Statement by Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine — Columbia, Barnard, Teacher’s College

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Apr 13, 2024 Palestine
Statement by Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine — Columbia, Barnard, Teacher’s College

Statement by Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine — Columbia, Barnard, Teacher’s College

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was originally issued by Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at Columbia University, Barnard College, and Teacher’s College on 10 April 2024 via their Instagram account.]

As members of the faculty and staff at Columbia, Barnard, and Teacher's College, we are deeply disturbed by the administrations increasingly hostile and ad-hoc treatment of students and student organizations who are actively working to raise awareness about the on-going genocide in Gaza.

In a letter dated April 5, President Minouche Shafik states, "I did not become a university president to punish students." Yet she continues to preside over disciplinary procedures that not only punish students, but do so in violation of the university's stated commitment to free speech and academic freedom, and by contravening existing rules and regulations for investigating and disciplining student activities.

This administration has shattered decades of institutional expertise and tradition when it comes to managing, if not welcoming, student protest on our campus. The last weeks have seen the university abandon the well-functioning procedure for handling violations of the University's Rules of Conduct (a process implemented as a response to the university's abusive treatment of students during the protests in 1968) by outsourcing the entire enterprise to an outside law firm with little or no oversight. That firm was then given the green light to hire a private investigation firm that has shown up at students' residences unannounced, banging on students' apartment doors threatening them with suspension or worse if they don't cooperate in a matter of hours. Students are left terrified: who are these people, do they really represent my university, should I get a lawyer?

We, the faculty and staff, categorically reject any act of violence on campus. We also support our students' rights of speech and assembly. In instances in which there were violations to university codes, we expect the university to follow relevant and existing measures for investigation and sanction of those concerned. However, this is not what is going on. Instead, the university, with an eye towards the April 17th Congressional hearing, has decided to enter into an exceptional state of punitive authority over the students:

The university has suspended students and evicted them from Columbia housing without due process. Students have been given 24 hours to move out of university housing, with no concern for where they will go or even if they have the financial means to do so. With respect to undergraduates, eviction also means cutting them off from the dining halls: that is, depriving them of not just housing but also of food. Besides the very basic question of whether such rapid evictions are legal under New York State or City law, the assumption built into this decision that every student has enough family wealth to fall back on is just outrageous, especially in light of the university's purported commitment to diversity.

  • The disciplinary process, now delegated to a private investigatory firm, has taken the approach of throwing a wide range of vague charges at the largest group of students possible - with the notion that they can sort it all out later. In this new disciplinary process, students are denied the right to an advisor of their choice, are not told the specific charges against them, are expected to provide a written statement explaining their position on those unspecified charges, and have no meaningful right to appeal the hearing officer's findings.

  • The university has hired an outside law firm to handle "disciplinary matters," whose lawyers have no understanding of university life and of our responsibility for our students. Hearings are now being conducted by recently-hired associates at Debevoise & Plimpton, individuals a couple years out of law school with no expertise or knowledge of the values and rules that constitute Columbia's community. In light of the university's reliance on Debevoise & Plimpton lawyers, the claim made by Claudia Marin Andrade (Associate Vice President for Student Success and Intervention), in the letters of suspension, that "the disciplinary process (as] an educational one," is a farce.

  • The number of students who have received notices requiring their appearance at disciplinary hearings who were not involved in organizing or at the event(s) under review raises serious questions about this dragnet approach to punishment: being called into a hearing, even if one has not attended the event in question is creating immense amounts of stress among students, especially foreign students whose US visas depend on their remaining enrolled in full-time study. What's more, it is quite evident, given who has been called in, that the dragnet is operating on the basis of racial profiling: Arab and Muslim students, in particular, are receiving threatening letters for no other apparent reason than their identity. 

  • The university is selectively enforcing disciplinary actions: Students at unauthorized counterprotests have not been called into disciplinary hearings or investigations, and pro-Israel student groups regularly get approval for events, regardless of whether or not the speaker's politics is considered offensive or even, hateful even, to many others on campus.

We reject the premise of extra-ordinary action under the guise of "a strong foundation of respect" at the university. We see political convenience, a demonizing of pro-Palestinian students, and targeting of their political speech, and we see the turning of a blind eye to pro­Israeli actions on campus that stand in obvious violations of standard protocols, including: the glaring lack of a Presidential statement on the chemical attack, an actual act of violence, on a peaceful rally on campus on January 21, 2024; no response to the continuing discriminatory harassment of students and faculty by Professor Shai Davidai via social media; or the hosting of ultra-right wing reactionary and racist speakers, such as an SSI organized event with "son of Hamas" Mosab Hassan Yousef on campus on March 21, 2024.

We urge Columbia's administration to observe commitments to existing disciplinary procedures that place the well-being of students and the community first, rather than political expediency.
Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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