Submission: Letter for Palestine from Members of the Literature Department

This letter was originally written and sent to the UCSD Literature Department in late November. We are still waiting for a response. Although our faculty has formally failed to comment, we commit to continuing to work towards these demands and challenge others to do so as well. We urge other graduate students to compose similar letters and pressure their departments to take action.

To the Literature Department at UCSD:

We write this statement as concerned members of the UCSD Literature department, as academic workers and researchers, as international students, as people of varying settler and Indigenous backgrounds, as people in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation against a genocidal settler colonial military occupation. As we witness the atrocities taking place in Palestine, we also witness UC and UCSD campus leadership ignore, disparage, and misrepresent the struggle and history of Palestinian people. In the midst of Zionist messaging released within the UC system, by other university campuses across the nation, and by our local and national representatives and institutions, we call upon our Literature department faculty to take an unapologetic stance against the Israeli occupation and genocide in support of Palestinian life and peoplehood. We welcome the endorsement of this letter and its release by our department.

We would like to uplift Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UCSD in their condemnation of both the discriminatory email from Chancellor Khosla and the statement made by University of California Board of Regents. SJP writes that Khosla’s “dangerous and discriminatory statement… sends the message to all minoritized students loud and clear: UC San Diego supports Israeli war crimes and is indifferent to… more than 75 years of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” To echo the statement written by colleagues in Ethnic and Gender Studies programs across the UC system, we condemn violence “toward Palestinian students from Zionist supporters on UC campuses,” including UCSD, “which took place in the last few [weeks] and in past instances where pro-Palestinian solidarity rallies, meetings, or events have taken place.” We condemn “in the strongest possible terms the UC’s failure to create a safe environment for Palestinian students and their supporters.”

This dangerous environment is buttressed by policies that conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism; these policies repress critical conversations and free political expression. In 2016, the UC Regents approved a policy linking anti-Zionism to antisemitism in the name of standing against “discrimination” and “intolerance.” This move is a predecessor to what we are now witnessing across the western imperial core: a McCarthyite campaign that bills any critics of the Israeli state—Jewish, Palestinian, or otherwise—as antisemitic, thereby silencing any critical conversation around the lived realities of the Palestinian people. To quote a statement from the Jewish students at the CUNY School of Law, “[we] are steadfast in our belief that Zionism—as a political ideology predicated on theft and destruction—serves to imperil both Jews and Palestinians, even though its proponents only target the latter.”

Palestinians and Jews alike deserve safety. But one group’s safety is not and should not be predicated on the “right” to establish an ethnonationalist state on land that another group has lived on and stewarded for generations. We grieve the loss of lives in both Palestine and Israel. But it is precisely the historical and ongoing genocidal and apartheid military occupation and settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians by the Israeli state that keeps both Israelis and Palestinians unsafe. To claim otherwise erases the decades of unspeakable oppression Palestinians have faced under a Zionist settler colonial regime for over 75 years. To police how Palestinians and their allies resist and to demand that they be “perfect victims” is to support the continuation of genocidal tactics that make Palestinian resistance necessary in the first place (Ethnic and Gender Studies statement).

In addition to the dangerous statements made by the Chancellor and the Regents, UCSD’s ties to the defense industry¹ demonstrate the university’s complicity and at times direct involvement with colonial and imperial violence. The university partners with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin—to name a few companies—thereby directly producing or funding opportunities for student engineers to work for weapons manufacturers, all of which have been profiting from the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. In 2004, UCSD Extension was awarded a $150,000 grant to collaborate with the Technion Israel Institute of Technology to “foster the growth of the biotechnology clusters in the United States and Israel.” As Chancellor Khosla himself writes in a summary of his work experience, he served as project manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1996, the year DARPA mass produced The Predator Drone, a drone originally developed by an Israeli company, which launched “a new era” of silent engines that transformed drone warfare into a “covert” or quiet killer. UCSD as a public education institution is inextricable from its ongoing involvement in settler colonial projects enacted against the Palestinian people, against Indigenous, Black and brown people in the United States and along its US-Mexico Border, and against civilians targeted by drone strikes under the guise of the US’s long list of military “interventions” and the supposed “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

At every New Writing Series reading in the department, we acknowledge that UCSD is on stolen land. This action will remain performative and hollow so long as the department doesn’t publicly condemn Israel as a settler colonial state. As stated on our website, as a department, we “seek to develop critical and creative interventions that will shape and inform a sustainable and just future.” How can we be a Literature Department that prides itself on critically engaged writing and research on global literature, ethnic literatures, and decolonial thought, a department that prides itself on bridging disciplinary fields, spaces, and peoples, and not take a stance on global issues of settler colonialism and militarism? We urge all who claim to be committed to decolonial studies, feminist, queer and trans scholarship, Asian studies, critical refugee and immigration studies, and ecocriticism—to name just a few areas in our department—to not only think intersectionally about systems of power but also put theory into practice.

We demand that the Literature Department faculty:

1. Take a public stance in solidarity with Palestine.
2. Provide active support for Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim students. (Here is a resource guide created by UCSD students.)
3. Create spaces and resources for students to learn more about the history of Palestine and their ongoing struggle for justice as well as to practice critical media literacy when bombarded by biased reporting and disinformation. We want to see courses, lectures, talks, panels, and more on Palestine.
4. Create spaces and resources for students to learn more about the military-industrial complex and how UCSD actively contributes to it. We do not want this to be discussed in the abstract or merely “gestured at.”
5. Boycott institutions that have not, in writing or action, condemned Israel’s brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. This boycott includes conferences, guest lectures, readings, performances, and any other form of labor the institution asks for, even if they were previously arranged. In this, we follow the lead of numerous other writers and artists in solidarity around the world.
6. Urge the university to support the BDS (Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions) movement.

Signed,
Concerned members of the UCSD Literature Department

¹ UCSD’s military involvement “began shortly after the first world war” according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, which “became a hub of the University of California Division of War Research in 1941.” UCSD has also collaborated with Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) as recently as 2019. In addition, the UC has over 2 million dollars in holdings with BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest investor in weapons manufacturing, private prisons, and fossil fuels.