East Jerusalem at the ruined site of his house, which had been demolished just two days before.
Evidence of the occupation is everywhere in Palestine. To deny its existence is to erase from the map the lived realities of millions of people and the legitimacy of international law.
Mr. Rullo states that the current war in Gaza “is not a war of oppressors versus the oppressed. This is, instead, a war for the very existence of the Jewish people living in Israel and around the world.” Such a claim, while likely rooted in legitimate, generational trauma from the Nazi Holocaust and Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, is a gross reversal of reality. The scale and details of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza are disproportionately too vast and too grotesque to fit within any word limit. But suffice it to say that a growing consensus of human rights organizations and genocide scholars (including Israeli historians) have concluded that we are witnessing an unfolding genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people.
After almost every article went to print, I received death threats and online harassment. And I am not alone. Such weaponization of false accusations of antisemitism against people who express even the remotest criticism of Israel is on the rise across the United States. So, for Mr. Rullo to claim, in reference to The Globe’s coverage of Palestine/Israel, “these types of stories make Jewish students on campus less safe” is not just ludicrous but also dangerously irresponsible.
Threats against Jews are real, as we in Pittsburgh know all too well. Antisemitism exists and is on the rise, both here in the United States and around the world. But there is nothing inherently antisemitic about resisting, criticizing or, in the case of The Globe, printing factual information about a nation-state that has been occupying and eradicating an indigenous population for more than 75 years now. We need more of this kind of journalism, not less.
Robert Ross, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Literature, Culture, and Society
Department of Community Engagement and Leadership