AS UCT STUDENTS, ACADEMICS, AND WORKERS WE CALL ON UCT TO STAND WITH PALESTINE

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As students, workers, organisations and scholars at UCT, we see solidarity with the people of Palestine as the only just position to take. This letter serves to clarify our call as the University community and to invite UCT Management to take an anti-apartheid stance.

UCT Management released a statement on the 18th of May 2021 where it characterised the recent heightened violence against Palestinians, as a “conflict”. We know what this word implies. We know that to characterise Israel’s state-sanctioned violence against Palestinian people is to resort to the diluted and apologist stance of supposed ‘neutrality’. What is happening to Palestinians is not a conflict, it is settler colonialism, white supremacy, occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing by the State of Israel and its supporters. As a university community, we also see the recent spike in violence against Palestinians as part of an ongoing project of settler colonialist expansion.

Settler Colonialism is not complex

There is nothing complicated about what is happening. The notion or characterisation that Israel’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine is complex has been weaponized and historically employed by Israel to defend its violent occupation of Palestine. This is not a coincidence. This idea has very deliberately been nurtured over the years and it serves multiple purposes. To obscure a project of racism behind the curtain of ‘complexity’ shuts down dialogue and prevents people from taking action.

Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel

We find UCT Management’s conjuring of the South African experience disingenuous and dishonest. To say that the colonial violence experienced by Palestinians can only be resolved through peaceful negotiation is to whitewash the history of the Anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. People struggling for the liberation of South Africa did not simply negotiate; there were decades of resistance, armed struggle, solidarity, calls for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions. The Palestinian struggle is an Anti-Apartheid struggle as much as it is an Anti-colonial struggle. The strategy of the Israeli state is the same strategy employed by the Apartheid Regime. Israeli Human Rights organisation B’Tselem, in a detailed report, concluded that Israel is, in fact, an apartheid regime, echoing the sentiments of many international organisations over the years. In their words: “The Israeli regime does not have to declare itself an apartheid regime to be defined as such, nor is it relevant that representatives of the state broadly proclaim it a democracy. What defines apartheid is not statements but practice”.

There is a legal, academic, moral, and political case that qualifies Israel as an Apartheid regime. This classification and analogy does not imply that it mirrors Apartheid South Africa. The Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to brutally impose the supposed supremacy of one group – Israelis – over another – Palestinians. A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.

Despite large-scale support, the call for Academic and Cultural Boycott in 2019 at UCT was blocked by management and right-wing members of UCT Council. That was a moment that had the potential for UCT to join cultural and academic institutions globally in resisting Israel’s business-as-usual approach to colonialism. If Israel continues to act with impunity Palestinians will continue to be massacred.

As members of the University, we call on UCT is to uphold its reputation as the top university in Africa by taking a principled position against Israel’s violence. NOW is the time for UCT to take a stand and be on the right side of history.

Palestinian solidarity is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and secular. This is not an issue about religion, this is about settler-colonialism and occupation. We, therefore, call on student organisations, workers, unions and academics to unite in solidarity with Palestine.

We demand, in response to the call from Palestinian civil society:

• UCT adopts an academic and cultural boycott of all Israeli institutions (not just in the Occupied Territories)
• That UCT cut all financial ties with Israeli institutions
• UCT must divest from Israeli companies and institutions

 

Undersigned:

Students, workers, organisation and academics in solidarity with Palestine