Santa Clara’s Associated Student Government (ASG) sent an open letter on Feb. 9 addressing the Israel-Hamas war. The letter’s release followed a senate supermajority overruling of President Lilly Humber’s veto of an initial supermajority approval.

The original vote took place at a tumultuous open senate meeting on Feb. 1. In the same meeting, Senior Senator Lily Guggenheim, ASG’s only Jewish senator and President of the Jewish Student Union, resigned, citing that she “could not have [her] name associated with this letter in any way as a representative of the Santa Clara Jewish community.”

During the Feb. 1 meeting, proceedings included an open discussion regarding whether to publish the letter entitled “Addressing the Humanitarian Crisis Unfolding in Gaza.” Over 70 members of the Santa Clara community, including students, professors and members of the public, spoke in addition to the senators.

The open letter was written in response to President Julie Sullivan’s Oct. 15 email, “Safety and Belonging in our Community.” This was written in response to a letter from the Jewish Student Union requesting acknowledgment of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“She condemned both anti-semitism and Islamophobia, but she left out anti-Arab racism, which received some heat,” Humber said. “That email was specifically recognizing the lives lost in the Hamas attack on Israel and Israeli lives, and they had yet to send out anything that was addressing Palestinian lives lost after Oct. 7.”

After a closed senate session in November, a group of senators began penning the open letter. In late January, it was tabled for the senate to vote on its passage.

“We had more people than we’ve ever had,” Humber said about the open session during which the voting occurred. “It was intimidating, but that’s what it’s there for.”

In order to pass the open letter, the majority of the senate must vote in favor of sending the letter to the student body. It passed with a supermajority–over 2/3 of the senate–in favor. After this decision was made, Humber was given a week to pass through the legislation.

“I, along with most presidents in the past, am incredibly lenient about what we do or don’t veto because we respect the role of the legislative branch,” Humber said. “I ended up deciding on a veto, and my reasoning was not because of the beliefs in the letter. It was because I thought it should have been more resource-driven.”

Humber felt the letter needed more outlets for students to go to for support after reading it. Edits requesting more historical context on the displacement of Jewish people, uplifting on-campus clubs such as the Middle Eastern and North African club (MENA) and the Jewish Student Union (JSU) and further recognition of Israeli deaths were rejected.

After Humber vetoed the open letter, the senate overruled it with another supermajority, with one vote against. On Feb. 9, Humber sent the open letter alongside a Presidential Memo containing the veto statement in an email to the student body.

Humber, a Jewish student herself, stated that as she ran for her position on a platform of student safety, hearing during the open senate meeting that students would feel unsafe if the open letter was released encouraged her to publish her veto statement.

“I knew my veto was going to be overridden, but my hope was to get my voice out and say ‘I heard you,’” Humber said. “The Israel-Palestine conflict in the U.S. manifests itself as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, and I think in our capacity as student government, we need to give all those forms of discrimination an equal shake when they’re talked about in the same swoop.”