One year of genocide. 

In the past year, we’ve seen Israel commit massacres with tanks, drones, bulldozers, snipers and 2,000-pound bombs. We’ve seen Israel indiscriminately attack neighborhoods, hospitals, refugee camps, bakeries, libraries, schools, mosques, churches and universities. We’ve watched screaming mothers and fathers, adults and children beheaded, sniped, dismembered and maimed. We’ve watched Palestinian bodies uncovered from mass graves or otherwise made unidentifiable because they have been incinerated or pulverized. Israel has brutally wiped entire families and entire lineages — at least 902 entire families — from this earth with no living relatives left to mourn them. The result? 

An estimated 186,000 or more Palestinians dead, at least 1.7 million Palestinians internally displaced and more than 2 million Palestinians starving. This is genocide. All with the backing of the United States.

Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

And yet, Palestinians have remained steadfast in their resistance against Israeli-imposed apartheid, colonial occupation and ethnic cleansing. They have embodied the value of sumud, or steadfastness, in their fight for their right to return to their homeland. Palestine has been at the forefront of the resistance against the creation of a Greater Israel: an imagined Israel of the future that has genocidal implications for the whole of the Middle East as Israel attempts to expand the borders of its ethnostate into Lebanon.

For many, Oct. 7 was the first they heard of Palestine. Why did it take Oct. 7 for the majority of the world to take notice of Palestine? Why, after nearly 76 years of resistance, has the Palestinian intifada exploded into people’s consciousness? 

Oct. 7 was a turning point for the Palestinian resistance, but we must consider it within the larger context of Israel’s 76-year-long occupation and colonization of Palestinians and their land. It is in Palestine that we see colonialism manifest as “violence in its natural state,” as Frantz Fanon writes in “The Wretched of the Earth.” And, as Fanon writes, power only concedes to greater power, and colonial violence “will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

This is not a fetishization of violence: it is instead the recognition that the violence of colonizers will be reflected in the actions of the colonized. Israel itself uses violence to solve its own problem: namely the threat of Palestinian existence to the legitimacy of its statecraft. 

So, instead of condemning Palestinians, we must consider history. We must consider the failures of our institutions to rise up to meet the needs of Palestinian life and liberation. It is unreasonable to expect Palestinians to civilly accept their death without resistance. If you and your family were subjected to a violent occupation that routinely kidnaps, tortures and murders your friends and family, would you not fight back? Would you not resist? 

Israel’s genocidal political project is fully supported by the U.S. government using the taxpayer money of its own citizens. Just three weeks ago, Israel secured an additional $8.7 billion from our government, merely a drop compared to the $310 billion Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding (adjusted for inflation). Historically, Israel has relied on powers external to the Middle East to sustain itself, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote in “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.” Now, the U.S. and Israel’s other allies are responsible for the horrors Israel inflicts through its expanding aggression, not only against Palestinians, but also the Lebanese, Yemeni and Syrian people.

So what can we do? 

First, we must refuse to remain complicit in this violence. As Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his 1967 speech against our government’s violence in Vietnam, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government … for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

As students at the University of Southern California, we must demand that our University do better. USC is fully complicit in Israel’s genocidal project. This semester alone, USC has hosted Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the Army and Navy, multiple local police departments and the Central Intelligence Agency on our campus to recruit USC’s best and brightest into America’s $829 billion war machine. And “war machine” is no euphemism: all these companies, organizations, institutions and recruitment partners materially uphold the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, as well as the suffering of oppressed people worldwide. 

This is to be expected of a university whose Board of Trustees consists of those who profit from weapons manufacturers, such as Robert A. Bradway (Boeing), Oscar Munoz (Archer Aviation) and Suzanne Nora Johnson (Chair of Intuit Board, whose top shareholder is Blackrock). Ironically, in 2004, the Board of Trustees wrote that USC strives to be an “an ethical university … [that could] serve as a bright beacon for all peoples in our day and in the centuries to come.” 

We cannot appeal to the morality of our corrupt administrators. Instead, we must work together as USC students and with the people of South Central to build community and collective power that will force the administration to make transformative changes. After the historic Gaza Solidarity Occupation, we continue to demand the following:

1. Disclose full financial transparency of the USC endowment and investments. USC has $13.8 billion in assets, of which more than $2.5 billion comes from our tuition. And with all that money, USC has refused to disclose what its investments are and how they are used. Amid the impenetrability of its investments, there are rumors of budget shortfalls hammering every department and student organization at USC. 
2. Divest from Israel and from war profiteers who supply the tools for maintaining colonialism, apartheid, genocide and violence.
3. Participate in a complete academic boycott of Israel. At USC, we continue to sustain three study abroad programs in Israel even though all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed. Many Israeli campuses are built on illegally settled Palestinian land, discriminate against Palestinian students, repress Palestinian history, censor political activism and provide research and technology supporting the occupation and its systems of control. 
4. Protect free speech on campus and provide amnesty to students, faculty and staff punished for their pro-Palestinian activism. About 74 students have faced disciplinary action after last year’s Gaza Solidarity Occupation. Most face probation or suspension. 
5. Stop the displacement of the South Central community. Real estate is political. As Israel sells stolen Palestinian land, a student housing boom around USC displaces residents of historically Black and Brown neighborhoods in South Central. Only private developers, such as multi-billion real estate company Ventus Groups, headed by USC alum Scott Gale, stand to profit. There is no student housing crisis, only a housing crisis exacerbated by USC.
6. End policing on campus by defunding the Department of Public Safety and disclosing and severing all ties with the LAPD. Since 2002, USC has spent more than $550 million on DPS. They have hired former LAPD officers who were fired for racism and racially profiled Black and Brown students. Additionally, USC arrested more than 50 students last semester and LAPD was paid over $2 million between March and May last semester. Many are on USC’s watchlist and are surveilled.
7. Denounce the genocide of Palestinians and pressure leaders to call for an immediate & permanent ceasefire. Experts from the United Nations to the International Court of Justice have recognized this fact. 

These are all achievable aims. But we cannot defend Palestinian lives and South Central’s residents alone: we need your help. We need every worker, student, and organization that cares about justice to join the Divest from Death Coalition. We have the backing of a global movement and historical precedent for divestment. From Costa Rica to Congo, Palestine to Philippines, Mexico to Hawai’i, and Ireland to Sudan, people have seen their own struggles for humanity, love and liberation in each other and the Palestinian struggle.

Find your sense of justice. The people of Palestine have shown us that, no matter your condition, we can all strive for justice for ourselves and for each other. Palestine intersects with many struggles — the climate crisis, racial justice, labor rights, feminism, queer liberation, disability justice, immigration and indigenous sovereignty. So we ask: do you want to be selective with your humanity? Or do you want to fight for liberation and justice for all?

Join us in our fight for the liberation of Palestine.