Zareena Grewal, a Yale professor, has gained internet support after facing calls to fire her for a pro-Palestine tweet that referred to Israel as a “murderous, genocidal settler state.”
Grewal, an associate professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, tweeted for the first time on October 7, only hours after Hamas launched a full-fledged surprise attack on Israel.
The Palestinian militant organisation caught Israel off guard with a barrage of roughly 2000 missiles and dozens of ground attacks that killed at least 1200 Israelis and seriously injured another 2,600.
Grewal issued a flood of pro-Palestine tweets throughout the crisis, expressing her displeasure with the Israeli government.
Grewal’s Wikipedia page identifies her as a “historical anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker whose research focuses on race, gender, religion, nationalism, and transnationalism across a wide spectrum of American Muslim communities.”
Several research books on race, gender, religion, nationalism, and transnationalism have been written by the professor. The title of her first book is “an ethnography of transnational Muslim networks that link US mosques to Islamic movements in the post-colonial Middle East through debates about the reform of Islam.”
She has also produced the documentary ‘By Dawn’s Early Light: Chris Jackson’s Journey of Islam,’ which looks at the life of NBA star Mahmoud Abdul Rauf.
Grewal’s X (previously Twitter) bio defines her as a “Yale prof” and “radical Muslim.”
What did Zareena Grewal have to say about the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Grewal’s first post, on October 9, labelled Israel as a murderous state. “My heart is stuck in my throat.” Prayers for the Palestinian people. Israeli [sic] is a genocidal settler state, and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed resistance and unity. “#FreePalestine,” she tweeted, according to the Daily Mail.
“No government on earth is as genocidal as this settler colonial state,” the professor wrote in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement a few days later, once the heinousness of the Hamas attacks became clear.
She has also lately retweeted articles claiming that the Middle Eastern country has “mad bloodlust” and that supporters of the Jewish state would have “been posting ‘I stand with slave owners’ during rebellions.”
On October 8, she retweeted a news item about the deadly Hamas bombings with the message, “It’s been such an extraordinary day!”
