Fawzy has seen the conflict firsthand. As a high school graduation present in the summer of 2009, Fawzy was given a trip to visit family in Ramallah, in the West Bank. She says her family was detained for hours at the airport in Tel Aviv. "And we were questioned, simply because we're not Jewish," she says.
Once she arrived in the West Bank, she saw the "horrors of occupation." There were paved roads that only Israelis could travel on, while Palestinians navigated over dirt and gravel. Some mornings, she woke up to find that her family's house had no water, while Jewish settlements half a mile away enjoyed lush, green lawns. At a checkpoint on the way to Jerusalem, Fawzy watched Israeli soldiers treat her mother with contempt, scanning her passport and then throwing the document back into the older woman's lap. "It's an 'I'm the boss of you' attitude," Fawzy says. "Very disrespectful."
Monica McGivern
"I think it's anti-Semitic. I think it's anti-Israel. I think they put hate on my door," says Jewish student and Israel advocate Rayna Exelbierd.
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By the time she arrived at Florida Atlantic University, Fawzy was a devoted Palestinian advocate. FAU is a largely commuter school not known for campus activism. Three years ago, the most active political group on campus was the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. But there's been a minor political awakening: The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender group held rallies this past school year, as did the College Democrats. Other students protested budget cuts.
Fawzy discovered that the college had a Palestinian American Organization, but it was more a cultural group than a political one. "I didn't think it was advancing the Palestinian cause," she says. So last year, she decided to revamp the club as a part of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group with 75 chapters across the country. In Boca, Fawzy found about 20 dedicated supporters. She says there are more Jewish members of the club than Palestinian ones.
The three leaders of the club — Fawzy, Aleksinko, and Schneider — vehemently deny that they want Israel to cease to exist.
"We're pro-Israel," Schneider says. "It's just the Israeli government and what they're doing to the Palestinians."
"We all believe in a just solution for Israelis and Palestinians," Fawzy adds. "We all believe in the Palestinian refugees' right of return." (To many pro-Israel advocates, the right of return implies an end to the Jewish state. If millions of displaced Palestinians return to the country, they could outnumber the Jews there.)
Fawzy envisions a one-state solution in which people would live together freely, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. "Everyone is equal," she says. "There's no occupation."
In September, the group held a rally to support Palestinian self-determination. In late February, for Palestine Awareness Week, it erected a replica of what it called the "apartheid wall" — the security wall erected by the Israeli government to separate Israel from the West Bank.
And this spring, it heard about Palestinian clubs at Harvard, Yale, and Tufts universities having demonstrated by posting mock eviction notices on students' dorm rooms to raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians living in the occupied territories outside Israel. Group leaders decided to copy the idea.
So they whipped up the fliers, which looked liked eviction notices but also had some explanatory text. They read: "The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions reports about 25,000 homes have been destroyed by Israeli military forces since the Occupation of Palestine began in 1967." They quoted Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch: "The Israeli government is depriving Palestinians of the right to live in their own homes."
The fliers also included a reference to Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American activist who was killed in 2003 while she acted as a "human shield" and stood in the way of a bulldozer that was demolishing a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government has insisted her death was an accident, that the driver of the bulldozer could not see her. The eviction notice described Corrie's death but not Israel's explanation of it.
The students had Artie Jamison, associate director for residential life at FAU, approve the fliers. (Jamison confirmed that she approved them but would not comment further for this article.) And on March 30, they walked up and down the halls of three dorms, spending about three hours posting 200 eviction notices on doors — randomly, they insist.
That evening, Rayna Exelbierd returned from a campus Shabbat service to find the eviction notice on her dorm-room door. A friend ripped it down. Exelbierd scanned the hallway. She didn't see any other fliers on neighboring doors. "I felt targeted," she says.
For Exelbierd, the far-off conflict in the Middle East is deeply personal. The 20-year-old has attended pro-Israel summer camps most of her life. She has visited Israel four times. After graduating high school, she spent a "gap year" there on a program run by the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. She returned again this December on a trip run by the right-leaning Zionist Organization of America. This was no tourist jaunt. Exelbierd says she dated a general in the Israeli Defense Forces. She met Jewish settlers who were evicted from homes they built in Palestinian territories "for reasons of peace and security," Exelbierd says. The Israeli government and the Obama administration have criticized settlers for thwarting the peace process, yet Exelbierd considers them heroes.
