An Invitation by Tenured Faculty at Princeton to Divest from Companies Profiting from Israeli Occupation

An Invitation by Tenured Faculty at Princeton to Divest from Companies Profiting from Israeli Occupation

An Invitation by Tenured Faculty at Princeton to Divest from Companies Profiting from Israeli Occupation

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The below petition was published in the Daily Princetonian.]

The following petition was begun by five faculty members in History and Near Eastern Studies and now has the following signatories. This ad serves both as an announcement of the petition to the community and as an invitation to the tenured faculty across the university for their support. If you would like to sign the petition, please send an email to: […]. The petition will be presented to the university administration before Thanksgiving.

Deeply concerned about the brutality of Israeli military rule over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as well as the ongoing Israeli military and economic siege of Gaza, we are Princeton faculty who can no longer remain silent.

The State of Israel has occupied the West Bank for nearly half a century in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Repeated Israeli military engagements in Gaza - in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014-have been condemned by many, including the United Nations, for Israel`s disproportionate use of violence against civilians. Moreover, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue expanding. As of 2012 there were over half a million settlers and this August, just days after the conclusion of hostilities in Gaza, the Israeli government seized nearly 1000 acres of land near Bethlehem. This seizure was the largest since the 1980s and drew a sharp rebuke from the United States government.

It is time for Princeton University to join the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Mennonite Church, the Quaker Friends Fiduciary Corporation, and Teachers Insurance and Annuity (TIAA-CREF), and divest from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continued siege of Gaza. The Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church have divested their holdings of Caterpillar because its equipment is used to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank; of Motorola because it provides the State of Israel with a communication network, a surveillance system, and electronic bomb fuses used in the occupation regime; and of Hewlett Packard which sells its products to the Israel Defense Forces and provides bio scanners that are used to profile Palestinians and track their movements.

We, the undersigned tenured faculty, therefore call on Princeton University to divest from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank until the State of Israel complies with UN Resolution 242, ends its military occupation of the West Bank and lifts its siege of Gaza.

We do so united by our conviction that moral pressure from the international community can help to bring about political transformation in the region as well as to support the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis to live in lasting peace and security.

The five faculty members who started the initiative are:

1.         Molly Greene

2.         Michael Laffan

3.         Gyan Prakash

4.         Cyrus Schyegh

5.         Max Weiss

The undersignatories of the published ad are:

6.         Peter Andolfatto;

7.         Benjamin Baer;

8.         John Borneman;

9.         Graham Burnett;

10.       Eduardo Cadava;

11.       Vera Candiani;

12.       Miguel Centeno;

13.       Zahid Chaudhary;

14.       Isabelle Clark-Deces;

15.       Andrew Cole;

16.       Linda Colley;

17.       Angela Creager;

18.       Andrew Dobson;

19.       Esther da Costa Meyer;

20.       Benjamin Elman;

21.       Richard Falk (Emeritus);

22.       Hal Foster;

23.       Eddie Glaude;

24.       Josh Guild;

25.       John Haldon;

26.       Abdellah Hammoudi;

27.       Thomas Hare;

28.       Tera Hunter;

29.       Amaney Jamal;

30.       Kevin Kruse;

31.       German Labrador Mendez;

32.       Meredith Martin;

33.       Douglas Massey;

34.       Pedro Meira Monteiro;

35.       Zia Mian;

36.       Erika Milam;

37.       Naomi Murakawa;

38.       Nick Nesbitt;

39.       Gabriela Nouzeilles;

40.       Chika Okeke-Agulu;

41.       Serguei Oushakine;

42.       Elizabeth Paluck;

43.       Imani Perry;

44.       Gayle Salamon;

45.       Kim Scheppele;

46.       Robert Tignor (Emeritus);

47.       John Waterbury (Emeritus)

48.       Michael Wood (Emeritus)

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412