‘We’re making more money off the blood of people overseas’

By: Jon King and Susan J. Demas –

( Michigan Advance ) – While student encampments at New York and Texas colleges protesting Israeli military action in Gaza have generated confrontations with police, similar protests at Michigan universities have so far remained peaceful.

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, more than 120 students are camped out on the Diag, the open space at the heart of the main campus. That has grown from about 50 students who turned out on early Monday morning to set up the encampment directly in front of the Hatcher Graduate Library.

Amid Palestinian flags and banners that call on the university to “Divest Now!,” sit more than 40 tents, most facing toward the center of the encampment where food tables and information boards sit, as well as a small staging area for organizers to address fellow students.

The Friday morning announcements began with an update on similar protest encampments across the country, reminders to not engage with any counter-protestors and Shabbat services and dinner planned for the encampment later Friday night.

Alifa Chowdhury, a junior studying political science and one of the student organizers, told the Michigan Advance that they have one demand for the university’s board of regents. 

“Our only demand is divestment, and we’re here to stay until divestment demands are met,” said Chowdhury, who is also a member of the TAHRIR Coalition, a student-led alliance of more than 80 organizations “fighting for divestment from Israel and the military-industrial complex and reinvestment in our education and our community.”

Specifically, Chowdhury said “weapons manufacturing and war profiteering companies” are connected to about a third of the University of Michigan’s $18 billion endowment.

The student encampment on the University of Michigan campus. April 26, 2024. Photo by Jon King.

“During times of war, like right now, they make more money because obviously people are buying more weapons,” she said. “And that just doesn’t make sense to us as students because that’s just not ethical because we’re making more money off the blood of people overseas. So the ask really is to take that $6 billion out and reinvest it into communities and really ethical things.”

The conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out on Oct. 7, after a surprise Hamas terrorist attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of more than 250 hostages. The resulting Israeli retaliation has killed more than than 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry.

In a news release issued Monday by the TAHRIR Coalition announcing the encampment, the group said, “We are not leaving the Diag until we achieve full divestment. Power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs. All eyes on Gaza, the Thawabit is our compass.”

Colleen Mastony, the university’s assistant vice president for public affairs, told the Advance that their investment policy has been in place for nearly 20 years and shields the university’s investments from political pressures. 

“Much of the money invested through the university’s endowment, for example, is donor funding given to provide long-term financial support for designated purposes,” she said. “The Board of Regents reaffirmed its position on this issue earlier this year.”

A March 28 statement by Regent Michael Behm said the university’s endowment had no direct investment in any Israeli company. 

“What we do have are funds that one of those companies may be part of a fund,” Behm said. “Another statement that was made was that $6 billion dollars or roughly one third of our endowment is invested in these Israeli companies. I asked the endowment team about that and, in actuality, less than one-tenth of 1% of the endowment is invested indirectly in such companies.”

Chowdhury, however, says the regents and university are hiding behind a policy that has been flexible in the past.

“The university has made it known that they will not divest because they don’t make investment decisions and financial decisions based on political pressure, but we know that’s not true,” she said. “They divested from Russia in a week, they divested from South African apartheid, they divested from fossil fuels, and those are inherently political decisions they had to make. So we’re here when we’re going to push for it and we know it’s going to happen.”

The protestors have also demanded that University President Santa Ono meet with them by at 8 p.m. Sunday. 

“Many of you have expressed interest in meeting with the TAHRIR coalition; here is your opportunity to do so,” stated an email sent by the group to the university and its board of regents.

“We stand in solidarity with our brave students occupying campus until our demand for divestment is met in full,” the email continued. “We reject any attempt to surveil, criminalize, or otherwise punish them for their activism. As members of the University of Michigan community, we firmly and proudly demand divestment now.”

Earlier in the week, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) of Michigan, posted a picture from the encampment of a banner that read “Long Live The Intifada,” a reference to the Arabic word for uprising and a term often used to describe Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

“We are dismayed to see anti-Israel protests at colleges and Universities like this one at the University of Michigan, using terms like Intifada, which refers to two periods of indiscriminate violence directed at Jews in Israel, resulting in the loss of thousands of innocent lives – Palestinian & Israeli. Simply put, Intifada is a call for violence that only stokes fear, anger and division,” stated the ADL. “Protests that use these terms don’t alleviate suffering nor bring about lasting peace in a global or local setting.”

The banner was not visible on Friday. As to claims that their protest is antisemitic, Chowdhury insists that is a false accusation that seeks to undermine legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and its policies, and has nothing to do with the Jewish religion.

