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Harvard staff members endorse BDS movement, student campaign to oppose Israeli apartheid

Picture shows an overview of the Harvard University.

Scores of Harvard University faculty members have endorsed the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) movement as well as a student campaign that is aimed at opposing the Israeli regime’s apartheid policies.

The 49-strong faculty staff lent their blessing to the anti-Israel BDS—which seeks to sanction all Israeli products that are made on the occupied Palestinian land and Israeli settlements—and the anti-apartheid bid through an open letter, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency reported on Saturday.

“Israeli state violence has devastated Palestinian life through a combination of warfare, territorial theft, and violent displacement,” read the letter, adding, "Unwavering US 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 Israeli 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 Israeli regime, which has seen Washington lavishing billions of dollars in military aid for Tel Aviv each year, and shielding the occupying regime against back-to-back condemnatory resolutions at the United Nations.

“Unwavering US financial, military, and political support has fueled the systemic domination and repression of Palestinians,” Harvard University faculty members noted.


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