Claremont Faculty for Justice in Palestine Statement: Recentering the Ongoing Genocide in Palestine

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Oct 24, 2024 Palestine
Photo by Samson Zhang Photo by Samson Zhang

Claremont Faculty for Justice in Palestine Statement: Recentering the Ongoing Genocide in Palestine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

October 2024

We write as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza continues with impunity, Israeli warplanes and ships bombard Lebanon, killing civilians on a daily basis, Israeli land grabs in the West Bank accelerate, and the United States continues to replenish the Israeli military’s arms and munitions to the tune of at least 17.9 billion dollars since October 2023 and has recently sent troops to Israel as well. This violence is an appalling expansion and escalation of what is now nearly a century of Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The illegality of that occupation has been recognized by the International Court of Justice, which ruled this past July that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank prior to October 2023 amounted to apartheid, a crime against humanity. Following that ruling, in September 2024, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw its military, cease building settlements, and evacuate settlers from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem; return land and assets seized since 1967, and allow Palestinians displaced since 1967 to return to their place of origin. However, despite these rulings and a growing international consensus that Israeli actions violate international law and constitute apartheid, illegal occupation, and genocide, within the United States, the repression of speech in support of Palestinian rights has reached new heights. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the firing of a tenured professor, suspensions of faculty, expulsions and threats of deportation of students, surveillance of syllabi and social media posts, and new “time, place, and manner” restrictions that limit rights to protest. Rising anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism has also led to multiple hate crimes in the United States over the past year, including the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, the murder of a Palestinian 6-year-old in Chicago, and the stabbing of a young Palestinian man in Texas. 

Meanwhile, in the Claremont consortium, since this semester began: Scripps College has characterized the Palestinian flag as inherently “unwelcoming” and shut down a student-run coffee shop which displayed it alongside other national flags and pride flags; called Campus Safety when a group of students calmly attended the president’s open office hours to object to the closure; and instituted draconian access restrictions for Denison library after a student group planned a non-disruptive “study in.” Harvey Mudd College heavily securitized its career fair with officers from a private security force and Campus Safety. Campus Safety also used a long range acoustic device (LRAD) - referred to as an “acoustic weapon” by the ACLU and developed for the U.S. military, which then deployed it in Iraq - against students protesting the presence of recruiters from companies that are part of the military-industrial complex. Pomona College has thus far issued full suspensions to 10 of its students for the 2024-25 academic year and interim suspensions to 2 additional students, evicting all of them without any hearing, and banned at least 36 students of other Claremont Colleges from its campus without first investigating whether those students had in fact violated the student code of conduct. This “punish first, ask questions later” approach is especially concerning given that many of the banned students are BIPOC and the Department of Education has already opened an investigation into anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism at Pomona over the previous year. 

While the Claremont Colleges have focused their energies on policing and disciplining students and whittling away rights to free expression on campus, the genocide in Gaza has entered its second year. Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes have targeted refugee tents, hospitals, ambulances, residential buildings, schools, universities, and United Nations centers, with munitions supplied by the United States that turn people into ash, dismember their bodies, or burn them alive. Israeli troops have piled Palestinians into mass graves and marched Palestinian men to either death or detention and torture, including sexual torture. Every institution of higher education in Gaza has been destroyed, an act of educide. Israeli blockades on food aid are leading to mass starvation, especially in north Gaza. The United Nations puts the count of those killed by the Israeli military at over 42,000. Estimates by medical professionals that take into account deaths from starvation and disease and the impossibility of forensic counting under circumstances of constant bombardment place the number of Palestinians killed as a direct or secondary result of Israeli military action above 100,000. Neither number is justifiable. Nor does either represent a full accounting of the death and destruction that Israeli colonial violence in Palestine and military attacks across the region have caused. In the West Bank, the Israeli military has killed nearly 700 Palestinians since last October, and settlers have conducted land grabs, prevented farmers from harvesting their olives, and poisoned livestock. In Lebanon, where Israeli Prime Minister has threatened to inflict“destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” Israeli airstrikes and naval bombardment have thus far killed over 2300people and destroyed entire villages, thousands of residential buildings, ambulances and clinics, churches, mosques, irrigation facilities, a television station, multiple branches of a financial institution on which 300,000 Lebanese rely, and a historic cemetery. The Israeli military has also attacked the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, and Israeli and U.S. officials are actively fomenting sectarian divides in the country, and seeking to use this war to install a U.S. and Israel-allied government. In addition, Israel has bombed Syria, and both Israel and the United States have bombed Yemen multiple times over the past year. The Claremont Colleges are directly complicit in these atrocities because of their investments in and partnerships with corporations and academic institutions that knowingly enable Israeli apartheid and genocide. However, every single college administration has been silent about its role in these horrors and has blocked calls from students, faculty, and staff to live up to their legal and ethical responsibilities to divest from and boycott the entities directly responsible. Not only have they been silent, but they have also actively repressed speech and protest intended to draw attention to this complicity.

