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The Glacier has not made any changes to the following Letter to the Editor from the undersigned faculty listed below. The statement is not an official opinion of The Glacier staff or advisor, but of those indicated below.
MVCC Faculty Statement on Palestine
October 2023
We, the undersigned faculty at Moraine Valley Community College, express our solidarity with the people of Gaza and all of Palestine who are struggling for self-determination and their freedom from the apartheid state of Israel. Our institution, being situated in a congressional district with one of the largest concentrations of Palestinians and Arab Americans in the US, enrolls a sizable number of Palestinian students, and we witness their pain. Like our students, we are heartbroken and outraged by the ongoing ethnic cleansing, genocide, settler colonialism, and military occupation in Palestine. The brutal Israeli attack on Gaza, now in its 13th day (as of this writing), has resulted in nearly 4,000 confirmed deaths, including over 1,500 children. Over a million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced to areas where there is no safety or shelter, and the settler colonial regime has cut off water, food supplies, and fuel. Essentially, starving Palestinians in Gaza.
Corporate media and white dominated institutions repeat false claims of violence against Israelis and fail to recognize the documented human rights abuses committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Coverage also ignores Palestine’s UN-sanctioned Right to Resist “subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.” There has been very little conversation about how the resistance is in response to decades of apartheid Israel’s brutality and violation of Palestinian human rights. Instead, the corporate news media dehumanize Palestinians by repeating the genocidal language of Palestinians being “human animals”. This abhorrent rhetoric about Palestine has deadly consequences. Here in Illinois, a six year old child, Wadea Al- Fayoume, was murdered, a direct result of racist warmongering.
We call for an end to the double-standards used when comparing Palestinians and Israelis. We reject corporate news media’s analysis and their description of Israelis as being “killed” while Palestinians have simply “died”. People were outraged at Hamas taking Israeli hostages. However, there has been very little conversation of Israel holding 2.5 million Palestinians, over half (53%) of whom are children, hostage in Gaza for the past 16 years in an airtight siege. At the same time, we call for an end to the false equivalencies used to compare Palestinians and Israelis. This lack of historical context in American media coverage creates a discourse that furthers a “both sidesism” narrative that fails to recognize the incredibly disproportionate violence experienced by the Palestinian people.
We call upon our colleagues to recognize the Palestine struggle as anti-colonialist, anti-occupation, and anti-zionist, and to be outspoken against Israel’s war crimes. We also urge condemnation of the unequivocal support by the US for Israel and demand that they stop being an apologist for the racist state. In light of what is happening today in Palestine, and to Gazans in particular, we encourage you to join us in full support of the right of return of all Palestinian refugees, as well as their own self-determination and freedom. We ask that you join us in a commitment to keeping our classroom and campus safe by centering our students’ lived experiences, and uplifting our students who are struggling with grief, rage, and fear. Now is not the time to be a quiet bystander.
Ahlam Ballouta, Mary Barney, Gretchen Bernard, Sharon Brennan, Shanya Gray, Nick Hackett, Teresa Hannon, Tish Hayes, Anna Jannak, Layla Khatib, Beth Kielbasinski, Larry Langellier, Sundus Madi-McCarthy, Marie Martino, Dan Matthews, jeffrey mccully, Adel Moustafa, Joe Mullarkey, Souzan Naser, Amanda Pettigrew, LaToya Pryor, Anni Rasmussen, Alexander Resendez, Amani Wazwaz, Christopher Wheat, Hiyam Yusef, Michelle Zurawski
