As we write, more than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 8,000 are missing and presumed dead, and 61,154 have been wounded by the Israeli military’s pulverization of Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023. On our campus, University of Minnesota community members who have protested this horrific slaughter of civilians have endured silencing, censorship and accusations of antisemitism. 

Faculty members have faced threats and harassment, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) University community members have confidentially shared with FLAGS-JP that they have received racially motivated and discriminatory treatment for supporting Palestine. Some Minnesota faculty have — falsely and irresponsibly —  maligned University community members who advocate for Palestine and critique the state of Israel with baseless accusations of anti-semitism and pro-terrorist sympathies. They have further used these spurious charges to call for university and federal investigation of their co-workers and students. 

We echo our colleagues at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank that there can be no moral equivalence between colonizer and colonized: nothing justifies genocidal violence. 

Alarmed by this pattern of persecution and refusing silence in the face of genocide, a group of University community members has formed the FLAGS-JP collective in line with the call from U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and formed the Faculty, Librarians, Alumni, Graduate Students, and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FLAGS-JP) collective. 

FLAGS-JP stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemns — in the strongest possible terms — the continuing violence Israel has unleashed, with the support of the United States, on Palestinians and their homeland.  We ask our colleagues to join us in challenging imperial grammars that attempt to normalize or sanitize the violence in Gaza. We are professionally and ethically obliged to acknowledge and encourage critical analysis of state propaganda that upholds settler colonialism, white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence. 

The decision to form this collective is born of urgency. We have no choice but to work toward educating our campus about the immensity of loss and devastation in Palestine. We have a responsibility to amplify the demands of the Palestinian people for an end to Israeli colonization and occupation. We must also hold the university accountable to our community, our students, and our colleagues amidst rising Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian violence in the US. 

While University leadership has issued multiple statements acknowledging the loss of Israeli lives in Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault, it has revealed its bias by remaining silent about the Israeli state’s massively disproportionate and unjustified violence against Palestinian civilians since October, as well as about the daily terror Palestinians have faced, before and since, from the Israeli state and settlers.

The campus community received a SAFE-U emergency alert on Jan. 11 about specific threats to shoot persons. However, inexplicably, neither the original notification, the University’s five updates, nor the University’s or law enforcement’s public statements, reported that the suspect named Iranian students as primary targets. 

We have witnessed Israel intentionally obliterate educational institutions across Gaza. At the University, to advocate for Palestine’s right to exist is to also advocate for academic freedom and freedom of speech. Pro-Palestinian speech, activism, and intellectual work are arguably the most frequent triggers of academic freedom violations, employment discrimination and censorship in academia: few political or personal stances render university community members who hold them as vulnerable to public persecution and administrative reprisals. We understand this reality as reflective of the larger truth that few, if any, sociopolitical causes are as stigmatized and marginalized as that of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and liberation.  

We firmly stand against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and we adamantly refuse the claim that supporting  Palestinian liberation constitutes antisemitism. We assert that Zionism is not an intrinsic or definitive feature of Jewish identity and recognize that silencing dissent and harassing Jewish and non-Jewish advocates for a free Palestine is a central part of the Zionist political project to normalize Israeli occupation, colonization and genocide. 

We hope and organize for Palestinian liberation from 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism, the end of the Israeli state’s apartheid system and occupation of the Palestinian Territories, justice and equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees. 

As employees and students at a university founded on the dispossession of the Dakota people and which invests in companies that support the Israeli state’s persecution of Palestinians, we adhere to the founding principles of the USACBI, and we ask the University to support the call from Palestinian civil society and divest from the state of Israel. 

To learn more about the FLAGS-JP collective and our principles of unity, visit our website. We invite members of the University community, as well as colleagues at other Minnesota colleges and universities, to join us by signing this form. 

Signatures in alphabetical order:

Lana Barkawi, Postdoctoral Alumna; Timothy Brennan, Faculty; Danielle Dadras, Staff; Leith Ghuloum, Doctoral Student; Serra Hakyemez, Faculty; Esther Liu, Doctoral Student; Megan O. Manion, Doctoral Student; Nathaniel Mills, Faculty; Terresa Moses, Faculty; Sima Shakhsari, Faculty

* Signers are submitting this op-ed on behalf of Faculty, Librarians, Alumni, Graduate Students and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FLAGS-JP) at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities.