The Technion-Israel’ Institute of Technology rejected the contention of Zionist student groups that the school allowed an on-campus exhibit honoring Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar.
The exhibit, “One City and Two Nations,” by Technion student Mohammed Haidar was displayed at the Haifa school’s Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. It closed on June 19.
Student groups Btsalmo and Im Tirtzu took credit for its removal. The Technion insisted that the exhibit was taken down as scheduled and it was unrelated to pressure brought to bear by their accusations.
Btsalmo and Im Tirtzu took issue with part of the exhibit that presented a timeline of events leading to violence in the Israeli city of Lod during the May 2021 IDF “Guardians of the Wall” operation in the Gaza Strip.
The groups were incensed by an image of Sinwar with the caption, “Hamas threatening the Israeli government with rockets if they don’t stop their violations in the Aqsa Mosque.”
“While soldiers are giving up their lives in Gaza, the Technion is presenting a final project that is all incitement. We demand immediate removal of the exhibition and punishment for all those involved,” Im Tirtzu stated in a June 19 press release.
Btsalmo CEO Shai Glick, quoted in the release, said, “I call on the Technion to remove the inciting exhibition immediately.” He urged the permanent removal of the students and faculty who participated in the project and even criminal prosecution for all those involved.
The Technion defended itself vigorously against the allegations. Technion spokeswoman Doron Shaham messaged JNS in a June 23 email: “The publication distributed by the ‘B’Tsalmo’ and Im Tirtzu movements presents a distorted and biased picture of the exhibition, knowingly misrepresents the truth, and aims to incite.”
JNS reviewed the section of the exhibit, and the Technion appeared to be correct. While the exhibit included Sinwar’s picture and a threat he had made, it didn’t seem to glorify him.
The exhibit did, however, espouse a pro-Palestinian narrative, adopting terminology heavily weighted to one side, such as its claim that religious Zionist Jews aimed “to Judaize the Palestinian old center of Lod.” It also referred to “Jews armed to the teeth and under the protection of the Israeli police” and the “martyrdom of Musa Hassuna.”
Hassuna, 32, an Arab Israeli, was shot dead on May 10, 2021, during the Arab riots in Lod. Israeli police arrested five Jewish suspects but concluded they acted in self-defense. It was at night and the shooters first fired warning shots in the air. There was “a concrete and real fear of injury …, this incident was carried out in self-defense,” prosecutors concluded.
The exhibit neglected to mention Yigal Yehoshua, 56, a Jewish resident of Lod, whom Arab rioters was stoned on May 11. He died from his injuries on May 17.
Shaham noted in a July 10 letter to JNS that the exhibit had nothing whatsoever to do with Oct. 7 (an unnamed Technion architecture student quoted in the Im Tirtzu press release called the exhibit “a slap in the face of the bereaved families, families of the hostages, and the combat soldiers in the field”).
Shaham wrote, “The student’s project was submitted last year, long before October 7th and the Operation Swords of Iron war.”
Glick told JNS that it’s true the exhibit predated Oct. 7, “but also long before October 7 Hamas was murdering people. … It was sending rockets into Israel by the thousands.”
Shaham said Btsalmo and Im Tirtzu unfairly focused on a narrow section of the student’s project, which “actually dealt with architectural solutions to reduce tensions in a multicultural city. The project focused on the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod to demonstrate how architecture can enable open dialogue by creating urban spaces for the expression of different opinions.”
According to a description of the exhibit on the Technion website, one of the architectural solutions offered to reduce tensions and provide for different opinions is the creation of city “protest spaces.”
For Glick, the narrative presented in the exhibit is completely off-base. “It’s not a different opinion when someone is trying to kill me,” he said.
“In ‘Guardian of the Walls,’ it was radical Muslims coming to kill. They came to Lod, to Acre. The first thing they did in Lod was pull down the flag of Israel and put up a Palestinian flag. Then they started to kill people. And they [Technion students and faculty] are saying, ‘Oh, it’s not killing. It’s only conflict.”
Exhibits like “One City and Two Nations” help normalize terrorism, Glick argued. With its wording about the Judaization of Lod, it is expressing support for a worldview that excuses and even encourages violence.
“A guy who comes to stab a Jew is the end of a long process. He comes because he knows there is support behind him from his family, his group, his community. It’s this support that’s most important. And it’s this support that I want to cut off,” Glick said, explaining why he was adamant that the students and faculty involved in the exhibit be removed from the school.
Shaham referred to Btsalmo as a “hate group” engaging in a “fake news campaign designed to damage the Technion and incite against its Arab students.”
Glick rejected the accusation, saying he works on behalf of victims, whether they be Arabs or Jews.
“The biggest victims of terror in the world aren’t Jews or Christians, it’s Muslims,” he said. “I want Arabs to be part of Israel, but if you support Musa Hassuna, if you support Yahya Sinwar, if you support Hamas, no way.”
He said Technion students overwhelmingly support his position and while his group didn’t have a presence at the Technion prior to this, it recently opened a branch there.
Glick noted that he’s a member of the Israeli government’s “Unit for the Coordination of the Struggle Against Racism,” an official body battling ethnic hate.
Asked by JNS to elaborate on why it considered Btsalmo a hate group, the Technion declined to comment.