“I think if people spent more than ten minutes at this encampment, there’s so much community and love and joy, music and art builds and open poetry and open mics,” she said. “This is also co-led by the Jewish Voices for Peace students, and so no, we don’t foster antisemitism here. It really is a place of love. Anti-Zionism and anti-Zionist rhetoric should not be conflated with antisemitism. They’re not the same thing. They’re not interchangeable.”

Meanwhile, Michigan State University students set up their “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” early on Thursday morning in “The People’s Park” — the site of a similar protest against the Vietnam War decades ago.

By 1:30 p.m. Thursday, about 50 students were gathered at the site in back of Wells Hall along the Red Cedar River, where roughly two dozen tents were set up amid Palestinian flags, a “Free Palestine” chalk drawing on the sidewalk and banners that read, “Stop Funding Genocide” and “Trustees: Divest Now.” 

The protest also featured a well-stocked snack table with cookies, fruit snacks, drinks and more, with students periodically trekking in more supplies, like green foam sleeping pads.

The protest was still going strong on Friday after protesters spent their first night camping out. MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant told the Advance that the protesters applied for a permit Thursday afternoon, requesting to camp/tent on campus through Sunday. The Board of Trustees Office approved the permit around 5 p.m. Thursday.

Fliers posted at the camp for “Encampment Norms/Expectations” included the following:

• Practice kindness and treat others with respect.
• Keep alert for marshalls’ instructions. Marshalls are wearing high-vis orange vests and are here to keep us safe.
• Avoid interacting with police. If you see police, inform a marshall.

There was no sign of a police presence at that time, although students said MSU police had made several stops earlier in the day telling them to disperse. 

Just a couple blocks away, dozens of MSU students donning green caps and gowns were busy taking photos outside Spartan Stadium and the Sparty Statue, the day before the start of spring graduation ceremonies.

Guerrant told the Advance on Friday that “graduation has gone extremely smooth today.”

Most students, many who wore masks, deferred to student leaders to talk to reporters on Thursday.

One of those who did speak was Camille Duvernois, a third-year student in world politics and journalism, who told the Advance the MSU students also seek divestment. The encampment was a joint effort by about 20 campus groups, she said.

“We are here to get the university to divest from weapons manufacturers, to divest from Israeli aid. They have millions of dollars vested in weapons manufacturers,” she said. “Students and community members are uncomfortable with our tuition money going to not only profiting off of genocide, but also funding it. We are paying our tuition and then that tuition money is going back into investments that kill children, that are bombing children senselessly, that are bombing innocent civilians in a land that has been occupied for decades illegally by settler-colonialist forces.”

Duvernois said the protestors would also like to see a ceasefire in Gaza that allows Palestinians “displaced recklessly” by Israel to return to their homes.

“But the attempts for a ceasefire have been continuously rejected by the Israeli Knesset [Parliament]. They’ve been repeatedly rejected by [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. He has repeatedly refused any sort of peace attempts from Palestinians,” Duvernois said. “Israel has refused for decades to allow Palestinians to exist in peace. And whenever there’s retaliation of any sort, people resisting their occupiers, it turns into genocide and it turns into senseless murder, and we don’t want our tuition money going to that.”

When asked whether the remaining hostages taken by Hamas should be returned as part of a ceasefire, Duvernois said it was absolutely a concern, although she continued to place blame on Israel.

“Of course. We don’t think that there should be any sort of violence or loss of life,” she said “But ultimately this violence is caused by the settler colonial ethnostate that is Israel. I mean, they are the reason that there are hostages. There’s the reason that there is violence.”

Duvernois said their protest would last as long as it took to achieve success.

“We will not end this stuff until the university decides to stop using our money for this sort of violence. They said in their last board trustees meetings that they would not be reconsidering their investments, that they would not be considering divestment. And when [new University President Kevin] Guskiewicz just talked to us, he said they were considering it. So that’s progress in some manner. I mean, they said it would be too chaotic to divest, but this is chaotic.”

However, Guerrant relayed a different version of the meeting with Guskiewicz on Thursday.

“The president did stop by the encampment yesterday around noon, but he did not say the university would divest,” Guerrant said in an email on Friday afternoon. “Rather, he reiterated what was said at the April board meeting — that MSU will not be divesting. The university is committed to safeguarding its investment portfolio from political influence. We currently have no direct or indirect investments in gun manufacturers nor in the three publicly traded civilian firearm manufacturers. MSU does not own an Israeli-issued security bond.” 

Eli Folts, who just finished his junior year at MSU, is a member of the Young Communist League on campus part of the encampment. He said on Thursday that divestment was not an impossible goal.

