Letters of Support
Letter from Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) to AAA Executive Board
July 24, 2023
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) applauds the decision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) membership to uphold the Palestinian call for a boycott of complicit Israeli universities over their longstanding active complicity in Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians.
With this vote, the AAA membership has taken a principled stand to ensure the association in no way facilitates Israel’s regime of oppression by refusing institutional ties with universities that have always been a pillar of this regime.
Your decisive vote conveys to Palestinians that our concerns, our rights, and our dignity matter. It also signals to academia that it has a responsibility to ensure it does no harm to the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world.
As we detailed in our letter prior to the vote, Israeli universities work in the service of the Israeli government and maintain deep ties with Israel’s military and arms industry, using the Palestinian population as a real-life laboratory to “field-test” and market its weapons globally. Israeli universities host Israeli military bases on campus and run joint centers. Some Israeli universities are built on Israeli-occupied Palestinian land in an affront to international law.
Principled stands such as the AAA’s bring us closer to a future of freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians.
It is difficult to overstate how these principled stands give hope to our members, and Palestinians at large, by recognizing our charges of decades of Israel’s grave human rights abuses and acknowledging, respecting, and following the pathway we have laid out to end those abuses, namely by boycotting the very institutions that propagate them.
We will persist. We have no other choice.
We are honored to have the AAA membership with us in our struggle.
Best Regards,
Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees
Letter from Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
July 24, 2023
Dear AnthroBoycott Collective,
From all of us at PACBI, we share our heartfelt congratulations with you on the stellar work pushing forward the motion to boycott complicit Israeli academic institutions at the AAA.
Yours is an example of the type of strategic planning and organizing that is crucial and most effective in attaining our ultimate goals of freedom, justice and equality.
The morally consistent and intersectional way in which you presented the arguments, the support you garnered from AAA sections, your unyielding work to push back against apartheid Israel-supporting lobby groups and to denounce and challenge internal censorship and bias, led us to this historic win in an academic association.
Your outstanding work will have positive reverberations throughout the academic world and, importantly, gives hope to Palestinians at a time when we are facing darkness all around.
As you know, ours is a long-term struggle and equally important secondary objectives in campaigns such as yours include planting seeds, expanding our base of support, opening up the debate, and preparing the ground for future work.
You have also overwhelmingly achieved those objectives.
Best regards,
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel