UC Palestinian Faculty Letter and Call to Action on Palestine

UC Palestinian Faculty Letter and Call to Action on Palestine

UC Palestinian Faculty Letter and Call to Action on Palestine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following letter was sent to the leadership of the University of California by a group of Palestinian Faculty members across various campuses. The letter signatories are situated in 12 schools and departments at 7 campuses (full list below). Given the lack of response by UC leadership to the letter below, the escalation of genocidal violence in the besieged Gaza Strip, and the surge in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racist violence, repression, surveillance, and infringement on first amendment rights — the UC Palestinian Faculty Council calls upon all our colleagues at various UC’s to form Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters and take immediate action to protect academic freedom, students’ rights, and the rights of Palestinians to dignity and freedom. Lastly, we call on our fellow faculty to ensure that anti-zionism - critique of state and ideology - is not equated with anti-semitism or punished and criminalized for such a false equation.] 

Sent on 20 October 2023

Recipients: UC President Michael V. Drake, UC Office of the President (UCOP) Provost and Executive VP Katherine S. Newman, UCOP Vice Provost for Academic Personnel and Programs Douglas Haynes, UCOP Director of Executive Communications and Engagement Shelly Meron

President Drake,

We, the undersigned Palestinian faculty members from across the UC system, write to express our outrage at your systemwide communication on October 9, and your continuing silence on the ongoing catastrophe unfolding in and around the occupied Gaza Strip. 

Your statement elides the Palestinian people and presents the Gaza Strip as though it were an island without history. It betrays a lack of interest in, and even a lack of a basic understanding of, the history of 75 years of Israeli colonial rule over Palestinians, the realities of life under 56 years of military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the devastating effects of 17 years of Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip. You could have consulted countless scholars of this history among the UC faculty. You chose not to do so. The end result is that your statement amounts to a callow taking of sides.

As we write, the entire population of the Gaza Strip—2.3 million people, half of them children—are trapped and besieged, cut off from all supplies of food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine, and subjected to relentless and indiscriminate bombardment. Israeli bombers have to date killed four thousand people, including over one thousand children, and wiped out 47 entire multigenerational families. High explosives, phosphorous, and incendiary bombs are destroying crowded neighborhoods in one of the most densely populated places in the world. Whole urban districts are being demolished at a time. Hospitals are overwhelmed with the dead and injured and continue to run short of medical supplies and fuel for their emergency generators—and even these crowded hospitals have been bombed. Families are rationing dwindling supplies of food and water intake amid reports of dehydration and illness due to the lack of potable water.  One million people have now been driven from their homes. Cabinet ministers and advisors to the Israeli state have referred to Palestinian civilians as “human animals” and have said that they intend to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.” Such proclamations constitute evidence of a terrifying prospect of genocide.

You were quick to denounce the killing of Israeli civilians in terms that your statement uses the strongest possible language to depict. Yet your office (and Board of Regents Chair Richard Leib) maintains a stony silence with regard to the extreme violence perpetrated by the Israeli state against Palestinian civilians for whose welfare that state is directly held accountable under international law as the Occupying Power.

The only possible conclusion to be drawn is that you do not attach the same value to Palestinian life as you do to Israeli life. 

Your statement invites censorship, intimidation, and violence against anyone and everyone across the UC system who teaches and advocates for Palestinian liberation and equality, or even basic equality more broadly. 

Anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism are rampant across UC campuses, creating an unsafe and hostile learning and working environment for members of these communities.

Already, Palestinian and allied students attending teach-ins or other events on various UC campuses have been attacked and subjected to verbal and physical violence. Students are reporting incidents of stalking, harassment, and threats of sexual assault and murder. As you may have heard, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death in Chicago as a direct result of the climate of anti-Palestinian racism and hostility spread across the country.

We are deeply concerned for the safety of students, staff, and faculty alike at all of our campuses. We call on you to condemn the kind of anti-Palestinian violence to which we have all been subjected. We call on you to affirm the equal value of all life in the context of the conflict in and around the occupied Palestinian territories. 

Sincerely,

Palestinian faculty

across Schools and Departments of Asian American Studies, Chemistry, Communications, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, Education, Engineering, English, History, Law, Literature, Medicine, and Rhetoric 

at

University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Hastings
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Francisco 

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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