Statement on solidarity with Palestine
AAMPLIFY stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and the youth activists across the nation who advocate for a permanent ceasefire and an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza.
As an organization that seeks to uplift Asian American youth leadership, we stand with the student activists who are exercising their right to protest the genocide in Gaza and the US’s role in the massacre. We call on universities to meet their demands at the bargaining table, instead of resorting to police force and militarizing school campuses.
We unequivocally call for an end to Israel’s devastation of Gaza.
In the last eight months, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 14,500 Palestinian children. Palestinians are starving in what UN officials have recognized as a “full-blown famine.” Hospitals and health care workers have been massacred. There are no universities left in Gaza. The horrific escalation in violence is only the latest in a 75-year long occupation of Palestine.
Students across the nation have organized to push for an immediate end to the genocide in Gaza. At college campuses like Columbia, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Humboldt State, San Francisco State, and more, multiethnic and interfaith coalitions of students have organized “Palestinian solidarity encampments” to protest US support of the Israeli military and call on their university to divest from investments in companies that do business in Israel or profit off the war in Palestine. Their organizing is part of a long history of student protest, sit-ins, and calls for divestment on college campuses that have included the Vietnam War and South African apartheid.
At multiple campus “Palestinian solidarity encampments,” the student protestors have been met with violence, Islamophobic and racist harrassment, and aggression from both members of the public and the police. At UCLA, for example, a violent pro-Israel mob attacked student protestors for nearly 5 hours, beating students with pipes, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons, as campus security watched from the sidelines. Attacks against the students continued for 3 hours before police arrived. The next night, police stormed the encampment with batons, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to brutalize students and tear down the encampment with force. By the next morning, police had arrested more than 200 members of the encampment–and none of the pro-Isreal mob who attacked the students. This brutal example of Zionist and police violence at a UC campus pales in comparison to the genocide, starvation, and suffering that Palestinians have endured at the hands of the Israeli military.
As Asian Americans, we recognize the Palestinian people’s fight for liberation is tied to our own histories of resisting racist and colonial oppression. We reaffirm our own role in standing with and fighting for justice for oppressed peoples here and globally.
AAMPLIFY also stands against antisemitism in all its forms and recognizes that Jewish peoples have resisted oppression for centuries. However, we join the Jewish voices who draw a clear and imperative distinction that seeking an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine is not anti-semitic.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
In community,
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