As a university steeped in the legacy of Balfour, we have an urgent duty to end complicity in Israel’s settler colonial project. Divestment from companies complicit in occupation, apartheid, and genocide is the first step toward historical redress.
A brutal, nine-hour, multi-agency police assault against unarmed protesters at UC Santa Cruz shows the university would rather use violence against its own students than address demands to divest from genocide.
Students at Columbia University continue to disrupt business as usual for Gaza and have birthed a radical re-imagining of society in the process.
Last month Sang Hea Kil, a justice studies professor at the San Jose State University, was placed on a temporary suspension because of her Palestine activism.
While the Mexican government has looked toward Israel for help in repressing dissent, Indigenous communities and activists see a common cause with Palestine as “todos somos Palestina” has reverberated across the country since October.
Columbia’s “Task Force on Anti-Semitism” has announced a goal of making “ambitious changes” to the university. Faculty and students critical of Israel and Zionism appear to be the first target.
Despite the deep complicity of Israeli universities in the genocide in Gaza, Canadian universities are refusing the calls of their students to sever ties with these Israeli academic institutions.
The Union of Jewish Students claims to serve the interests of the UK’s Jewish student community. It actually serves the interests of Israel by associating with its “quasi-governmental” Zionist institutions and whitewashing its coloniality.
Palestine has ignited our planetary consciousness once again, and it is the student movement that refuses to let genocide become our new normal. They know that the fight for Palestine is a fight for us all.
The gravity of the settler colonial genocide in Gaza has forced us to reckon with our role as a solidarity movement. We must support the struggle of the Palestinian people to abolish Zionism, no matter the means they choose to do it.