Pratt Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) is an affiliate group of the national Faculty for Justice in Palestine network. We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Lebanon against the ongoing, escalating terroristic and genocidal violence of the Israeli state.
We also act in solidarity with Pratt Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Pratt Alumni for Justice in Palestine (AJP), and affiliated student groups (Pratt Jewish Voices for Peace, the Pan-African Student Association, and Queer Pratt to name a few) struggling for freedom and justice in Palestine.
You can follow us online through our website and on social media at:
@pratt_fjp
Get involved by reaching out through social media or by email to: contact [at] prattfsjp.org
Boycott-Divest at Pratt: Where Are We Now?
We engage in critical inquiry to encourage new ways of thinking, challenge the boundaries of our fields, and promote civic engagement. Our school educates and fosters collaborative, creative, and socially responsible professionals who contribute to building a more inclusive and just global society.
—from Pratt’s Mission Statement
In February, a coalition of Pratt student groups issued an open letter to the administration demanding divestment from the Israeli government, and its corporate and institutional supporters.
In May, the Pratt Academic Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution* on financial disclosure and transparency, in preparation for divestment of Pratt’s financial connections with the Israeli government and any corporate entities that contribute to Israel’s continued assault on and occupation of Palestinian territories.
On July 2nd, the Pratt Board of Trustees issued a statement summarily rejecting the demandsand the resolution. They did so despite growing international condemnation of Israel’s actions as genocidal, illegal, immoral and a threat to humanity.†
Coming in the middle of summer, the email claimed to be an expeditious response to the Senate resolution. In fact, it was a collection of specious claims and arguments that sought to justify the unjustifiable. It was a legalistic and procedural document that attempted to hide a morally bankrupt decision—in full contradiction of Pratt’s own mission statement—behind false fronts of intellectual objectivity, fairness, and support of “diversity.”
The response marks a shameful failure to uphold and defend Pratt’s self-proclaimed educational goals of encouraging “critical inquiry” and “new ways of thinking.” Behind the humanistic referrals to fairness, objectivity and even-handedness lay core assumptions for which the Board of Trustees must be held accountable. They are, in short:
- The Board believes that complex political issues are beyond the scope of educational institutions, and best left to politicians.
- They see the suffering in both Israel and in Gaza, but their belief in intellectual “objectivity” disallows them from perceiving any distinction between those two forms of suffering.
- The Board’s commitment to diversity compels them to value every point of view equally, even in the face of catastrophic violence leading to the genocidal destruction of a people.‡
- Neutrality, and a belief in moral equivalence, justifies continued collusion with the Israeli state and its supporters, because to do otherwise would be “taking sides.”
- The Board categorically refuses to divest from the Israeli government and all corporate and institutional entities that daily contribute to the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the killing of its people. Yet this is not in itself a political act or staking of a political position.
- Furthermore, the Board’s responsibility for the fiscal health of the institution requires that should the Institute divest, any financial loss resulting from Israel-specific divestment would lead to reduced funds for student scholarships and faculty support.
The clear message from the Board of Trustees is that faced with the conflict between Pratt’s self-defined mission, which would require the institution to take a stand against the indiscriminate killing of more than 41,000 women, men and children in Gaza (in addition to other mounting atrocities), and political expediency that induces the Institute to bow to perceived political and financial pressures,the Board fails in its responsibility to support Pratt’s values, or to represent the students and faculty who are indispensable to Pratt as an educational institution.
The absolute repugnance of the genocidal, expansionist war being carried out by the Israeli state and crucially underwritten by the United States has been expressed by students, faculty, staff, and alumni, time and again, with great eloquence and criticality. The Board of Trustees has judged that this deeply considered position rooted in global humanitarian consensus does not even merit substantive engagement.
We will not let this be the last word. We will not rest. Not one of us is free until Palestine is free.
* The fourth resolution in this document—“that Pratt provides full transparency regarding institutional investments in Israeli companies or companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine and prepares to divest from these holdings, if any”—passed by a supermajority. The Board of Trustees has perfunctorily disregarded the mandate of Pratt faculty. We must, however, also confront the fact that the first three resolutions, including one calling for an end to Pratt’s study abroad partnership with Bezalel University, failed to pass by a small margin. What this tells us is that there is more work to be done in our own ranks, as well as at the administrative level.
† See, for example:
”UN General Assembly demands Israel ends occupation of Palestinian territories”
”Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded”
‡ At this moment, more than 41,000 people have been killed, not counting those who have died from starvation, lack of water, lack of medical care, and displacement. Israel specifically targets journalists, professors, health care workers, artists, poets, and community/religious leaders, using AI technology provided by the US and its corporate partners.
In addition to the destruction of life, infrastructural devastation is also vast in its scope and scale. More than 87,000 housing units have been completely demolished with a total of 55% of Gaza’s housing uninhabitable, a total of 156,423 other buildings have been damaged across the Gaza Strip, including 204 hospital buildings, of which 39 were completely destroyed; 391 mosques, with 174 destroyed; and 883 school and university buildings, with 176 completely destroyed. Israel has also been charged by the UN, internal aid agencies, including USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
What We’re Reading
I see Umm Hassan wandering in the fields among the thousands of others without homes. I see her, and I hear the whistle of the train. I know there weren’t any trains in Galilee; they came later, in Lebanon and Syria, when the refugees were rounded up and distributed around the various suburbs, which then turned into camps.
The whistle rings in my ears. I see the people being led toward the final trains. I see the trains, and I shudder. Then I see myself loaded into a basin and carried on a woman’s head.
I confess I’m scared.
I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death.
We mustn’t see ourselves only in their mirror, for they’re prisoners of one story, as though the story had abbreviated and ossified them.
—Elias Khoury (1948—Sept. 15, 2024), from Gate of the Sun
Is the tree of the heart enough
If our wind was shattered
and we too were shattered with the wind?
—Faraj Bayraqdar, from “Cooing”
Analysis of a Purposeful Genocide
“When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank… But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there… The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip…
“The (current) scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.”
—Adam Shatz, “Israel’s Descent,” London Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 12, June 2024
Religious Communities Respond to Israeli War Crimes
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted on July 1 to divest from Israel bonds and begin the process of urging two companies to stop practices that contribute to human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories. This decision includes:
1. Divesting from governmental debt held by countries maintaining prolonged military occupations, including Israel.
2. Denouncing Christian Zionism, which links the State of Israel with biblical views of the “promised land” and promotes taking land from Palestinians.
3. Encouraging General Electric (GE) and Palantir Technologies to end policies harming Palestinians. GE sells fighter jet engines used by Israel’s air force, and Palantir provides AI technology for Israel’s surveillance of Palestinians.
Bob Ross of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network highlighted the urgency of addressing Israel’s occupation, “There is a growing consensus in the church that we shouldn’t be profiting from Israel’s human rights abuses and, frankly, genocide against Palestinians.”
Religion News Service via Instagram
How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War
History is crowded with chapters in which Indigenous peoples, starved and immiserated by colonial oppressions, finally rebel, with those rebellions at times including atrocities. This, in turn, becomes the pretext for their colonial overlords to unleash unhinged “exterminate all the brutes” rampages, to the point of genocide. As Israel ramped up its genocidal threats on Palestinians it termed “human animals” one year ago, scholars of anticolonial history such as Ghassan Hage and Shailja Patel pointed to these parallels on social media and in small journals—drawing on histories of “colonial punitive expeditions”everywhere from Namibia to Minnesota. But they rarely had access to large platforms in North America and Europe to provide this context.
That’s unfortunate, because it would have helped place 7 October and its aftermath into historical perspective—not as an excuse for Hamas’s war crimes, but as a warning against the weaponization of Israel’s shock and humiliation for imperial aggression and grotesque rights violations.
—Naomi Klein, from The Guardian, October 7, 2024
Letter from Palestinian Universities (excerpts)
In a letter addressed to “students and faculty in Gaza Solidarity encampments,” the presidents of a number of Gaza universities (now almost completely obliterated) expressed what the encampments have meant to them.
“In a moment of great darkness, your protests erupt and give hope for humanity that justice is not an abstract concept but a continuous struggle that connects us all. Your values are emancipating the university from structural racism and complicity with power and colonialism.
“The situation in Palestine has reached … genocidal levels, marked by the mass targeting of Palestinian life by killing and displacement; the destroying social, cultural and all educational institutions; and the aim to reduce Palestinians to bare life…
“You are leaders in the call for justice with your bodies on university campuses and in the streets… You stand for the courage that is needed to take action for justice and freedom and determinedly against systems of genocide and racism…
“At a time when the voices of the oppressed are intentionally silenced, your solidarity serves as a beacon of hope…
“We draw inspiration from the courage of those who refuse and resist the continuing injustices of settler colonialism and military occupation. We welcome you at our universities in a liberated Palestine.”
Signed by the Presidents of:
Al Azhar University
Islamic University in Gaza
Gaza University
Al Aqsa University
Palestine Polytechnic University
Al Quds Open University
University of Palestine
Birzeit University
Arab American University
Al Zaytoonah University of Science and Technology
Bethlehem University
and others…
from The New York (War) Crimes, Encampment Edition, May 10, 2024
