[The following statement is put forth and cosigned by Georgetown University faculty, students and staff in solidarity with the Palestinian People and their ongoing struggle against settler-colonialism.]
We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against settler colonialism and forced dispossession.
We salute the bravery of Palestinians—in the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and within Israel—as they resist the violence of the Israeli military, settler militias, and mobs.
We condemn the recent forced displacement of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem--part of a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem--and Israeli violence perpetrated against families trying to defend their homes.
We condemn the attacks on Gaza. They represent only the last chapter of a fifteen-year war and blockade that has transformed the territory into a prison for its two million inhabitants, most of whom descend from refugees expelled and driven from their homes in 1947-48 in what became Israel.
We stand with Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem in calling the Israeli state’s systemic discrimination and violence by its proper name: Apartheid. The nature of Israeli governance and law, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories promotes Jewish supremacism at the expense of non-Jewish life. Human Rights Watch issued a landmark report on April 27, 2021, that characterized the Israeli state’s systemic discrimination and violence as inflicting “deprivations... so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” In January 2021, the Israeli Human Rights organization B'tselem had come to the same conclusion: “The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime.”
For decades, Palestinian activists have provided ample documentation of the injustices they face every day only to have this evidence dismissed and marginalized in US academic institutions. We recognize this history of denial and seek to rectify it.
We mourn all loss of life. And we refuse the “two-sides” narrative that ignores the differences between one of the most heavily militarized states in the world and a Palestinian population resisting their oppressors. Palestinian resistance to this violent system of apartheid is a legal right.
As Georgetown University faculty, students, and staff we stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and see their struggle as fundamentally entwined with many other struggles for racial justice and liberation, from Ferguson to Standing Rock to the Rio Grande. We affirm our commitment to working against all forms of racism and injustice in our own institution and beyond.