Palestinian Professors' Unions Applaud American Anthropological Association Vote to Boycott Complicit Israeli Universities
"Principled stands such as the AAA’s bring us closer to a future of freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians."
Letter sent to the American Anthropological Association Executive Board.
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) applauds the decision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) membership to uphold the Palestinian call for a boycott of complicit Israeli universities over their longstanding active complicity in Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians.
With this vote, the AAA membership has taken a principled stand to ensure the association in no way facilitates Israel’s regime of oppression by refusing institutional ties with universities that have always been a pillar of this regime.
Your decisive vote conveys to Palestinians that our concerns, our rights, and our dignity matter. It also signals to academia that it has a responsibility to ensure it does no harm to the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world.
As we detailed in our letter prior to the vote, Israeli universities work in the service of the Israeli government and maintain deep ties with Israel’s military and arms industry, using the Palestinian population as a real-life laboratory to “field-test” and market its weapons globally. Israeli universities host Israeli military bases on campus and run joint centers. Some Israeli universities are built on Israeli-occupied Palestinian land in an affront to international law.
Principled stands such as the AAA’s bring us closer to a future of freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians.
It is difficult to overstate how these principled stands give hope to our members, and Palestinians at large, by recognizing our charges of decades of Israel’s grave human rights abuses and acknowledging, respecting, and following the pathway we have laid out to end those abuses, namely by boycotting the very institutions that propagate them.
We will persist. We have no other choice.
We are honored to have the AAA membership with us in our struggle.
Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees
