UC Berkeley Faculty Statement of Solidarity with Palestinians

UC Berkeley Faculty Statement of Solidarity with Palestinians

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by faculty memebers and scolars at UC Berkeley in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Click here to sign on.] 

We faculty members and scholars at UC Berkeley stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza facing genocidal Israeli state violence. We stand in solidarity with our fellow educators in occupied Palestine who have renewed their call for international academic institutions to stand with, and not against, the subjugated, brutalized, displaced, and terrorized Palestinian people. 

As of this writing, and growing by the hour, Israeli military operations have killed a reported 2,670 civilians in Gaza, over half of them children. The World Health Organization warns that only 24 hours of water, electricity, and fuel are left in the Gaza Strip. Israeli air strikes continue to hit the Rafah border crossing. Due to the blockade and continuous shelling, specific figures are impossible to confirm. Journalists in the area are threatened. We refuse to remain silent as we watch a systematic genocide underway, supported by the United States government.

We insist on the recognition of the dignity and value of Palestinian lives and of the right of Palestinian people to demand liberation. As educators who have spent our careers dedicated to humanistic learning and critical thinking, we are appalled by the constant dehumanization, dehistoricization, and devaluation of Palestinian life. We refuse the specious framing of Israel's overwhelming violence against Palestinians as simply retaliatory. To do so deliberately elides and denies decades of constant, ongoing, documented settler-colonial dispossession, oppression, and brutalization of the indigenous Palestinians by the occupying Israeli state. This is an abdication of scholarly and ethical responsibility. Such framing also ignores the fact that major human rights organizations Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’tselem classified Israel in 2021 as an apartheid state because of its extreme structural racism against Palestinians and the flagrant privileging of Israeli Jews over Palestinians across all the lands occupied and controlled by Israel. 

The decontextualization of the Palestinian people goes hand in hand with their dehumanization. And the dehumanization of Palestinians is a key step toward their mass killing. This historical moment has clear antecedents in how struggles against colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Americas and slave revolts in North America have often been framed and demonized as “barbaric” to justify further oppression.

The Gaza Strip in its current mangled geography is itself a product of the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes and villages in other parts of Palestine to make way for the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. In 1967, Israel invaded and occupied the rest of Palestine including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, two decades before Hamas was founded. Then in 2007, Israel and Egypt, with the support of the United States, commenced an inhumane blockade of Gaza that lasts until today. 

We note that of the 2.2 million stateless inhabitants of the Gaza strip now suffering under massive Israeli bombardments, 70% are themselves refugees and 43% are children under 18. The structure of the resulting apartheid state renders Gazans systematically vulnerable to catastrophic violence. In recent days, we have witnessed Israel's Defense Minister characterize Palestinians as “human animals” and impose a complete siege on Gaza so as to block two million Palestinians from accessing anything needed to survive: water, food, fuel, and basic medical supplies. We see U.S. government officials assisting in plans to transfer Palestinians to Egypt–yet another effort to expel Palestinians from their land as a continuation of the ongoing Nakba.

We are horrified by the premeditated genocidal violence and explicit calls for “annihilation” directed at the population of Gaza. We invite all our colleagues and students, across disciplines and irrespective of ethnicity or religion, to learn about Palestinian history and life. There can be no justice for Palestinians without an end to apartheid, and there will be no end to apartheid so long as so many tacitly or openly accept, condone and justify the ongoing structural and colonial violence and discrimination against native Palestinians. 

We believe that all human life has equal value. We will not pretend that the history and humanity of the indigenous population of Palestine have no intrinsic value. We stand without hesitation with our Palestinian and allied students, staff, and faculty of all faiths and nationalities who fight for justice in Palestine. We note with alarm how many Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and allied students, staff, and faculty have been harassed and bullied without meaningful intervention by UC campus leadership. We refuse the blatant mischaracterization of calls for Palestinian liberation as antisemitism, which we abhor. We call for our colleagues working against antisemitism to stand with us to demand justice for all oppressed and colonized people. 

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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