UC San Diego students condemn university stance

For the last six months, students have watched in horror as universities across the United States remain silent on the indiscriminate bombing and intentional targeting of civilians, the torture and execution of healthcare workers, and the destruction of bakeries, agricultural lands, desalination plants, water and sewage treatment facilities, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and all 12 of Gaza’s universities. While the world watches Israel’s spree of war crimes — unprecedented in scale and severity — continue with impunity in Gaza, settler and state violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated dramatically. Students, faculty, and staff from the UCSD Divest Coalition joined 160 encampments across the globe to demand an end to our institutions’ silence and complicity in genocide. On May 6 at 5:45 a.m., UCSD administration dispatched over one hundred police officers dressed in full riot gear to violently arrest more than 60 members of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, including over 40 students and faculty.

It is in the context of this accelerating campaign of genocidal violence against the Palestinian people that we, as UCSD graduate students, write to express our outrage and disappointment that Dr. Joe Uziel was invited to present a job talk on our campus on March 7. Dr. Uziel’s work as the director of archaeological digs in Silwan directly contributes to ongoing efforts by the Israeli state to systematically erase, displace, and eliminate the Palestinian people. The genocidal aims of this seventy-five-year campaign of ethnic cleansing have become starkly, violently apparent in its latest and most deadly manifestation: the current military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

From 2011-2019, Dr. Uziel served as Director of Excavations in Silwan, a district in Occupied East Jerusalem. Excavations in Occupied East Jerusalem, which was illegally annexed by the Israeli Occupation in 1967, are a violation of international law. In Silwan, discriminatory laws and policies are invoked in an unlawful manner to evict Palestinian residents and demolish their homes. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) carries out excavations in Silwan in direct partnership with the Ir David Foundation (known by its acronym Elad). Elad is an extremist settler organization that explicitly embraces a mission of ethnic cleansing that aims to replace East Jerusalem’s Palestinian inhabitants with illegal Jewish settlers.

During Dr. Uziel’s eight years as Director, 129 homes and community buildings were demolished, 166 individuals were displaced, and 673 individuals were impacted through their direct displacement or the destruction of their workplaces. His work is central to a project of ethnic cleansing facilitated by a pseudo-scientific form of archaeology that seeks to legitimize the Zionist colonial project by providing evidence to support the reductive and historically inaccurate narrative of Jews as the original indigenous people of Israel. Dr. Uziel’s work in Silwan actively sought to erase evidence of the Palestinian people’s historical connection to their indigenous homeland through practices of excavation that materially eliminate remains from the post-biblical period from the historical record.  These methods have been criticized in internal IAA correspondences denouncing the practice of digging horizontally as “bad archaeology” and lamenting that the IAA “could not be proud of this excavation.”

We vehemently object to Dr. Uziel’s invitation to campus, as it condones his unscientific methods, which weaponize archaeology to serve the genocidal aims of a violent Occupation. Furthermore, UCSD graduate students who wished to attend Dr. Uziel’s job talk and silently distributed a flyer (attached) with information on the implications of his excavations in Silwan were forced to leave the talk and locked out of the room. Department faculty justified these students’ removal from the lecture first by claiming incorrectly that students were required to register for the lecture in order to attend and subsequently by suggesting that only Anthropology graduate students were permitted to attend departmental job talks.

We view this as an egregious instance of discrimination against Muslim graduate students of color by Anthropology faculty, in which students’ right to freedom of expression was denied when they silently shared information on the ways in which Dr. Uziel’s work directly violates international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people. 

In light of the Anthropology Department’s decision to invite Dr. Uziel to campus and subsequent discriminatory actions towards students from marginalized communities on campus, we reflect on this same department’s statement on Anti-Black Racism and State Violence, which notes that many faculty “research structural violence and know that state violence was built over centuries to buttress and enable indigenous dispossession” and therefore “call for action against all sources of racism and violence, including those emanating from our institutions.”

As we witness what is undoubtedly the most documented case of genocide in human history, we wonder: where are the voices of those who have built careers on the study of structural violence, human rights, inequality, and social justice? 

As anthropologists, our faculty have spent decades studying the mechanisms through which power operates, how it works to establish the boundaries of the “human” enshrined in the legal institutions of human rights such that some bodies remain excluded from such protections, how it functions to silence and erase certain subjectivities from the realm of public discourse while simultaneously rendering their bodies vulnerable to disparities in health outcomes or—as in the case of Palestinians—designates them as those against whom violence may be enacted with impunity. 

This expertise affords faculty members a unique ability to recognize and articulate many ways in which institutional and state violence converge, from the silencing of dissent on campus to our own department’s decision to host a scholar whose work violates international law and renders him complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. And, so, we wonder in disappointment: why must it fall upon graduate students to call attention and object to the presence of Dr. Uziel on our campus? Is there no moral imperative for those who have used such expertise to build successful careers to speak out as we witness unprecedented injustices and atrocities continue to be justified and funded by our federal government?

Today, as we watch Israel continue to slaughter men, women, and children sheltering in al-Shifa hospital with international impunity, in our heartbreak and outrage, we demand that our Anthropology faculty take a courageous stance that reflects the values they have espoused throughout their careers. We demand that the Anthropology Department:

1. End the Silence:
   • Issue a public apology for the presence of Dr. Uziel on our campus and for the discriminatory exclusion and silencing of Muslim students of color who were removed from his job talk. 
   • Issue a public statement that denounces the ongoing campaign of genocidal violence against the Palestinian people and affirms their right to live in safety and freedom in their indigenous homeland. 
2. Amnesty for All—Stand with Students:
   • Demand that the administration drop all criminal charges against members of the UCSD Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
   • Demand that all suspended students be immediately reinstated and that suspensions or other disciplinary measures are not used as a means of retaliation against anyone affiliated with the encampment.
3. Campus-Wide Boycott
   • In line with the UCSD Divest Coalition’s demand for a campus-wide boycott, which includes an end to all eleven Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with Israeli institutions, immediately terminate the following non-binding MOUs and commit to non-renewal:
     • MOU between the University of Haifa and the Anthropology Dept for the purpose of marine and coastal archaeology research
     • MOU between the University of Haifa and the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability for the purpose of cyber-archaeology
     • MOU between the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Anthropology Dept for the purpose of marine and coastal archaeology research
4. Divest from Death
   • Amplify the Coalition’s demand for divestment from corporations that enable and profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide, such as Honeywell International and General Electric.