“We need divestment. We’ve done it in the past and we were a leader then,” he said referencing divestment in the 1980s from the then apartheid-nation of South Africa.

“I mean, if you think about it, look at the timeline,” he said. “It took eight to 10 years. It took a long time, but once it kind of hit that critical mass where we had that cooperation between faculty and students, it was very powerful. And I think that’s far from impossible. We can do it. We have the people; we have faculty support. We just really need to push this and we need to engage community members. We need to engage alum.”

 

 

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

Susan J. Demas

Susan J. Demas is a 23-year journalism veteran and one of the state’s foremost experts on Michigan politics, appearing on C-SPAN, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and WKAR-TV’s “Off the Record.” In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief, she is the Advance’s chief columnist, writing on women, LGBTQ people, the state budget, the economy and more. For almost five years, Susan was the Editor and Publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, the most-cited political newsletter in the state. Susan’s award-winning political analysis has run in more than 100 national, international and regional media outlets, including the Guardian U.K., NBC News, the New York Times, the Detroit News and MLive.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

Via Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

 

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.

We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.

They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.

Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the right

Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of anti-war and civil rights protests, and many conservatives characterized the demonstrators as communist sympathizers.

Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.

11Alive: “Over 20 taken into custody at Emory University after explosive protests”

From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.

Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists hounded college leaders with public pressure campaigns by collecting signatures from students and alumni that called on them to put an end to campus demonstrations. Conservatives also urged donors to withhold financial support until administrators subdued protesting students.

Cops on campus

Following the massacre at Kent State in 1970, when the National Guard fired at students, killing four and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges shut down temporarily amid a wave of nationwide youth outrage. With only a week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes and even some commencement ceremonies.

In response, conservatives launched a new wave of post-Kent State injunctions against those universities to force them back open.

With protests ongoing – and continued calls from the right to crack down on them – many university administrators resorted to calling on the police and the National Guard, working with them to remove student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment brought about the birth of the modern campus police force.

Administrators and lawmakers, afraid that local police could not handle the sheer number of student demonstrators, arranged to deputize campus police – who had historically been parking guards and residence hall curfew enforcers – with the authority to make arrests and carry firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further stifle student dissent with reams of legislation. In 1969, legislators in seven states passed laws to punish student activists who had been arrested during protests through the revocation of financial aid, expulsion and jail sentences.

President Richard Nixon, who had excoriated campus disruptions during his successful White House run in 1968, encouraged college presidents to heed the laws and applauded them for following through with expulsions.

Is ‘antisemitism’ the new ‘communism’?

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I’ll be watching to see how the Trump and Biden campaigns respond to ongoing student protests.

For now, Trump has called the recent protests “antisemitic” and “far worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden has similarly condemned “the antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both are repeating the false framework laid out by GOP Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House inquiries since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

There indeed have been antisemitic incidents associated with pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx have baited four women presidents into affirming the right’s politicized framing of the protests as rife with antisemitism, leading the public to believe that isolated incidents are instead representative and rampant.

Like their association of civil rights and peace demonstrators with communism throughout the Cold War, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now broadly hurling claims of antisemitism against anyone protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, many of whom are Jewish.

The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice: Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Instructor, School of Education, University of New Orleans

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MESA Board Joint Statement with CAF concerning escalating repression of protest on campuses

The Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom view with increasing alarm the growing number of attempts to intimidate, repress, and criminalize campus protests against the ongoing Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the US diplomatic, military, and economic support for it. Federal, state and local government officials—from the president, to congressional members, to governors and mayors—have exacerbated the threats on campuses by encouraging university administrators to violate basic commitments to freedom of expression, while casually smearing overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with unsubstantiated claims of violence or discriminatory speech. University leaders should constitute the first line of defense for students and faculty in the face of forces seeking to vilify, harass, and silence them. Instead, we regret that several university boards of trustees, presidents, and their administrations have acquiesced in the ugliest of campaigns targeting their students and faculty for engaging in what have been peaceful protests, joined by a wide cross-section of their campus community.

As Palestine solidarity and anti-war demonstrations have proliferated and intensified, sweeping characterizations of them as violent, dangerous, and antisemitic have been deployed as part of a campaign that has weaponized the language of “safety” to delegitimize, intimidate, and forcibly disperse legal, peaceful dissent. University administrations, most egregiously at Columbia, New York University, and Yale have—in some cases, in violation of their own university policies—called in the police to break up protests and arrest tens of students, some of whom have been summarily suspended and evicted from university housing. At NYU, faculty, too, were arrested. The University of Southern California cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement address after a slanderous hate campaign was launched against her for her pro-Palestinian views; the University of Pennsylvania revoked Penn Against the Occupation’s status as a registered student group; Harvard has now banned that university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Given the developments of the past several weeks, we are extremely concerned about what these disturbing events portend as commencement season approaches.

