Open Letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk From the Ucla Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism

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Mar 20, 2025 Palestine
Open Letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk From the Ucla Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism

Open Letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk From the Ucla Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism

By : Jadaliyya Reports
[Editors' note: Today, Thursday, March 20, 35 plaintiffs - made up of faculty, students, journalists, and legal observers filed the largest civil rights suit to date in defense of Palestine solidarity activism on a university campus. The suit names UCLA & UC administration, multiple police agencies, and individuals from the mob attack on the Palestine Solidarity Encampment as defendants. It seeks to hold accountable those who engaged in violence, harassment, and intimidation against Palestine solidarity activists and to remedy the failure to protect them. 
 
The UCLA Task Force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim Racism also calls on UCLA administrators to remedy its discriminatory treatment of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian faculty, students, and staff and those who advocate for Palestinian rights. The Task Force has published three reports to date that have been sidelined, if not ignored, by UCLA administrators. While the Task Force is not a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, two of its members, Professors Robin DG Kelley and Sherene Razack, spoke at the press conference today that announced its filing. Prof. Kelley stated: "UCLA is an unsafe environment for students and faculty who advocate for Palestinian human rights and call for an end to genocide." Prof. Razack read excerpts from the open letter below. You can view the entirety of the press conference here.] 


Dear Chancellor Julio Frenk

On March 10 you announced an initiative to combat antisemitism and declared that UCLA will implement the recommendations of the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias,  chaired by Professor Stuart Gabriel. These recommendations include “improving the complaint system, assuring enforcement of current and new laws and policies, and cooperating with stakeholders.” The UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism, was created at the same time as the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias. Both Task Forces were presumably assigned equal value as advisors to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in a moment of unprecedented historical crisis in the university. Indeed, EVCP Darnell Hunt consulted with us numerous times over the past year and a half, without which the incidents of racism and terrible harm to many students and faculty would not have been brought to light. We submitted three reports documenting the racism, discrimination  and violence directed at Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs and anyone, including Jews, who express opposition to the war in Gaza and who support the human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people. 

In your refusal to engage these reports, and in your endorsement of one task force and not the other, you have demonstrated racial and religious animus and discrimination towards Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs, and towards the Task Force itself. Your action dismisses our labor and ignores the violence and discrimination we have documented.

We write to remind you that the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism has produced no less than three substantive reports documenting discrimination against Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs and those in solidarity with them.  The first report, submitted on May 13, 2024, documents the attacks on the Palestine Solidarity Encampment by outside groups and by police; the second report submitted on June 28, 2024, details the subsequent militarization of the campus and the aggressive policing and legal actions taken towards our students. We concluded that the militarization of our campus, the persistent attacks on students, faculty, and staff for supporting ceasefire, divestment and disclosure, the punitive measures deployed by the administration toward anyone even mildly critical of Israeli policies, have made UCLA less safe than ever for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim students and faculty, and for those in solidarity with Palestinians. We have amply demonstrated a systemic discrimination against these groups.

Our third report, submitted January 31, 2025, documents the significant curtailment of academic freedom and the repression of speech at the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM). We have documented repeated violations of codes of conduct and California law and shown that faculty and students have repeatedly brought these violations to the attention of UCLA administration to little avail. 

With respect to academic freedom, we note that not only is Palestine by and large (with notable pockets of marginalized exceptions) not taught at UCLA, but, as the third report shows, on far too many occasions when Palestine is taught, that teaching has been disrupted and penalized.  When individual instructors take on the question of Palestine at UCLA, they do so at their own risk in terms of facing harassment, intimidation and attempts at censorship, on all of which the administration remains silent and inactive. We note, furthermore, that whereas our campus offers plenty of space and facilities and resources for the free discussion of Zionism and Israel—in the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Israel Studies and the campus adjacent Hillel—there is no space for Palestine studies at UCLA.  There is no safe space to talk about Palestine on our campus. 

This discriminatory situation is worsening. As we brought to your attention, for example, there is an alarming escalation of doxxing of racialized medical students and residents at DGSOM and we are deeply concerned about the considerable harm they, and anyone in support of Palestinian human rights, are suffering both in their professional and personal lives.  Finally, you have had our recommendations for some time now- recommendations that call on you to drop all charges against our students and to stop penalizing the advocacy of Palestinian human rights and speech on Palestine in general. We have specifically asked that UCLA take measures to hold accountable students, faculty and staff whose anti-Palestinian actions contravene the applicable codes of conduct at UCLA, mandated by the University of California, and the law. 

The Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism includes internationally recognized experts on racism and colonialism whose books are highly acclaimed. Our reports are based on our scholarly expertise and offer a detailed qualitative account of how students, staff and faculty are penalized for their support of Palestinian rights and for their efforts to stop a genocide. As has been pointed out about task force reports on antisemitism, such reports can contain serious methodological flaws when they are not prepared by experts in the field. It is concerning that not one of UCLA’s well-known experts on antisemitism sit on the Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israel bias. 

The asymmetry of your response to the two task forces is glaring. It is highly consequential.  At a time when the national climate is one of intensified persecution of supporters of Palestinian human rights, justified on the grounds that universities are hotbeds of antisemitism – a charge that always conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel--, we find the denial of Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism at UCLA to be complicitous with the agenda to destroy universities altogether. 

Discrimination and the assault on rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly are increasingly authorized by higher authorities with the intent of transforming the university into a zone where the free and open exchange of ideas is prohibited, and the university becomes a place of intense surveillance and fear. Universities that heed the call of the Federal Department of Justice to repress speech and protest and to violate the constitutional rights of its students and faculty only hasten their own demise.

We urge you once again to preserve UCLA as a space where the rights of all students and faculty are respected and protected.  We strongly recommend the affirmative and active protection of the right of students and faculty at UCLA to work on Palestine and speak freely on Palestinian rights without fear of repression or punishment.  

UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism

Signed: Gaye Theresa Johnson, co-chair; Sherene H. Razack, co-chair

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
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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