“That is our story, Wasim; the birds of paradise turned out to be dragons of evil. It was all a ploy, criminal media propaganda, a new kind of torture and humiliation for us.”
— From Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
— Nelson Mandela, 1997
Palestinians have shown us the true meaning of bravery. People just like us, from students to grandparents, have been forced into feats of extreme will and strength. 200,000+ Palestinians forced into martyrdom have exposed the crimes and contradictions of genocide. Even underneath a sky of blood and fire, targeted daily by the occupation’s siege of bombs and death squads, the people of Gaza have still found ways to care for each other, love one another and live on.
This perseverance has lasted for decades. For 76 years of apartheid and beyond, Palestinians have remained steadfast against heinous acts of violence, theft and imprisonment. The Zionist regime has not been able to defeat countless Palestinian journalists, educators, intellectuals and everyday people who have revealed injustice and exposed to us the reality of imperialism. Palestinian steadfastness should inspire us to stand up for morality and justice; it should catapult us as students to unite in solidarity and to back it with action.
Here in Grinnell, there are many things we must recognize. First, we are living through a genocide funded by almost all of our public and private institutions. Grinnell College is no exception. It may make us queasy, it may make us feel terrible or want to ignore it. But we should feel terrible. Genocide is terrible.
Second, we must remember that our own struggles are connected to the genocide. Our own struggles are clear: the people within the United States are being robbed by our criminal and oligarchical employers. Our already-defunct welfare systems are now being finished off for good. We are constantly under threat by gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) agents kidnapping our family members, or by police forces brutalizing us. There is so much more.
The apartheid and now genocide have been orchestrated in tandem with these struggles. We must recall that the same criminal employers stealing from us are also stealing millions of dollars through the butchering of people in Gaza (and beyond). We must also recall that ICE, CBP and police share thousands of contracts with the same companies that keep the genocide ongoing. Many of our law enforcement agencies collaborate with the Israel Occupying Forces (IOF) through training programs and shared use of surveillance tools like Pegasus, a spyware tool responsible for targeting both Palestinian and American journalists.
This goes beyond the domestic United States — both the United States and the IOF have funded far-right paramilitary death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Colombia, according to Antony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory. The IOF also funded massacres in Haiti and sends weapons to the genocide in Sudan.
Third, our institutions are deeply entangled with genocide and suffering across the globe. It is well-known at this point that arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are profiting enormously from the genocide. But even non-arms corporations are tied to the killing of Palestinians. Google employees have been mass-fired after exposing the existence of Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s contribution to the apartheid regime in Palestine. Through development of tech infrastructure for checkpoints and surveillance, Google and Amazon capacitate the 24/7 stalking and murder of Palestinians. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol use these same technologies to surveil the US-Mexico border wall.
The involvement of our technology corporations in the United States is an affronting example of entanglement. Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Dell, HP, NVIDIA and tech fascist corporations like Palantir have contracts for or are invested in the illegal, violent and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land. Tech venture capital firms like a16z and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invest in weapons startups used for killing Palestinians. Meta has collaborated directly with the apartheid regime to censor and ban anti-genocide rhetoric from their platforms.
All of these corporations additionally develop and often conduct the surveillance and oppression of marginalized groups (and frankly everyone) in the United States. Their technology is used by police forces and three-letter agencies (FBI, ICE, CBP, etc.) to track, arrest and deport people. We have watched as students in our sister colleges are stalked, harassed and deported with the support of these companies.
Despite this, our universities have kept ties. Grinnell has been a leader in divestment as one of the first institutions to divest from South African Apartheid. Regardless, Grinnell College’s investment board (named Exit 182) has yet to support the proposal to divest from funding our education with the blood of Palestinians. Grinnell College has been confirmed to be invested — the scope of which has been withheld — in corporations on the divestment list.
Furthermore, our colleges and universities repress any education on Palestine, obscuring the apartheid regime from history and intellectual debate. At Grinnell, administrators have told members of SJP that we are not allowed to use the word genocide when referencing Palestine. As a result, the fourth and final thing we must recognize is that we must not let this repression take hold of us. Please keep learning. Please keep your morality sacred. Please take the opportunities to fight injustice where you can. Fuck ICE, Free Palestine!
Support the divestment campaign through this QR code.
Signed,
Adelaide Creegan `27
Leo Goldman `27
Salma Hassab `27
Catherine Kim `27
Donovan Wilcox `27
Correction: A sentence from this article has been clarified to accurately reflect that SJP members were told they could not use the word genocide when referring to Palestine. In a previous version of this article, SJP also made a claim about what faculty members could say in class regarding Palestine. The S&B could not verify this claim. Ellen de Graffenreid, vice president of communications and marketing, said that no faculty member has been directed by the Dean’s Office that they cannot teach about Palestine in class and pointed to the College’s academic freedom principle in the Faculty Handbook.
