HUNTER COLLEGE–Palestinian, Indigenous and Arab students openly condemned a divisive video created by a Hunter graduate professor amidst the 75-year-long apartheid in Gaza, intensified by the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
In a video uploaded to social media on Oct. 18 titled “Dear Hamas,” Tamy Ben-Tor, an Israeli professor in Hunter’s Master of Fine Arts program, wore a mask portraying the caricature of an Arab man. The video’s existence, originally brought to light by Hunter student group Palestinian Solidarity Alliance (PSA), was taken down from Instagram and is now only available on Ben-Tor’s YouTube channel. The video has since sparked an immense wave of backlash within the Hunter community, with some students taking to social media to demand Ben-Tor’s termination as a faculty member.
“I am still on the fence about the massacre of babies, on the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies, and on the other hand…,” said Ben-Tor in the video. “I’m sure you’ll support our LGBTQ library that we’re building, the women’s rights movement that is offering our full support to you, dear Hamas….brave men who invaded a colony and massacred the ‘innocent’ babies and raped the ‘innocent’ women of that colony.”
