Dear Professor Chambers,
Before you read the letter, ground yourself through the guide to Depth Conversation by the GTDF Collective, this is important.
As graduate students in Political Science at UCI, we are extremely concerned and anxious about our right to quality education, our moral faith in the leading faculty members in the department, and our freedom of speech regarding the recent developments in Gaza. We hope to collectively raise the following concerns as an anonymous group, due to safety risks, of over 35 current PhD students in your department. We, in the spirit of the deliberative ethics you advocate for throughout your career, wish to take some time from your busy schedule in the hope of co-creating a healthy democratic environment in the department.
Within your capacity, we request you to do the following to reciprocate our communicative effort:
1). Read carefully the concerns we raise, which should take no longer than 30 minutes;
2). Discuss these concerns with other faculty members as the chair of our department (feel free to share this letter to other faculty members and discuss it in your meetings);
3). Provide us with the latest date for your reply and respond to these concerns as the chair in the form of an open letter to graduate and undergraduate students;
4). Take actions in response to our demands, and, if not, openly communicate the reasons why to us through an email to all students in your department.
Our Concerns
1. The department leadership’s collective silence and moral failure
As of now, no statement has been made by the department regarding the current situation in Gaza. In light of the politics of statements happening on our campus now, this silence shows at minimum a moral reluctance to take responsibility, as educators and scholars, to address the atrocities happening in Gaza now that affects many of your students and colleagues. In his recent one-sided campus-wide statement, Chancellor Gillman’s statements ring hollow by calling for neutrality without, himself, acknowledging the dire situation Palestinians have faced for decades. A letter expressing dissent, signed by hundreds of UCI graduate students, was sent to the chancellor’s office. The office’s response remained unapologetically silent about the Palestinian’s plight or cause.The four-sentence response reads as follows:
“Chancellor Gillman has read and considered your message. He will not be retracting nor apologizing for his statement of October 10. He will not be adopting the broader narrative being advocated in your various messages given how divisive and contested that narrative is within our community. He stands by his condemnation of the Hamas attack and his plea for us to treat each other with respect and humility.“
Following these exchanges, the letter against “bigotry” signed by the President and all ten chancellors of the UC system conveyed a clear message that the UC leadership has nothing but empty neutrality in response to Israeli settler colonialism. Outspoken pro-Palestinian faculty from other departments also faced immense pressure from the UC administration further undermining the hollowness of the administration’s “neutrality”. The Council of UC Faculty Association has recently sent a letter to Michael Drake and UC Regents, raising concerns with campus surveillance and censorship faced by Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish faculty in the current moment.
Indeed, the UCI chancellor is NOT neutral. As of now, UCI has been the ONLY UC campus to receive an email from their Chancellor standing with Israel. What’s more, Chancellor Gillman tries to restore “anti-semitic forms of anti-Zionism” after the Regents avoid using it in their 2016 “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.” He says in his cover to President Drake’s letter:
“There are very different viewpoints about the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but it must be remembered that Regents Policy 4403: Statement of Principles Against Intolerance calls on University leaders “actively to challenge anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination when and whenever they emerge within the University community.” The report leading to the creation of this policy condemned not only overt expressions of antisemitism but also “antisemitic forms of Anti-Zionism.”
“Anti-semitic forms of anti-Zionism”, which he implies is in the statement, is NOT there. In fact, it did NOT make it into the final Principles because, as the working group writes in their introduction to the statement:
“the State Department definition would sweep in speech protected by principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment. Sanctioning people based on their speech, they say, would violate the First Amendment.”
Chancellor Gillman’s manipulative move demonstrates his clear pro-Occupation stance and politically-motivated maneuver to shut down discussions on Zionist forms of antisemitism. This is extremely concerning as he’s not only actively bypassing UC Regents’ policy language but also fabricating the statement into something in favor of justifying his future punitive actions. This makes us worry that he is prepared to weaponize this definition to further penalize pro-Palestinian students on campus. And you, as a tenure-track faculty member with administrative power, should protect and advocate for students at risk, rather than maintaining silence.
