To the University of California Community,
We write this statement as academic workers, students, faculty, alumni, and affiliates in Ethnic and Gender Studies programs across the UC system in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle against a genocidal military occupation. As we witness the atrocities taking place in occupied Palestine, many of which have been ongoing for the last 75 years, we have watched as our campus leadership continues to ignore and/or disparage the struggle of Palestinian people for liberation and against their annihilation. We do not condone violence toward Palestinian students from Zionist supporters on UC campuses, which took place in the last few days and in past instances where pro Palestinian solidarity rallies, meetings, or events have taken place. We condemn in the strongest possible terms the UC’s failure to create a safe environment for Palestinian students and their supporters. For example, people at UCLA have been shoved, hit, spit on, called derogatory names and violently harassed by Zionist students. The climate at the UC system is so hostile that one student had a knife to their throat, which didn’t elicit any of the usual public safety emails, texts or notifications. It is evident, at this time, that the UC system privileges the protection of those communities that benefit from their multimillion dollar military investments.
We hold the ongoing, 75-year occupation and settler colonial violence to blame for all violent struggle that is currently taking place on Palestinian lands. More specifically, we join a growing international chorus of voices holding the Zionist Israeli government accountable for the violence that we have witnessed over the last several days. Gazans have been living in the world’s largest “open air prison,” where they are subjected to daily acts of violence by soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). To blame anyone other than the Zionist Israeli government and its settlers mischaracterizes this struggle and fuels the ongoing violence. Although international law states that Palestians’ have the right to defend themselves in their ancestral homelands, it is evident these rights only apply to some.
To police Palestinian means of resistance and demand that they be perfect victims and resistant subjects is part of the genocidal campaign against Palestinians, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the reality on the ground. The obsession in Western media and academia with ‘condemning Hamas’ relies on an equivocation of violence between the oppressor and the oppressed. The loss of innocent life anywhere for any reason is abhorrent. To claim that the loss of civilian life on ‘both’ sides is commensurate in scale (how many have died) or degree (where they might have to flee, access to humanitarian resources) is effectively a re-articulation of ‘All Lives Matter’ in a wartime context, a moral truism uttered to distract from the ongoing extermination of a people. Yet, all this must be placed in the context of Hamas’ formation and maintenance, which are directly linked to the state of Israel. Hamas is a result of the systematic annihilation of other Palestinian resistance groups, including the withdrawal of support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, thus Israel is responsible for the retaliation of its own making. Without the occupation, Hamas would not persist. Without the systematic elimination of other resistance movements—some which may have been more palatable for the Western liberal, leftist, or supposedly decolonial academics—Hamas would not persist. In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu himself, without Israeli intervention, Hamas would not have survived. To equate Palestinian resistance with one group is to once more project imperial logics of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors onto a geopolitical reality that is far more complicated.
We call for all UC campuses, departments, scholars and staff to recognize that the Israeli government, through the use of bureaucratic violence, police and military surveillance, and legal discrimination have long enacted an apartheid state in which Palestinian life is disposable and Palestinian land ripe for theft. Let this be clear: Israel is an apartheid state. Since the 1948 Nakba, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing and forced removal of over 750,000 Palestinians from their own land and a redrawing of the Palestine/ Israel border, the Western world has been complicit in this colonial violence by refusing to name it as such. We, the undersigned, refuse to engage in the discourse of terrorism in regards to Palestinian struggle. We acknowledge that this fight for freedom is one against racist and ethnonationalist extremism.
The virulent spread of disinformation—unsubstantiated accounts of sexual assault and mutilated children—parroted at the highest levels of government despite media retractions, is nothing more than the regurgitation of centuries-old orientalist, colonialist, and Islamophobic tropes which work to manufacture consent to flatten Gaza. In fact, much of the recent misinformation we saw in the media was a manipulation of the atrocities committed against Palestinians, such as the Sabra and Shatila massacres.’ As stated by the Israeli War Minister—the Israeli government believes they are fighting animals, not people. Dehumanization is a common practice of settler colonialism in order to justify deeming colonized people as disposable epistemically and ontologically.