The Claremont Colleges’ inaction on student demands and suppression of free speech on Palestine is part of a broader pattern of institutional repression across the U.S. long referenced as the “Palestine exception.” At UCLA, we have witnessed campus security and police sit idly by as armed pro-Israeli mobs physically attacked student encampments leading to injuries and hospitalizations, only to violently attack and arrest peaceful protesters days later. At Columbia, we saw a police officer use a firearm inside a campus building during the arrest of protesters. Time and time again across the country and world, it has been security forces that have unleashed violence against protesters, and yet it is the protesters who are deemed violent. It is increasingly clear that it is the content of speech in support of Palestinian liberation that is being sanctioned and criminalized rather than the mode: this is made starkly obvious at Harvard University, which has banned students from the library for silently reading simply because those reading happened to have signs and books about Palestine visible as they read. These efforts to chill speech are accelerated by non-binding resolutions deliberated or passed by federal and state legislatures that condemn speech critical of Israeli government actions and vocal in support of Palestinian rights as inherently antisemitic. The suppression of free speech across the western world is so extreme that it has even attracted the attention of UN human rights experts, who remind us that “when the best universities and cultural institutions in western countries collude with their States to intimidate, isolate and silence dissenting voices on the Palestinian situation, they undermine their own artistic and academic freedoms and diminish the vibrancy of their own democracies.”

In this context, the Claremont Faculty for Justice in Palestine reiterates our commitments to Palestinian liberation; to anti-colonialism and anti-racism; to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that calls for institutions around the world to end their complicity with Israeli genocide, occupation, and apartheid; and to protecting the rights of those who engage in  speech, teaching, and activism related to Palestine and Palestinian rights. 

We call on members of the Claremont consortial community to focus first and foremost on protecting life in Palestine and Lebanon by doing everything in our power to stop the accelerating genocide. Specifically, we call on every institution in Claremont to divest from and end partnerships with corporations that knowingly facilitate and enable human rights violations and violations of international law, including apartheid, occupation, and genocide. We also call on our institutions to end partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, including study abroad programs, that have enabled these human rights violations. Ending our complicity with Israeli atrocities is one of the only mechanisms we have to save lives. In addition, we call for our institutions to stop suppressing speech that supports the fundamental rights of Palestinians. Instead, they should uphold the humanitarian values they proclaim in their mission statements by affirming the rights of students, staff, and faculty to speak out and protest in support of Palestinians’ right to self-determination and legal equality, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the ending of Israeli colonization and occupation of Palestinian lands. Finally, we call on our institutions to ensure the rights of their Palestinian, Arab, SWANA, and Muslim community members, which have been infringed on at multiple Claremont Colleges. In times of genocide, it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to take action to stop both the genocide itself and the forms of repression our institutions use to coerce our silence and complicity. Remaining silent degrades our educational mission and our collective humanity. 

[Claremont Faculty for Justice in Palestine includes over 85 faculty and staff members in the Consortium. For more information, email claremontfjp@proton.me.]

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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