We are a group of faculty from universities around the Twin Cities area. We come together in light of our universities’ collective silence and active participation in the ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine. We want our campus communities to know that we stand in unapologetic solidarity with their call for a free Palestine. We know that when liberation-minded people come together, change can happen.
For more than 75 years , the Indigenous people of Palestine have faced a series of attacks on their lives, identities, land, culture, beliefs, and dreams. We call this violence and genocide what it is: Zionist occupation and settler colonialism not as an event but as a continuous structure that has perpetuated displacement and decimation of hundreds of thousands Indigenous people within historicPalestine. This violent displacement and ongoing oppression continues to impact millions more displaced and exiled Palestinians living in diaspora, who face global persecution while also being prevented from returning to their ancestral homeland. The ongoing struggle for liberation and decolonization did not begin on the 7th of October 2023, it began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, with the Nekba of 1948 and the Naksa of 1967, and with the continuous violations of international law, human rights violations, annexation, and ongoing war crimes perpetrated by the settler-colonial government of “Israel”. . Since October of 2023, the escalation of this ongoing genocide and systemic oppression of Palestinians demand we not only grieve the loss of life in Gaza, the West Bank, and other regions of historic Palestine violently stolen by the settler colonial state of “Israel”, but also, we join the global majority’s collective calls for social and political liberation and justice for Palestine.We recognize that our liberation struggles are forever interconnected, that a people united will never be defeated .
People’s resistance struggles in Palestine and elsewhere have taught us that the wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon names them, confront systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession through anti-colonial and decolonial means.
For far too long, professors and other academic workers have taken refuge in the ivory tower and ignored ongoing assaults on humanity. Even worse, some have argued that conflated anti-Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism. We reject this conflation of anti-zionism with anti-semitism We seek solidarity and connection with fellow anti-zionists, who recognize that liberation struggles are forever interconnected from Gaza to Ferguson, the Congo to Haiti, Minneapolis to Puerto Rico. In the tradition of radical pedagogues that come before us such as June Jordan, Edward Said, George Abraham, and Rashid Khalidi, we call on faculty, students, and staff to get off our campuses and organize! Organize alongside Palestinian activists who are demanding a cessation to the colonial violence of occupation in Gaza and throughout the Global South. Organize by using the university’s resources against itself for the betterment of the communities around us. Organize with students who dream of a better world. It takes all of us.
