MASSACHUSETTS (Dispatches) – Scores of Harvard University faculty members have endorsed the anti-Zionist Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as well as a student campaign that is aimed at opposing the occupying regime’s apartheid policies.
49 faculty members lent their blessing to the anti-Zionist BDS—which seeks to sanction all products that are made on the occupied Palestinian land and illegal settlements—and the anti-apartheid bid through an open letter, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency reported.
“Israeli state violence has devastated Palestinian life through a combination of warfare, territorial theft, and violent displacement,” read the letter, adding, “Unwavering U.S. financial, military, and political support has fueled the systemic domination and repression of Palestinians.”
“In 2018, Jewish supremacy in Israel was given legal sanction through the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which makes the right to national self-determination in Israel unique to the Jewish people and defines Jewish settlement as a national value,” said the undersigned.
The so-called law was passed by a vote of 62-55 after a long and stormy debate that year, prioritizing “Jewish” values over democratic ones across the occupied Palestinian territories. It declared the holy occupied city of Al-Quds as the Zionist regime’s “capital,” allowed Jewish-only communities, set Hebrew as the official language, and relegated Arabic from an official language to one with “special status.”
The letter went on to echo various reports by prominent human rights organizations that have documented widespread rights violations against Palestinians and an institutionalized system of segregation and discrimination against them, which amounts to a system of apartheid.
“It is this larger context of escalating ethno-nationalist violence that the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee addressed in its Israeli Apartheid Week of events. It is also the context that prompted The Harvard Crimson to publish its April 29 editorial in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and Palestinian liberation,” the signatories said.
The letter also blasted the United States’ chronic defense of the Zionist regime, which has seen Washington lavishing billions of dollars in military aid for the occupying regime each year, and shielding the regime against back-to-back damning resolutions at the United Nations.