The department has contributed to the weaponization of objectivity, wrongly assuming the possibility of neutral speech amidst genocide and war crimes. In such a heated political moment, in which pro-Palestinian voices are penalized and Zionist propaganda saturates mainstream media in the US, this stance causes immense damage to our deliberative culture. The only official events sponsored by the department so far are multiple talks by Prof. Alon Burstein, who frames the current situation within a highly contested idea of the “Israel-Hamas War”, while cloaking that polarizing stance with social scientific terms and “objectivity”. As political scientists and theorists, we are well aware of the political nature of selective public statements and mournings. We think this unreflective usage of social science is embarrassing and simply bad scholarship that does more harm than good to the public and to our department’s reputation within the campus community. We encourage honest discussions of the issue that embrace subjective stances and nuance, instead of hiding under the pretense of objectivity. We especially wish to highlight this need for honest, deliberative, discourse given the concerning precedent of the department’s involvement in the notoriously Islamaphobic Irvine 11 case in recent history. What’s more, UC Irvine has a long history of Islamaphobic policies in the name of combating anti-semitism, which has been documented by legal practitioners. Against this backdrop, our department leadership’s collective silence shows a tacit agreement with these racist institutional practices.
2. The epistemic failure of unreflectively endorsing Zionist myth-making
We are extremely troubled by our own Prof. Jeff Kopstein’s long-term epistemic complicity with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Recently, it was brought to our attention that by citing his own paper on social media, Prof. Kopstein claims a correlation between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism, especially among muslim students. As social scientists, we are appalled by the lack of academic rigor in the “statistical analysis” he and his co-author conducted. The paper also uses a report on the “UC Regents’ Principles against Intolerance” drafted by Douglas Haynes, the Vice Provost for Academic Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Concerningly, in the report, only anti-semitism is centered as the sole form of intolerance that matters and the only one mentioned as a priority. Certainly, it is an important issue, but the focus in the article on antisemitism while, in the very same paper, promoting the highly Islamophobic claim that Muslim students are disproportionately antisemitic is a tragic irony. Accordingly, Haynes calls for extensive institutional, infrastructural, and financial support for “the study of Israel” and “addressing anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment”. This report advocates for supporting “the training of campus police on hate crimes” to “utilize the Anti-Defamation League law enforcement training on hate crimes, including anti-Semitism and bigotry of all kinds”. The concerning implication is the encouragement of further police presence on campus, a presence which is deeply threatening to all students of color who are considered dangerous bodies. Further, it reinforces the trend of false neutrality proliferated within the entire department strategy of addressing this question. It is clearly shown on Nov 14th’s event that Prof. Kopstein, along with non-student Zionists, unapologetically worked with the police to repress student protestors raising public awareness on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. From the video of the event, uploaded by Prof. Burnstein to his Youtube channel, Prof. Kopstein pacifies the non UCI affiliated Zionist guests who spat at UCI students, accosted them physically, verbally insulted them and threw objects at them. He, not only showed blatant disregard for the wellbeing of peaceful student protestors, but apologized to these audience members, “I apologize, this is not how students should comport themselves”. He further blamed his experience of walking around campus with police escort on those same student protestors. In the talk he said Hamas has been preparing for this for over two years, likewise, his policing campaign against student dissent cloaked in the name of anti-intolerance has been brewing for years. The contradictions in this callous disregard for the wellbeing of students and the right to assembly are our source of disillusionment with someone who was supposed to be a role model for students. It pained but did not surprise us that, subsequently, UCI files student conduct charges against peaceful graduate and undergraduate student protestors who challenge Burstein’s narrative during the Q&A without disrupting him. The hypocrisy of liberal pacifist “free speech” shows its full color when we contrast the heavy punishment of peaceful pro-Palestinian student protestors and the tacit endorsement and exemption the university offers to tenure-tracked Zionist Professors who continuously threaten and verbally abuse student ceasefire advocates.
