May 21, 2021
As members of the Vassar community and people of conscience, we denounce the ongoing attacks on Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces. We especially condemn the recent extensive bombardment and killing of over 200 people and injuring of thousands more in Gaza, an open air prison of two million inhabitants, mostly descended from refugees expelled from other parts of Palestine. This intensification of violence follows the displacement of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah and the attack on worshippers in Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan. We situate these flashpoints in the broader context of the Nakba, Israel's ethnic cleansing, dispossession, containment, and expulsion of Palestinians since 1948. Tragically, all we can hope for in the current ceasefire is a return to the unacceptable status quo ante, or a slowdown in home demolitions and killings.
We affirm that the Palestinian struggle is an indigenous resistance movement confronting settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. This is not a symmetrical battle. Israel is one of the most heavily militarized states in the world and receives $3.8 billion in military aid annually from the United States. As we write, the US Congress is considering a $735 million arms sale to the Israeli regime. In the past decade alone, US aid has not only underwritten the dispossession, jailing, torture, maiming, and killing of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children throughout the region, but also the creation of an acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
We agree with Human Rights Watch, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, and the United Nations, which have all described Israel’s systemic discrimination and violence against Palestinians as apartheid, a recognized crime against humanity. In the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and within Israel, Palestinians resist daily humiliation and violence from the Israeli military, settler militias, and lynch mobs. We salute their bravery and steadfastness.
We recognize that peace can only be achieved with justice in Palestine/Israel. It is not possible under conditions of military occupation, blockade, discrimination, dispossession, and the enduring direct, structural, and cultural violence inflicted upon Palestinians.
We reject what the so-called peace process has become: an instrument of continued land grabs and state violence, propagating the fiction of a “two-sided conflict” and the perpetual postponement of a just solution.
We support the Palestinian right to return, the end of the occupation, and the right of all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine to live in dignity, safety and freedom. We stand with Palestinians, their Jewish Israeli allies, and all those around the world fighting for this noble goal.
We see the movement against racism, police brutality, and mass incarceration in the United States and the Palestinian struggle against apartheid as interconnected. We agree with The Movement for Black Lives' declaration that “The fight for Palestinian rights and dignity is integral to the fight for human rights everywhere.”
We know that educators who teach and speak about Palestine do so at great risk in a climate of censorship. We stand with the statement issued by Scholars for Palestinian Freedom. We also join our colleagues at Yale, Princeton, the Universities of Illinois Chicago and Urbana-Champaign, Universities of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Davis, Harvard, CUNY, University of San Francisco and Gender Studies Departments around the country to express our solidarity with Palestinians.
