Call for Action for a Liberated Palestine

Catriona Rueda Esquibel
Call for Action for a liberated Palestine

The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies joins the world in resisting the genocidal attack on Palestinians in and outside of Gaza and Palestine. NACCS leads and supports scholarly and activist efforts that unsettle colonial logics, practices, and states. As, such, we call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire and persistent escalated action to stop the genocide in Palestine. We urge the United States government, universities, and colleges to divest from funding the state of Israel and its military. We wholeheartedly support Palestinian liberation and autonomy.

The scale of the attacks on the Palestinian people and their educational, health, information, and social and government infrastructures compel us to act in every possible way to stop the material and cultural genocide. We deplore the scholastacide underway, the attacks on public knowledge, and on scholarly, journalistic, and artistic reporting on Palestine, and the pervasive censorship of Palestinian voices and realities. We oppose anti-Palestinian racism in all its forms and false narratives of victimization, which aim to further legitimate Israel’s colonial project.

We reject pink-washing and all attempts to use queer, trans, and non-binary people’s identities as tools to demonize and dehumanize Palestinians and to justify the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. We recognize that queer, trans, and nonbinary Palestinian folks are especially targeted by Israeli apartheid and genocide.

As an organization committed to environmental liberation, we condemn the ecological devastation being committed on the land, air, water and all living organisms in Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces. We condemn the destruction of olive groves, the contamination of the soil and groundwater, and the sewage and waste that is filling the sea, and the bombs which have polluted the air. These acts of destruction make life unlivable. We condemn this ecocide, which we understand is central to the colonial project.

As students mobilize perhaps the greatest social uprising in history, we must heed their call, join their organizing efforts, and generate intergenerational solidarity across academic ranks to support and grow their movements. The lineage of Chicana feminist movements teaches that our freedom struggles for liberatory futures must be queer and feminist led. The Palestinian Feminist Collective calls on movements for a liberated Palestine to confront the systemic gendered and sexual dimensions of colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession.

As a discipline that includes the study of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas and colonial aggression against Mexico by the United States, and as a community of descendants, many who resisted colonization and land takeover, we in Chicana/o/x Studies stand with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

Further, we affirm the Palestinian people’s right to both stay on and return to their lands. We demand the release of humanitarian aid and the restoration of all basic needs, including electricity, gas, food, and water. As a discipline that includes the study of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas and colonial aggression against Mexico by the United States, and as a community of descendants, many who resisted colonization and land takeover, we in Chicana/o/x Studies stand with the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Further, we affirm the Palestinian people’s right to both stay on and return to their lands. We demand the release of humanitarian aid and the restoration of all basic needs, including electricity, gas, food, and water.

We express our commitment to supporting and affirming students and faculty experiencing anti-Palestinian racism and Zionist silencing, harassment, and punitive attacks. We defend scholarly and activist freedom and our right to teach, write, and research the truth about Palestine without the threat of censure or retaliation. We call on universities and colleges to cease their intimidation, repression, and criminalization of campus scholar activism on behalf of Palestinian liberation. Academic institutions cannot protect academic freedom except for Palestine. The targeted suppression of the subject of Palestine is  inconsistent with academic freedom, a core value of higher learning.

Further, universities and colleges are unleashing a securitized project to deploy racial policing on and off campus, intensifying policing and militarized responses. We stand with the “stop cops on campus” and prison abolitionist movements and understand that our struggle for abolition from the police, prison, ICE, and detention regime violence is a joint struggle with the liberation of Palestine as the genocide is waged with militarized technologies and tactics that surveil and attack our shared communities.

At this moment, we are witnessing a historical global movement for a free Palestine. We urge our members to participate in and support direct actions demanding an immediate cease-fire and release of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. This moment beckons the transformation of the colonial university itself and is another iteration of the struggle for Ethnic Studies. We understand Palestinian liberation is deeply tied to our collective liberation as Chicana/o/xs. We envision a liberated future for Chicana/o/x peoples and our Palestinian relatives and join our struggles to usher them in.

NACCS joins the Association of Asian American Studies, the American Studies Association, the Native  American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association, which have all called for an immediate ceasefire and action and research to stop the genocide.

This Call for Action is in Memory of Professor Catriona Rueda Esquibel. She along with her partner Dr. Luz Calvo led the Association in creating a BDS stance in 2015.

NACCS acknowledges the Jotería Caucus, LBMT Caucus and Indigenous Caucus for their putting forth the statement.