After a long year of infighting, turbulence and turmoil, I expected the first Union Senate meeting I ever attended to be filled with bureaucratic logjams. What I didn't expect, however, was to find our elected officials, who are tasked with student advocacy, using loopholes of club overlap and redundancy to attempt to deny a group of students their essential identity and integrity. When a group named Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine comes before the Senate for approval, some explosive confrontations are to be expected. Detractors and supporters crowded into the Senate chamber as the discussion began. I expected a contested discourse in which strongly pro-zionist community members spoke of the fledgling group's purported terrorist ties. I expected strong emotional responses and high tension. Instead, the Senate both managed to offend and disappoint in other, more unexpected ways.

Several Senators took turns questioning if the purported club was redundant, given the existance of the Arab Culture Club or the Arab-Jewish Dialogue Group. To envision the absurdity of this argument, imagine the Union striking down the Russian Culture Club because Brandeis is a predominantly white campus and all white culture is the same. However, for Palestinians this slight is offensive to the level of calling Kurds merely Iraqi or Chechens merely Russian.

According to eminent Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi in his book The Iron Cage, the assertion of a Palestinian identity as separate from Arab has been long suppressed. In the British mandate period, as individuals began to view themselves as autonomous from the greater Arab world, the British took strides to deny this emerging identity. After a failed revolt in the mid to late 1930s, the notion of a separate Palestinian was brutally suppressed. The British partition took great pains to speak about a Jewish and an Arab partition rather than a Palestinian one. Since 1948 the whole Palestinian identity was to be subsumed by Israeli and Arab negotiators alike in an attempt to use their plight for political gain. For Palestinians, one of the greatest accomplishments of the past 60 years has been their acceptance in the eyes of the world as a group of separate status.

This brief history is presented in order to illustrate that the label Palestinian has been one of the most contested and fought for self-identities of the past half century. For our senators to openly ask Palestinian students if their purpose conflicts with an Arab culture club is a gross political statement that has been rejected by the international community as well as in Israel and the United States.

A senator was quoted this week as saying that if a group advocating for justice in Kosovo had come to be chartered, he would have struck it down because Kosovo does not objectively exist. Yet, it is not our senators' role to make such political judgments, their insipid amendments about Iran or Israel's 60th birthday included. Instead, as long as there are enough students hoping to advocate for their narrative and share their perspective, our senate should not discriminate. Doing so exposes senators' attempts to force compliance with their particular worldviews.

Most importantly, doing so directly undermines the Union's purported role in advocating for student rights. How can our Student Union have any legitimacy in protecting us from administration usurpations when they are the main force denying students the legitimacy of their very identity?

Indeed, the comments became so rancorous that even though debate was cut off due to quick parliamentary maneuvering, the students offended came back later in the meeting to voice concerns about their treatment. The senators involved complained that they felt personally under attack in the process, but they were clearly the ones at fault. Students should find the Senate a body representative of their views; instead, they found their elected officials declaring that, in their eyes, they did not exist.