Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) held a vigil on Oct. 7 “for the living, the martyrs and the land,” according to promotional flyers. The event, which drew around 40 attendees, primarily commemorated Palestinians killed since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

“Our intention for having this all-day vigil is to call attention to our vision of a liberated future that encompasses justice and belonging for all people,” said lauryn chew ’30, an SJP organizer and the event’s MC, who spells her name in lowercase. 

The vigil featured an installation of sticks, each representing “ten of the 20,000 plus children killed in the Gaza genocide since Oct. 7,” according to the display, alongside names and written artwork with messages including “We are on the right side of history!” and “Every martyr is a universe.” 

Heather Schechter ’27, who spoke at the vigil for JVP, said that “mourning the Gaza genocide” did not omit mourning those murdered on Oct. 7. “The Torah and the Talmud tell us that every life is a Universe,” Schechter said. “To kill a life is to kill a universe.”

Members from Stanford JVP spoke before two songs were performed by the activist group “Raging Grannies,” an organization composed of older women from across the Bay Area. More speakers from SJP followed.

Hillel at Stanford, the Jewish Student Association (JSA), the Stanford Israel Association (SIA) and Chabad at Stanford held a separate memorial the same day honoring both the hostages who returned home and those who were killed.

Stanford’s Hillel director Rabbi Jessica Kirschner said many Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community were using Oct. 7 to remember people killed at the Nova music festival, in their homes and workplaces and while attempting to protect others. “Even three years later, the wounds are still too fresh to ask the memorials to hold more than that,” she wrote. 

The pro-Palestinian vigil marked the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in which Hamas militants killed approximately 1,200 people and took 251 others hostage. SJP organizers said their event intended to focus on Palestinian deaths in the ensuing war while maintaining that Israeli civilian deaths were also tragic.

“It’s really just to draw a connection between October 7 and the lives that were lost after it,” SJP member Rain Zeng ’30 said. “We’re critiquing the Israeli government’s response to that event and we’re not saying the event itself doesn’t matter, or that the Israelis who died deserved it, or anything like that.”

Daanish Noor ’27, an SJP organizer, said the organization’s broader goal was “Stanford’s divestment from the genocide.” In Zeng’s view, the University “has institutional ties and reasons for partnering with corporations that contribute to genocide.”

Noor said he hoped the installation and all-day format would encourage students to come and “just look at the sheer atrocity.” 

Comparative literature professor David Palumbo-Liu — who wrote to The Daily on behalf of Stanford Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine — supported the vigil with other faculty members.

“Memorials often center on helping people commemorate painful events together, to think carefully about their significance and memorialize the dead,” Palumbo-Liu wrote. “Faculty, like everyone else, can be part of that process.”

Kirschner said the Oct. 7 date should be reserved to focus on the Israeli victims of the attack.

“October 7 remains a day of mourning specifically for the victims of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023,” Kirschner wrote to The Daily. “Attempts to make it something different, and especially to excuse or glorify terrorists and murderers as ‘martyrs’ on this day of all days is gross and cruel.”

“We respect all loss of life as tragic,” Zeng said. They added that SJP’s goal was to create a space to mourn Palestinian deaths, which they said were not otherwise adequately recognized on campus.

One Palestinian student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the conflict has shaped their entire life.

“It’s been three years for a lot of people, in their mind, but for me, the struggle against the occupation of Palestine, the colonization of Palestine, has been my whole life,” the student said. 

The student added that Palestinians on campus have felt their voice suppressed, and that their safety has not received the same institutional priority as that of others. 

“It feels like we’re less human,” they said. “It feels like our lives are not as important to them, and not as important to the world in general.”

On Oct. 11, 2023, the University released a statement in response to the Hamas attacks that “Stanford stands unequivocally against hatred on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, and other categories.”