It is apparent that to Prof. Kopstein at these moments, anti-Israel is equated with anti-semitism, thus any critique of Israel can be framed as violent. We, as graduate students, are shocked that someone assigning the late Lee Ann Fujii in his own course on political violence would be so willfully and cruelly ignorant about policing on campus. How does one show such affinity to the state of Israel, which is an artifact of deep anti-semitism, while still believing that he’s working against anti-semitism? How does one call the police on anti-Zionist Jewish students while claiming anti-intolerance as his vocation? How is one against anti-semitism when he does not even sign on to the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, which was signed by hundreds of scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies? How does a self-proclaimed lover of poetry silence others to the extent of social death? How is someone anti-hate but not doing anything for a ceasefire now? Meanwhile, he shows no real care for the haunting impact of police brutality faced by his students of color everyday. If anything, he plays an active role, as an advocate and faculty lobbyist, in increasing police funding and shaping a Islamaphobic surveillance network on UCI campus that aligned with the racist ADL, one of his main sponsors. It is really not that complicated. As he often said, our job as social scientists is to simplify, not complicate things. But maybe it is complicated, as we find ourselves puzzled by his inability to see Palestinian pain and oppression in his people’s name, as a descendant of Holocaust survivor himself. We are confused by the fact that Israel’s infantilization of his people and weaponization of his trauma fails to be deeply humiliating to him. Contrary to him, we believe that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we do not believe in exceptionalising anti-semitism at the cost of everyone else. No one is free until everyone is free.
The sanctity of academic spaces includes the sanctity to engage in peaceful dissent and active, discursive, protest. As a Berkeley alum, Professor Kopstein should be familiar with the proud legacy of student activism in the UC system, even when that activism “disrupts”, peacefully, everyday operations. To us, that activism includes that against anti-semitism and justice for Palestine, but, based on the previously cited article, to him, SJP and other pro-Palestine organizations are heavily implied to be anti-semitic and responsible for the creation of a “hostile environment for Jews”. Ironically indeed, it was through reading Lee Ann Fujii for his seminar that we collectively learned a much more humble and compassionate way of being that attends to the Other. Many of us have lived through generational traumas of genocide, war, displacement, conflicts, and authoritarian regimes, but we can never imagine weaponizing our traumas the way he does. We are speechless.
We are deeply disappointed by the department’s failure to educate the public about the relationship between myth-making and political violence at this critical juncture. As scholars, the primary power we have is to rigorously investigate, deliberate, and circulate ideas on subjects that matter. Many of us are political scientists working on conflicts and wars, who know from our own works that a basic interpretive caution against static and homogenic historical narratives that support the militarization of conflicts and the dehumanization of populations is extremely necessary. It particularly saddens us that many of our faculty members similarly work on political violence, genocide, racism, democracy, etc., and yet do not feel the need to implement this lesson when it comes to commenting on the nature of the talks sponsored by our department funding. Forwarding Prof. Burstein’s talk without acknowledging the epistemic violence it entails demonstrates willful ignorance and tacit endorsement of the ongoing genocide and doing so as a department chair indicates institutional complicity with said violence.
We, as graduate students, are willing to take on this epistemic responsibility, by offering a demythification of Prof. Alon Burstein’s talks. On November 23, 2021, the department organized a talk by him entitled “Israel, Hamas, and the Gaza Complex”. Another talk was given more recently, hosted by Prof. Jeff Kopstein, on the so-called “Israel-Hamas War” on Oct 18. 2023. These two talks, most of the content of which overlap, will be the main texts we analyze and respond to in Appendix 1 presented following in this letter.
