Palestinian Students’ Urgent Call to Students Around the Globe: Stop the Genocide and End Complicity with Israeli Apartheid

23 October, 2023 ـــ We, the undersigned Palestinian student groups and unions in occupied Palestine, call on students, student associations, and councils around the globe to take action to protect life and stop Israel’s unfolding genocide against the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza open-air prison. 

Since October 7th, the Palestinians in Gaza have been under the most intense and indiscriminate Israeli bombing ever, devastating entire neighborhoods, markets, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, healthcare services, and journalists, among others. Entire families have, again, been wiped off the face of the earth. More than 5,087 Palestinians have been killed, over 2,055 of them children, and close to one million have been displaced. The UN is now saying many may “dehydrate to death” as clean water runs out, and UN experts are sounding the alarm about the “use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

In short, Israel is waging a genocidal war on our people, as confirmed by leading Palestinian human rights organizations, more than 800 international scholars, and the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights. 

We salute all the global expressions of meaningful solidarity with our people’s struggle for self-determination, liberation, and the right of our refugees to return home, with millions pouring onto the streets from Indonesia to Brazil, from the US and Europe to South Africa, and across the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq. This solidarity, especially at this most testing of times and despite severe anti-democratic repression in the colonial West, gives us true hope.

Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid will not stop its rolling massacres unless we muster enough people power worldwide to end international state, corporate, and institutional complicity with it and pressure governments to impose targeted sanctions on it, as was done to apartheid South Africa.

Throughout this ongoing bloodbath, the U.S., EU, and UK have continued to provide Israel with lethal weapons and complete diplomatic protection against accountability, rejected the global call for an immediate ceasefire, and promoted Israel’s fabricated propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians and incites racial violence against Arabs and Muslims. Palestinians consider the U.S., EU, and UK governments enablers of and complicit in Israel’s unfolding genocide. Students in those countries, in particular, are called upon to urgently act, despite the terrible repression, to pressure their governments to end this genocidal complicity.

Like most people worldwide who yearn for a future where justice, freedom, and dignity lay the foundation for real and sustainable peace, we want to see an end to all violence in our beloved homeland. But the very existence of systems of oppression, like settler-colonialism and apartheid, is the initial violence. We recognize that international law stipulates that peoples under foreign occupation and colonial regimes have a right to resist by all means, including armed resistance, so long as they do not harm civilians.  

We implore students worldwide to urgently organize and demand that their institutions and elected officials call for:

1. Immediate humanitarian ceasefire, guaranteed by the UN.

2. Immediate entry to Gaza for life-saving humanitarian needs (incl. water, food, fuel, and medicine) and lifting the siege on Gaza.

3. UN protection for the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

4. Clear condemnation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, or “second Nakba” plans.

5. A comprehensive military embargo on Israel, as was done to apartheid South Africa.

6. A full and swift investigation by the International Criminal Court into war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the crimes of genocide and apartheid.

We invite allied students and people of conscience to also: 

1. Maximize BDS pressure and all creative efforts to hold apartheid Israel to account by, among others:

   1. Getting your institutions to adopt procurement and investment policies that exclude arms companies and all others involved in grave violations of international law.

   2. Convincing large, intersectional coalitions and other justice movements to adopt or escalate relevant, context-sensitive BDS campaigns (corporate, academic, cultural, sports, etc.).

   3. Campaigning to convince businesses, student organizations, cultural and academic organizations, etc. to declare themselves Apartheid Free Zones (AFZ).

2. Challenge the mainstream racist and dehumanizing anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic narrative, especially in the hegemonic West, by using factually accurate, well-referenced, ethically consistent, and accessible language to:

   1. Mainstream the charge of genocide, focusing on Palestinians most affected by it. 

   2. Contextualize the current crisis (75 years of oppression, 16-year siege, etc.). 

   3. Effectively contribute to directly refuting the most dominant, dehumanizing, racist Israeli/Zionist propaganda claims.

   4. Remind the world that this Israeli government is the most far-right, fundamentalist, and sexist in history, but it is a continuation of decades of settler-colonial violence against Indigenous Palestinians. 

Signed:

• General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS)

• Birzeit University Student Council

• Al Najah National University Student Council

• Bethlehem University Student Council

• Arab American University Student Council

• Al Quds University Student Council

• Hebron University Student Council

• Right to Education Campaign