ME/SA stands in support of our students, faculty and staff who have been affected by the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis in Palestine, Israel and the Gaza Strip.

We, the signatories below, express our concerns for the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip and condemn the state-sanctioned violence by settlers and lynch mobs against Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel. The current asymmetrical assaults by the Israeli state have left over 180 Palestinians dead, of which at least 40% are women and children, and over 1200 Palestinians injured, as of May 16. Palestinian families spent the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in a state of terror and anguish. Israel’s state violence is also an assault on the education of Palestinian youth. More than 24 Palestinian schools in Gaza have been damaged by Israeli air strikes and Palestinian students have been prevented from protesting the war at Israeli universities. This brutal violence follows the forcible evictions of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli settlers, whose settlements are deemed illegal under international law. Marauding Jewish extremists have been filmed lynching and beating Palestinians in the streets. As US-based scholars, we are outraged that the US administration has refused to condemn this Israeli state violence, yet again. The Biden administration has opposed the UN Security Council meeting about the rapidly escalating crisis and blocked their statements, including calls for a ceasefire (at the time of writing this). The US government has historically provided more funding to Israel than any other country in the world to the tune of $3.8 billion a year. Imagine how this money could be spent on public education, healthcare, and building safer communities! This latest eruption of anti-Palestinian violence and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is occurring in the context of an ongoing history of forcible displacement, dispossession, and systemic racism by Israel. Recently, Human Rights Watch criticized Israel as an apartheid state, given the legal nature of entrenched racial discrimination by the Israeli state against Palestinians under its rule. The Black Lives Matter movement in the US has helped spotlight the distressing similarities between, and the collaborations binding, US and Israeli policing. Indigenous rights movements have highlighted struggles against settler colonialism linking North America and Palestine. Mass incarceration, refugee displacement, border militarization, and restrictions on freedom of movement are all issues that have energized transnational solidarity between social justice movements in the US and Palestine. Feminists have recently endorsed the statement that Palestine is a Feminist Issue opposing gendered and sexual violence in Palestine as intrinsic to the “siege of Palestinian land and life.” We stand in solidarity with Palestinian scholars working under conditions of edu-cide and struggling with the censorship of their narratives and scholarship. We also support the right of students and faculty to speak openly about these issues of human rights and global justice without fear of reprisals, blacklisting, or unwarranted allegations of anti-Semitism that trivialize actually existing anti-Semitism in a context of emboldened white supremacy and fascist violence. As scholars committed to racial justice and opposed to war and colonialism, we believe that justice is indivisible and has no borders.

Dept and Program Signatories
Department of Asian American Studies
Mellon Research Initiative on Racial Capitalism
Department of American Studies
Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Department of African American and African Studies
Mellon Research Initiative on Feminist Arts and Sciences
Department of French and Italian
Middle East/South Asia Studies Program

individual Signatures

Donald Palmer, Graduate School of Management
Kathleen Frederickson, Associate Professor of English
Justin Leroy, Assistant Professor of History
Natalia Deeb-Sossa, Professor of Chicana/o Studies
Susy Zepeda, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies
Michael Singh, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies
Victor Montejo, Retired Professor of Native American Studies
Ofelia Cuevas, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies
Alan Klima, Professor of Anthropology
Viola Ardeni, Lecturer in Italian
Jaimey Fisher, Professor of German and Cinema & Digital Media
Joshua Clover, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Jesse Drew, Professor of Cinema and Digital Media
Hsuan Hsu, Professor of English
Seeta Chaganti, Professor of English
Inés Hernández-Ávila, Professor, Native American Studies
Justin Spence, Associate Professor of Native American Studies
Zinzi Clemmons, Assistant Professor of English
Suzana Sawyer, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Zoila Mendoza, Professor of Native American Studies
Lucy Corin, Professor of English
Erin Gray, Professor of English
Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology
Elizabeth Miller, Professor of English
Simon Sadler, Professor of Design
Omnia El Shakry, Professor of History
Stacy D Fahrenthold, Assistant Professor of History
Michael Ziser, Associate Professor of English
Joseph Dumit, Professor of Science & Technology Studies
Stephanie Boluk, Cinema and Digital Media
Parama Roy, Department of English
Margaret Ronda, Associate Professor of English
Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Davis
Ali Anooshahr, History Department
Wendy DeSouza, Middle East/South Asia Studies Program
Julie Wyman, Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media
Baki Tezcan, Professor of History
Timothy Choy, Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies
Cristiana Giordano, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Liza Grandia, Associate Professor of Native American Studies
Tim Lenoir, Professor of Science & Technology Studies and Cinema & Digital Media
Kris Fallon, Associate Professor of Cinema & Digital Media
Fiamma Montezemolo, Professor, Cinema & Digital Media