3. The insecurity and isolation faced by students concerned with Palestinian fate
Political science in general, and this department in particular, have been notoriously complicit in Islamophobia and settler colonial genocidal zionism. Back in 2011, the department was deeply involved in the Irvine 11 case that penalized Muslim student protestors speaking out against Zionism in our academic spaces. The department hosts and sponsors scholars like Alon Burstein from the Israel Institute, an extensive propaganda operation infiltrating US higher education. Amidst a political climate where pro-Palestinian activists and students face immense censorship across the US, the UCI political science department’s past and present misconducts intensify the insecurity and isolation Muslim and pro-Palestinian students face on a day to day basis. Reflecting back on the his experience of being censored and canceled by his university, political scientist Somdeep Sen notes
“this sort of theme of limits on what and how we can study Palestine, was already evident to be, back in 2011, when I was starting my PHD, where I went into this PhD program in a, in a very traditional, orthodox, political science department.”
Unfortunately, this resonates with many graduate students’ lived experience with UCI’s political science department, a pattern we must address. This is not normal. It is not normal that graduate students have to convince themselves that nothing can be changed in a toxic department like this. It’s not normal that graduate students have to hide their politics in order to work with professors, fearing the consequences of losing their job or facing police reprisal. It is not normal that the majority of our graduate students in the department are merely enduring their time here for the degree, held epistemically hostage to the institution, not thriving. It is not normal, Simone.
For pro-Palestinian students, the inability to speak or be silenced leads to a deep sense of isolation, which the department leadership is directly responsible for. We are appalled by the silence, lack of care, and cruel indifference to the ongoing genocide by you, as the chair of the department, and other leading faculty members. How do you look us in the eyes and expect respect from us when you remain silent and continue to numb yourself into apathy and denialism? We dare not say anything out loud in town hall meetings or in your office, as we know clearly how the power asymmetry between us can backfire on us. But this limits our capacity to connect with like-minded graduate students, as we can only talk to each other through underground channels. Other students who are similarly appalled are struggling in isolation and are thus left rudderless and alienated, not sure where to turn because of the divisive culture fostered by this crafted, silencing, and false “neutrality”, generated by silence, and tantamount to an endorsement of the horrors being undertaken by allies of the voices given official standing. In Appendix 2, we compiled a list of resources for those out there who will benefit from it. We demand you to share the list to the graduate and undergraduate student listserv.
4. The economic injustice and what divestment means for graduate students
The department leadership shows willful ignorance or tacit consent with the UC’s active investment in Israeli apartheid. The university of California is an active complicit partner in funding Israeli settler colonialist projects and the simultaneous genocide of Palestinians. The UC contracts with companies involved in Israeli occupation (e.g. Schneider Electric, who owns Pelco, which provides security cameras to settlers; Siemens, which supplies traffic control systems and passenger coaches to Israel railways corporation; Johnson Controls develops technology for the discount group’s Israeli headquarters). In the meantime, UC capital investments are sent to companies, and increasingly private equity firms, that indirectly or directly arm the Israeli military. In these ways, student tuition goes directly to support the occupation of Palestine. The UC’s investment portfolio consists of billions going straight to Israel while students are unable to access affordable housing and academic workers routinely don’t make enough to escape food insecurity.
The department leadership is siding with the vision of a university as business, landlord, and gatekeeper of knowledge rather than a university as it should be: an educational institution. Last year, when we were negotiating our new contract, the UC refused to give us a cost of living adjustment. The UC claimed it was too expensive and in the almost one year since, have cut funding from key programs in order to “afford the new grad student contracts.” It’s never been about scarcity, it has always been about what the UC sees as valuable. During our 2022 graduate workers strike, faculty members in the political science department showed no public, verbal, explicit support beyond vague, symbolic gestures. While many of your graduate students are financially precarious, most professors in our department don’t seem to understand the economic reality of pursuing a PhD today for working class students. You, again, as the department chair, physically attended the APSA conference this year despite hotel workers’ strike and mass academic boycott of the conference in solidarity, despite graduate students’ boycott in our department. The lack of support and care for graduate students and workers has created a reputation of cold indifference for the UCI political science department, and one that, based on current actions, is regrettably seeming more and more accurate. That pattern of neglect makes it difficult for us to recommend this program in good faith to prospective graduate students. This letter seeks to appeal to a basic, human, empathy that the department has forgotten amidst bureaucratic obligations, deadlines and the cold machinery of the capitalist academic world, but one that is essential to the continued production of “good scholarship” by students and faculty alike.
