April 29, 7:26 p.m.
A group of about 20 people with Israeli flags congregated on the northern end of the Main Quad, at around 6:30 p.m. The Daily Illini had a conversation with group member Ethan Morady, a junior in Business, who identified as a Jewish and Israeli University student. Morady did not consider the group to be a counter-protest.
DI: Why did you guys decide to congregate here on the Quad today?
Morady: I started over there (the southern end of the Main Quad), just because I wanted to hear what they were kind of talking about. I came for a little bit yesterday, to also kind of hear what they were talking about, then I was at the (protest) at Alma Mater. Because like, as a Jewish student, as an Israeli student, this isn’t an issue I take lightly. This is something I take a great deal of effort into learning as much as I can, really understanding every issue at hand because it’s not something light. There are a lot of people dying, and some of those people are my family, some of those people are their family. And it’s not okay.
DI: This group here, are you guys a part of any organization here on campus?
Morady: I guess it looks like a little bit of a collection. There’s a little bit of the Jewish community here, there’s some people from Hillel, some people from Chabad.
DI: Is there any message you would like to share with us here?
Morady: They’re not the first people to come after us. They won’t be the last, unfortunately, but like, we just want them to know that we’re happy about being Jewish and we’re not going anywhere.
One thing I will share, which is the reason I disdain some of these protests, like theirs over there, is because I feel bad for the Palestinian people. I do. They don’t have a lot of resolve, they don’t have a lot of future. But it’s not really because of the Israeli government. They conflate it with the Israeli government because it’s an easy cop-out. If they actually want to change, they’d pull out Hamas, they’d pull out the Islamic regime, the PIJ, Ismail Haniyeh, and the rest of the so-called Palestinian leadership that has turned Gaza into a cesspool of terrorism and devastation.
If the leaders of Hamas, and the PIJ and the Palestinian people actually cared, they wouldn’t have made themselves billionaires off of the suffering and pain of the Palestinian people. Hamas does this constantly, where they provoke Israel just so that Israel will respond, and they have more news stories. It’s the reason why in Israel, every single house has a bomb shelter in it — in the side of the roads, there’s bomb shelters everywhere. In Gaza, they have nothing, because Hamas just uses all the supplies and stuff for themselves.
I’ve said this before, as a Persian, my grandparents are from Iran. I love the Persian people, culture, society, all about it. What I don’t love, and what I can understand, is that it’s the Ayatollah and the Islamic regime that is ruining my country and my homeland. They’re the reason I can’t go back and see where my grandparents are from.
What bothers me is that (the protesters) can’t separate Ismail Haniyeh from the regular Gazan people, and that’s the major difference. A lot of these Palestinians and Gazans are stuck. But if you continuously support and love Hamas … and Gaza, and the West Bank and all these other places, they will have no resolve.
I’ll say this too. I don’t like Netanyahu (and) Ben-Gvir. They’ve also profited on radicalizing parts of the Israeli public, and they need to go too. But if you’re putting sole blame on Israel, you’re not looking in the right spot. But that’s just my two cents.
