May 2021 Statement

May 25, 2021

​We, as members of the University of San Francisco community, express our heartbreak and outrage at the recent acts of extreme violence in Israel and Palestine. We recognize that firing projectiles and dropping bombs that primarily threaten civilians is a war crime whether done by Palestinians or Israelis. We also recognize the gross asymmetry in power between Israel, the region’s most powerful armed forces, and Palestinians living under siege and occupation. We believe that all nations have the right to self-defense, but that no one has the right to attack civilian targets.

We acknowledge that the root of the conflict is in the occupation, displacement, and ongoing oppression of Palestinians by Israel, as seen most recently in the acts of violence against families in Sheikh Jarrah, the attacks on worshipers at the Al Aqsa Mosque, the massive bombardment of Gaza, and the recent increase in arrests of activists.  In this statement, we offer our solidarity with Palestinians and their Jewish Israeli allies, understanding that the struggle for Palestinian liberation began with the Nakba in 1948.  We stand with Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization, B’tselem, that describe the systematic violations of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights as a “crime of apartheid and persecution.”  The United Nations denounces the purposeful fragmentation of Palestinians as an effort to entrench apartheid politics.

We call on the U.S. government to stop supporting the violation of Palestinian human rights through its military aid to Israel (amounting to more than $10 million per day) and its abuse of its veto power at the United Nations, preventing the world body from upholding its Charter, including the inadmissibility of any state expanding its territory by force. And we denounce anti-Semitism, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia in all its forms.

Right now, educators and students who teach and speak about Palestine do so at great personal risk in this climate of censorship, thus undermining academic freedom.  Along with our colleagues at UC Press, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, Princeton University, University of Illinois, Chicago, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, City University of New York, Vassar College, Yale University, Gender Studies Departments and Scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies across universities, we express our solidarity with Palestinians.

We affirm the call in Jesuit teaching and in the social justice mission of the University of San Francisco to “take action against the things that degrade human dignity” and to “amplify the voices of the underserved.” The work of dismantling systems of injustice in the U.S. and globally is interconnected; as the Movement for Black Lives states: “The fight for Palestinian rights and dignity is integral to the fight for human rights everywhere.”