Our Demands
1. Department Specific Demands
- Provide full transparency of the hiring process and funding sources for Prof. Burstein, including the department’s involvement with the Zionist Israel Institute.
- Sponsor and organize, at minimum, the same number of pro-Palestinian events, with equivalent department support and funding, as Burstein’s events, most especially ones involving inviting Palestinian scholars to speak in the department in the following month.
- Provide an open statement written by leading faculty members on behalf of the department, addressing the current atrocities occurring in Gaza and the department’s commitment to urge the UC to divest from Israel and calling for a ceasefire.
- Urge UCI Political Science department faculty members to sign on the UC Faculty letter of concern to president Drake and the Political Scientists Say Ceasefire letter
- Share the two Appendixes below to all graduate and undergraduate students in the department without adding additional comments or diluting the collaborative labor of scholarship and community that went into their production.
- Add indigenous, Palestinian scholars to the department as faculty and graduate students, discuss and implement ways in which the department could acknowledge Acjachemen/Juaneno land and invest back to local indigenous communities.
- Include Postcolonial, Anticolonial, & Decolonial Theories & Methods on the list of Advanced Methods courses.
- Work to empower your students with an environment of care for their well being, especially in this time, but also going forward, engaging in greater empathy, regard, and sensitivity for the various voices that make up the department we share.
2. from Palestinian and various other organizations we ally with
- “A formal apology from the entire UC Board of Regents for this egregious statement.
- An explicit acknowledgment of the equal value and dignity of Palestinian lives along with their right to self-determination.
- A formal message acknowledging and condemning Israel as an apartheid state in line with two of the UC system’s self-proclaimed core values of ‘integrity’ and ‘ethics’. It is only ethical to have proper coverage of this disproportionate violence against Palestinians. This administration’s implicit biases ultimately result in their failure to uphold their core values
- For the UC system to fully divest from corporations that profit from the illegal occupation of Palestine in accordance with the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. This includes cutting relations with any academic institutions in Israel, including study abroad, that are complicit in the occupation.”
From the River to the Sea,
Collectively drafted by
UCI Political Science Graduate Students for Peace
November, 2023
Appendix 1 Demythifying Dr. Burstein’s Narrative
Notes by editors
- Settler colonialism is driven by several common founding myths: the dream of indigenous non-existence and/or voicelessness; an empty land without a people and a people without a land; racial hierarchy; savior superiority complex; dehumanization and otherization of indigenous population; self-victimizing militarism, etc. The ingredients and the recipes are the same, the cook is the only thing that differs. The mental gymnastics required for genocide apologists to maintain their cognitive distortion and self-deception is clearly shown in the following myths. Getting the facts right is crucial to this conversation. But we hold that the opposite of myth-making is more than just “facts”, but empathy, ethics, justice, and solidarity from below.
- How to use this Appendix: The quotes below are from video transcripts automatically generated by YouTube. Due to limited capacity, there will be misspelling and grammatical errors but it does not affect reading comprehension. The hyperlinks are existing resources addressing the specific myths, please click on the links to read more.
