Dear all,

As Israel’s apartheid regime carries out its genocidal war plans against the Palestinian population in Gaza, we encourage faculty members, academic unions and associations, and university programs and departments to issue statements calling for urgent action to help prevent further bloodshed and destruction.

These statements can be instrumental in contributing to, first and foremost, prevent Israel’s very real threat of a second Nakba against the Palestinian people, and secondly, to challenge and reshape the prevailing narrative that dehumanizes Palestinians to one centered on international law, humanity, justice and ending oppression to achieve peace.

We are including bullet points below as a template for such statements, with urgent calls for priority actions, which can also be included in responses to one-sided university administration statements:

• Express grief for all innocent lives taken.
• Reiterate your commitment to justice and equal rights for all.
• Condemn Israel’s 75-year regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid as the root cause of the violence.
• Affirm that the only viable means to end all violence (the initial violence of the oppressor and the reactive armed resistance of the oppressed) is to take action to end the root cause of the violence: oppression.
• Condemn Israel’s unveiled, intentional war crimes and acts of genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, including massive bombing campaigns killing at least 714 Palestinian children, and wiping out entire families and neighborhoods, destroying universities, water, power and telecommunications networks, and tightening even further its 16-year siege on Gaza by cutting off all vital services including electricity, water, food and medicine.

Calls for priority urgent action:

• Immediate ceasefire
• Humanitarian aid into Gaza
• UN protection for Palestinians in Gaza

Additional calls for action:

• End complicity of university and/or government in Israel’s apartheid regime by, among other things, canceling all joint projects and activities with complicit Israeli universities.

 

 

See additional statements:

Urgent call from Birzeit University, here

By Dr Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, here

BDS Movement , Jewish Voice for Peace, UCS Left

Some relevant quotes from the past week

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

Netanyahu:

Gaza is the city of evil, we will turn all the places in which Hamas deploys and hides into ruins. I am telling the people of Gaza – get out of there now. We will act everywhere and with full power.

We are happy to help with messaging or review statements if that is helpful. Please let us know of any statements released.

Thank you for your support in this time of urgent need.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)