Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Stanford RA Who Threatened ‘Zionist Students’ Resigns

(JTA) — A student at Stanford University who threatened to “physically fight” against “Zionist students” following Israel’s passing of legislation making Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people” announced that he would resign his post as a residential assistant.

In a Facebook post last month, Hamzeh Daoud, 20, wrote, “I’m gonna physically fight Zionists on campus next year if someone comes at me with their ‘Israel is a democracy’ bullshit. And after I abolish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abolish your petty ass ethno-supremacist, settler-colonial state.”

Daoud later amended the post to say “intellectually fight,” and added, “I edited this post because I realize intellectually beating zionists is the only way to go. Physical fighting is never an answer to when trying to prove people wrong.”

Daoud, an active member of Students for Justice in Palestine, identifies as a “third-generation Palestinian refugee.”  He is a graduate of the Amman Academy in Amman, Jordan.

In an op-ed statement to the Stanford Daily published on Friday, Daoud addressed his Facebook post and looked to the future.

“I bear with me trans-generational trauma that is beyond the confines of this statement,” Daoud said in noting that his grandparents took refuge in Jordan following Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. He called Israel’s passage of the nation-state law “yet another layer of trauma.”

“I acknowledge the language in my first post had a strong negative effect on many in our Stanford community. I apologize from the bottom of my heart to everyone who was triggered by it. I recognize that I was projecting my own trauma onto others in a way that is never acceptable,” he wrote in his statement.

He said he is entering trauma-based therapy with the Counseling and Psychological Services Center at Stanford.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.