Attempts by universities to limit or suppress Gaza war-related speech and protest have been all too common since shortly after the 7 October attack. But the growing securitization and outright repression on campuses have reached levels not seen since the 1960s. We are witnessing a situation in which, in the name of security, it is university leaders themselves who have become the primary threat to the rights and safety of members of the campus community. The appeasement of malign forces seeking to destroy academic freedom, faculty governance, and curricular diversity, in which Columbia’s president Nemat Shafik so willingly participated during her 17 April congressional hearing, must not be allowed to metastasize. Today the goal is to suppress speech on Palestine, but the battle over free speech and academic freedom on our campuses did not begin, nor does it end, there.

We therefore call upon college and university boards of trustees, presidents, and administrations across the country immediately to clearly and forcefully recommit themselves to the freedom of inquiry, expression, and protest on campus that have been pillars of the US academy for decades. As the massive killing and destruction in Gaza continue, we also demand that you fulfill your responsibility to your profession and your campus community to defend peaceful protesters, uphold academic freedom, and reject all pressures seeking to criminalize peaceful encampments and demonstrations against this horrendous war—and our government’s complicity in it.

Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.

NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

8 APRIL 2024

Contact: academicsvsscholasticide@gmail.com

Faisal Bhabha, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Heidi Matthews, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Stephen Rosenbaum, UC Berkeley School of Law

Over 1,500 North American Academics Condemn Scholasticide in Gaza

Over 1,500 academics based at more than 270 higher education institutions in the United States, Canada and Mexico have signed an Open Letter condemning Israel’s systematic attacks on educational life in Gaza, to mourn these losses and to stand in solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues and students. 

The signatories to the Open Letter denounce Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza, which has resulted in mass civilian death, injury and widespread devastation for 2.3 million Palestinians. The signatories also deplore the attacks of 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups.

The right to education is an internationally protected human right enshrined in multiple human rights instruments to which Israel is a party. Scholasticide is the intentional and systematic destruction of educational infrastructure, educators and students. On 4 April 2024, the NBC News report “Class destroyed: The rise and ruin of Gaza’s revered universities” details how “universities across Gaza have been leveled.” 

Whereas education had been a source of hope for Palestinians living under the nearly 57-year-long Israeli occupation of Gaza, today we are witnessing the destruction of educated futures on an unprecedented scale. 

The Open Letter describes how the scholasticide is being carried out in violation of international human rights, humanitarian and criminal law. The signatories write :

“Denying access to education through the widespread and systematic destruction of educational infrastructure, along with deliberate and indiscriminate killing of educators and students, is an essential attribute of the collective punishment Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza”.

The Open Letter calls attention to the fact that all 12 universities in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged and thousands of university faculty, staff and students have been killed or injured. 

To date, Israel’s attacks have also killed nearly 6,000 school-aged children with another 10,000 wounded. As of January 2024, more than three-quarters of school buildings in Gaza had been damaged. 

The signatories call for academic institutions and scholars around the world to join them in condemning Israel’s attacks on educational futures in Gaza, insofar as “[s]cholasticide facilitates the physical and cultural erasure of the Palestinian people and is integral to rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable.”

Al Jazeera English Video added by Informed Comment: “Israel’s war is depriving Gaza’s students of an education | Al Jazeera Newsfeed ”

The Open Letter makes seven calls to action:

1. An immediate and permanent ceasefire and immediate and unconditional release of all hostages;
2. Israel’s compliance with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice; 
3. An end to Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and its occupation, so that the educational sector can be rebuilt; 
4. Full access of United Nations agencies to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to carry out independent monitoring, investigation, and humanitarian coordination; 
5. All States that have suspended funding to UNRWA – the UN agency which runs many of the Strip’s now closed elementary and secondary schools – to immediately resume funding; 
6. North American universities, governments, NGOs and individual academics to support the reconstruction of educational institutions in Gaza, through financial and in-kind contributions; and 
7. State and individual accountability under domestic and international law mechanisms.

The Open Letter remains open for signature by any academic affiliated with a postsecondary institution in North America.

The Open Letter can be accessed and signed at https://forms.gle/m2c1UpLVXMHuJ3sA8.   

Letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott regarding Executive Order GA-44