On Tuesday, March 15, Pitzer's president and vice-president for academic affairs co-signed a statement of support for, and solidarity with, Ukrainians. That statement ended with this comment: "We stand with Ukrainians who are demonstrating tremendous bravery, resilience, unity, and courage as they defend their homeland."
What's tragic and disturbing is that this valuable statement against state oppression when Ukrainians are the victims entirely contradicts the administration's opposition to taking a stand against state oppression when Palestinians are the victims.
The recent "Statement on Ukraine" evidences jarring dissonence when read next to this statement of March 14, 2019, when the same Pitzer president issued an unprecedented veto of shared governance, in order to block the Pitzer community's taking a stand against Israeli state apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
What follows is my public response to the administration's recent "Statement on Ukraine"; I had previously responded to the president's 2019 support for Israeli state oppression, in a published op-ed on March 25, 2019, "A Veto Against a Just Peace for All in Palestine and Israel."
Here is my open letter to my faculty colleagues responding to the administration's recent statement:
March 16, 2022
Colleagues,
The
March 15 “Statement on Ukraine” from Pitzer’s senior administrators (included
below) is right and valuable in taking a clear political stance against the
Russian state’s murderous intervention, including occupation, in Ukraine.
But
if we bring critical thinking and knowledge of global politics to bear on that
statement, we must acknowledge that its position and principles are ones that
our college’s administration has otherwise strongly opposed, specifically when
the victims are Palestinians.
The argument that mainstream US support for Ukraine evidences profound inconsistency relative to the response to several other global crises—including in Kashmir, Yemen, and Palestine—has been powerfully laid out by Khaled Beydoun in his March 7 Washington Post opinion piece, “The World of Inconsistencies between the Ukraine, the Middle East, and Beyond.”
For Pitzer College, the most salient of Beydoun’s examples is Palestine, of course.
Last
Monday, March 14, was the third anniversary of the college president’s
unprecedented veto of shared governance, blocking our community’s support for
the right to education and the most basic of human freedoms for
Palestinians. In the intervening years, both Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch, as well as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem,
have issued unequivocal reports concluding that the Israeli state is
responsible for the grievous crime of apartheid. (The AI
report; the HRW
report; and B’Tselem’s).
Not at all surprisingly, Palestinians are clear-eyed about the glaring inconsistencies, the tragic hypocrisies, in mainstream US responses to the Russian state’s assault on Ukraine. Please read, for instance, this commentary of March 15 from the Palestinian BDS National Committee, regarding Western responses to Ukraine.
No two situations are ever fully analogous. Of course there are differences between the situations of Ukraine and of Palestine. Here recall that the Israeli state’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza has extended over the last 55 years—and that the Israeli state’s ongoing occupation of ’48 Palestine (i.e., of the area within the 1948 borders of the Israeli state) has extended over the last 74 years.
President Oliver: Rescind that veto; Palestinians should be free.
Respectfully, Daniel
Alternative statement?
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree and wish to bring up a tangentially related topic
LOL. You called Israel an "apartheid state" which is odd considering that there are over 2000000 Palestinians living in Israel with Israeli citizenship. They hold positions in parliament, in hospitals, schools, police, industry, and have a quality of life that they would never have in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt...
ReplyDeleteHowever, no Jew can walk down the streets of Ramallah, Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, or Hebron without being stabbed in less than 5 minutes. Attacking terrorist and enablers is not apartheid and neither is blocking them from reaching Israeli civilians to kill. You know what is apartheid? destroying Jewish religious and culture locations to usurp them as "Palestinian Muslim" and ethnically cleansing Jews from land they lived in since ancient times and was affirmed legal under intl law since 1920.
On your Twitter account you were complaining that the Israel Defense Force killed two Palestinians in Jenin. You conveniently forgot to mention that the slain men were members of terror groups and that one of them was responsible for the murder of two Israeli brothers in Huwara the previous week. Well, at least you actually admitted you support terrorism. The Palestinian population has grown from 1.37 million in 1948 to 14 million today. If Israelis are partaking in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, they are doing a lousy job.
Are you going to complain about Hamas and the Palestinian Authority using children as soldiers and human shields? Sources: New York Post: UN-report-outlines-how-hamas-used-kids-as-human-shields The Almenier: Telling the Truth About Palestinian Child Soldiers by McKenna Bates The Tower: Telling the Truth About Palestinian Child Soldiers The Tablet: Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels
ReplyDeleteThe Palestinians are not under occupation. Jewish people have lived there for 3,000 years and there are countless Jewish sites in Israel which predate the Muslim invasion and Arab occupation of the seventh century. At least twenty ancient texts written by Josephus, Manetho, Apion, Tacitus and Juvenal all refer to Jerusalem as being the home of the Jewish people, as does the Old Testament. Temple Mount is the site of the two most important Jewish temples which were built hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded Israel and razed the temple to the ground to build a mosque. In April 2019, archaeologists unearthed an ancient Jewish settlement built 2000 years ago, centuries before the Arab invasion. The half-acre site is proof that the Jewish culture stretched to edge of the Judea province and revealed exposed tunnels used by rebels during the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135AD. The main find is a piece of an oil lamp depicting a nine-stemmed menorah. Archaeologists also found parts of a watchtower, bakeries, Roman-era coins, a mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) and limestone vessels used in rituals.Temple Mount is the site of the two most important Jewish temples built hundreds of years before the Arabs invasion of Israel and there are countless Jewish sites in Israel which predate the Muslim invasion and Arab occupation.
ReplyDeleteIsraelis are sick and tired of having to put up with terror attacks from Palestinian terrorist nutters. Last year they experienced over 2000 terror attacks from them and Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism and he was also directly responsible for the Munich Massacre when innocent Israeli athletes were murdered during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
ReplyDelete