We, as students of Bowdoin College, do not have the ability to free Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Such a feat is only achievable through negotiation and diplomacy—efforts the Israeli government has actively sabotaged by shooting its own hostages in Gaza, repeatedly murdering ceasefire negotiators and relentlessly and indiscriminately bombing the Gaza strip.

However, as U.S. taxpayers, we have the ability—and moral obligation—to question and forcefully oppose our government’s unconditional support for the wholesale destruction of Palestinian life. Many of us at Bowdoin have understood and embraced this responsibility through passionate advocacy for Palestinian liberation and calls for Bowdoin to take basic steps to sever financial ties with entities implicated in genocide. According to the Bowdoin College Conservatives, it’s precisely because our college has been a site of anti-genocide advocacy that they decided to stage a production of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney’s racist play, “October 7.”

Anti-Palestinian bigotry has become a core part of the pro-genocide playbook on college campuses. It is exactly this hatred that motivated last night’s production, and it is a profound moral failing that it has not been challenged thus far. I wish I could call last night’s play an isolated incident, but it was not. Some months ago, I heard a member of the Bowdoin College Conservatives refuse to say the word “Palestinian” and instead describe the entire population of Palestine as “spear throwers.”

They continued this trend with last night’s play, which dehumanizes Palestinians. Palestinians only exist as militants and are then described in racist terms, as “savages” and “dark creatures.” The play’s creators have justified this language, with playwright Phelim McAleer telling Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Chava Pearl Lansky that “[savage] does seem like kind of an appropriate word, no?” Like these playwrights, Israeli officials have long voiced their disdain for the humanity of Palestinians: Palestinians are no more than “drugged cockroaches in a bottle,” “crocodiles” and “bloodthirsty animals.” Now, under the pretense of objectivity (promotional materials repeatedly stress that the script is based solely on verbatim accounts from Israelis) “October 7” is used to launder this same dehumanizing rhetoric.

But we should not just question how Palestinians are depicted in McAleer and McElhinney’s play. What the play doesn’t show is arguably more damning. The play never considers what it has been like for the 1.6 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza to grow up in an open-air prison, just miles from where their families were expelled from their homes, while Israel encourages non-Palestinians from around the globe to move and build houses atop their former villages. The play omits the half-century of illegal Israeli occupation, as well as the nearly two decades-long blockade. Not once does the play reference the frequent bombardments of Gaza during this blockade that preceded October 7 and killed 5,300 Palestinians.

To the playwrights, Palestinian suffering isn’t worth mentioning. After all, doing so would complicate McAleer and McElhinney’s embrace of racist Manichaeism, as voiced by war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2023 said of the genocide in Gaza: “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” Mentioning such suffering would also contradict their active denial of it—in a press release for the production at Bowdoin, Phelim said that “we want people to know what happened on October 7, and that there was peace on October 6.”

The play thus explicitly seeks to cast Israelis as perpetual victims and Palestinians as perpetual aggressors. The decision to start and end the play on the same day is not an innocuous choice—it is intended to erase the preceding century of denial of Palestinian self-determination and to excuse the past 23 months of Israel’s horrific genocide of the Palestinian people.

To the Bowdoin College Conservatives, nothing could possibly justify the events of October 7, but October 7 justifies the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinian people that has followed. Their equation of anti-genocide activism with October 7 denialism only holds if you view Palestinian lives as fundamentally less valuable than Israeli ones.

McAleer and McElhinney demand an exclusive focus on October 7, not out of respect for those killed or held hostage, but rather to deny, ignore and whitewash the unspeakable pain endured by the Palestinian people before and since that day. Ultimately, their omission of the Israeli state violence preceding and following October 7 means this play is more than a distraction. It is a piece of propaganda aimed to manufacture consent for an ongoing genocide, one made possible due to unrelenting support from the U.S. government.

Amid a ground invasion of Gaza City launched just this week, an ever-mounting death toll and a continuous stream of images, videos and testimony of unspeakable horrors perpetrated by Israel, this play is part of a concerted effort to get us to look away. To look away from images of emaciated children, videos of Palestinians burnt alive in their hospital tents by airstrikes and testimonies of those who have suffered or bore witness to these atrocities.

Americans’ support for or indifference toward this genocide is what greases the wheels of unconditional U.S. aid for Israel’s campaign to systematically destroy the Palestinian people. McAleer, McElhinney and the Bowdoin College Conservatives want to justify these atrocities, or at least muddy the waters enough that opposing genocide seems like an overly simplistic viewpoint. But they will not succeed. Every day, more and more Americans of conscience are speaking up to demand an end to the atrocities funded by our tax dollars. Among them are countless students, professors, staff and alumni of Bowdoin. Today, and every day, I am proud to be one of them.