Rutgers University brought a CAT bulldozer to our Gaza Solidarity Sukkah
October 23th 2024
Anti Zionist Minyan – New Jersey
Rutgers University brought a CAT bulldozer to our Gaza Solidarity Sukkah
On the morning of October 23rd, the NJ Anti-Zionist Minyan, a primarily Rutgers-based community organization of Anti-Zionist Jews, built a sukkah on College Avenue to honor our religious obligations during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. We held a banner reading “Jews Against Genocide. Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” facing the Rutgers Hillel building — a Zionist organization which Rutgers normalizes and empowers to effectively control Jewish life on campus.
Immediately after construction began, an administrator arrived to demand we take the sukkah down. Within minutes, six police officers arrived. Within an hour of us first erecting the structure, the Rutgers administration sent a Caterpillar bulldozer, ostensibly to demolish it.
For decades, Caterpillar has been supplying Israel with the D9 armored bulldozer, which the Israeli military routinely uses to demolish Palestinian homes and civilian infrastructure. Furthermore, CNN recently published a disgusting article crying about the mental health of those IOF soldiers carrying out genocide in Gaza, quoting Guy Zaken admitting to running over Palestinians “dead and alive, in the hundreds” with a CAT D9.
We responded with outrage at the sick irony of our administration sending an actual bulldozer from this very same company to destroy our sukkah. In reaction to our response, facilities removed the CAT and instead destroyed our sukkah by hand, throwing its dismantled parts into the back of a truck, to be brought to police headquarters along with our Palestinian flag. We chanted L’chaim intifada! Long live intifada! We honor the struggle for liberation from oppression by colonization, in every age, from our ancestors to those who fight for freedom in the present day. Palestine will be free, and the world will be free from colonization and oppression.
It is our right to practice our religion freely without repression at Rutgers, a public university!
Zionist organizations, such as Chabad-Lubavitch, have been allowed to construct sukkot on the very same street and pass out flyers through the entire holiday. We, purely because of our stance against genocide and Zionism, face police harassment and the destruction of our ritual objects and property.
The university hides behind its “free expression guidelines,” just as it hides behind its claim that it represses Palestinian solidarity expression in order to “protect Jewish students.” We know both are falsehoods.
The Rutgers Endowment Fund remains invested in Caterpillar, including in its $100 million investment in the PGIM-Quantitative Solutions (US) fund as well as other corporations aiding the Zionist entity in its genocidal war against Palestine and Lebanon. We are reminded that Rutgers’ repression of our Jewish ceremony reflects its commitment to upholding the status quo of a Zionist minority, not to combat ntisemitism.