We strongly condemn the University of California's attempt to reproduce Western media’s narrative of ongoing violence in Palestine, which includes the victimization of Israeli women and children to manufacture consent for intervention and further violence against Palestinians. As scholars working at the intersection of Ethnic and Gender Studies, the current moment recalls for us the femonationalist rhetoric used to justify war with Afghanistan, when media outlets in government institutions called for U.S. intervention to save innocent women and children from terrorist forces. This statement recognizes and condemns the weaponization of this moment by other ethnonationalist and nativist movements like the Hindutva (or Hindu nationalism) to further Islamophobia and violence against Kashmiris (living under Indian settler colonial occupation) as well as Indian Muslims, who are facing an ongoing genocide in India. As they continue to rely on the circulation of Israeli and Western mis-and-disinformation, we reject their legitimization of such violence. We urge the community to practice critical media literacy when consuming mainstream media stories of violence against women and children committed by Palestinian resistors which serve to frame Palestinian freedom fighters as evil, monstrous “terrorists.” These justifications are ahistorical and erase the violence that racialized women and children face daily under occupation. Similarly, to globally label Palestinian rebels as rapists marginalizes a real, ongoing pattern of gendered violence against Palestinian women by Israeli Defense Forces as part of its ongoing occupation for the past 75 years. Are Palestinian women and girls not worthy of empathy, too?
As academic workers and educators, it is our duty to speak up about the injustices that we teach our students, despite the concerted, hostile climate of repression and doxxing being cultivated by Zionists, which is happening with the license of our university leadership. We ask, how can a community of scholars and university workers, in good moral conscience, teach our students to recognize patterns of propaganda and genocide but remain silent while these very patterns are being repeated by mainstream media and campus communications? We challenge the way Palestinian freedom struggle has been talked about under the rubric of terrorism while Israeli occupation and military violence goes unchecked with impunity and backed by billions of U.S. dollars, which includes UC funding. It is this narrative that has not allowed for the critical analysis needed to understand the Palestinian struggle as part of a legacy of anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, anti-capitalist fights for freedom.
As it attempts to reckon with its legacy as a land-grab institution, the University of California must also reckon with its complicity in ongoing settler-colonial projects in the United States and abroad. Land acknowledgements are not enough if they are empty signifiers. For the last decade, UC students in the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement have complied evidence of the UC’s complicity as an extension of war and policing through its technologies, weapons, and tactics that are spread throughout Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Mauna Kea, Somalia, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, native nations and reservations, Akwesasne of the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Nation, Chumash lands, San Diego, U.S. border lands, and Los Angeles. Through its University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP)—the UC’s main investment vehicle—the UC has some of its largest holdings in the investment management firm BlackRock, the world’s largest investor in weapons manufacturing and fossil fuel and Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world and a top supplier of both the US military and police forces. Corporations like BlackRock and Lockheed Martin profit from the military and the police’s slaughter of Black and brown civilians around the world. As we write this, Lockheed Martin stock is experiencing its best day in years amid the conflict – a big payday for the UC whose investments directly fuel military aggression and war crimes against innocents in Gaza and beyond.
This statement is nothing less than a call for Palestinian liberation. We refuse to use “both side” statements that equate the colonizer with the colonized. To equate the violence of the settler colonial project of Israel and by extension the U.S. and the West with Palestinian resistance is to intentionally forget the last 75 years of occupation–we as scholars refuse to do so and practice, in spite of the university, the act of bearing witness. We remember and become accomplices to liberation. At this time, we refuse any calls for “peace” which are just calls for the quiet submission of Palestinians to an early grave. As Kwame Ture taught us, peace is not liberation. We call on all UC faculty, students, affiliates, and organizations to divest from ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid at the hands of the government of Israel now.
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