1. The historiography of state-formation in 1948
“Gaza was not a separate unit in 1947, the U.N puts forth the resolution 181 the partition of Palestine separating the land into a Jewish State and an Arab State and For the First time, the Strip starts to become its own separate unit” (2021 talk)
Myth 2: The UN created Palestine (The fourth chapter laid out the history of Palestinian resistance against the UN resolution and the erasure of their voices)
“a lot of people will say you have to start 50 years prior to that some people will say earlier I’m not starting there I am starting from when the state of Israel was founded in the modern sense of where the Israeli Arab conflict began in 1948” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 3: The history of the conflict should start from 1948
“after the establishment of the state there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that ended up settling in different refugee camps many of them in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank and at this point there was no connection between them at this time” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 5: Israel is not responsible for Palestinian refugees’ displacement
Myth 6: The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was an accident of war
Myth 7: Blame the Arabs for Palestinian displacement
2. The Wars with the Arab World & Occupation
“……the Muslim Brotherhood is an organization that was founded in the age of 1928 which was meant to, through a grassroots social welfare social activism, develop a form of political Islam in order to from the ground up work and into the people’s hearts and Minds starting in 1949 the Muslim Brotherhood invests heavily in the Gaza Strip also because they are engaged in the conflict with Israel and see this as a very easy way to infiltrate people’s hearts and Minds……” (2021 talk)
Myth 8: War of 1948 was inevitable self-defense against terrorism for Israel
Myth 9: The Palestinian Question is about Religion
“in 1967 War breaks out between again Israel and most of the neighboring Arab countries and over six days Israel’s borders are transformed from looking like this to looking like this Israel takes over the West Bank and the Golan Heights the Gaza Strip and all of Sinai ……meanwhile the local population in Gaza undergoes several different political processes first of all they undergo what is called a very intensive process of palestinization whereas before the people may have perceived themselves possibly as part of Egypt possibly as part of some future Confederation From This Moment the people are considered Palestinian this process permeates into the Muslim Brotherhood activity that very much starts to talk in language of the Palestinian identity being very linked to Muslim identity and translating this into all kinds of Grassroots political activity” (2021 talk)
Myth 10: War of 1967 was just an inevitable self-defense, not a choice
Myth 11: The 1967 Occupation corrupted the previously good and morally pure project of Israel
Myth 12: Palestinian identity is fake and politically weaponized after 1967
Myth 13: Israel has sought peace and co-existence after 1967
3. The Political Economy of Gaza
“……one of the things to look at is between 1967 and 1989 the number of mosques in this small Enclave of the Gaza Strip grew from 77 to 200. within this 20-year period under Israeli occupation which indicates both how popular the Muslim Brotherhood was becoming and at the same time how much Israel was not hampering the activity of this organization the Muslim Brotherhood begins to consolidate local politics it’s activists start permeating into universities and local municipalities and at the same time offering massive programs of social welfare free education free food and working alongside the Israeli authorities”
Myth 14: Israel brought prosperity and modernized the Gaza Strip
Myth 15: Israel makes the desert boom
“today in the Gaza Strip there are little over two million people it is one of the densest areas unemployment has skyrocketed Beyond any any measurable account primarily because of continued destruction of infrastructure continued mismanagement a continued blockade and a continued inability of anything from the West Bank including human resources or material resources to easily get to the Gaza Strip at the same time Hamas has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist has refused to engage any negotiations with the Israeli State directly” (2021 talk)
Myth 16: Israel has nothing to do with Palestine’s underdevelopment
4. Intifada and Palestinian Resistance
“……article 12 of the Hamas Covenant which was published in August of 1988 explicitly States nationalism from the point of view of the Islamic resistance movement is part of religious Creed and then later on because Palestine is an Islamic we are determined to to liberate it no matter what to the death this was the continuous challenge of Hamas against the PLO as the intifada goes on” (2021 talk)
Myth 17: Religious and violent forces thrived during the First Intifada
“……in 1988 a rebellion breaks out in the West Bank in the Gaza Strip known as the first intifada which was really a popular uprising of local Palestinians that very quickly was taken over by the PLO in order to rebel against the Israeli occupation that moment in history especially leading to what happens now more than 30 years later is critical because at that moment a different group is established calling itself the Islamic resistance movement the acronym in Arabic that’s which acronym is Hamas the Hamas movement is established in 1988 also calling for the obliteration of Israel” (2023 Oct talk)
“……in the second inifada massive campaigns of violence are launched from Palestinian territories carrying out overwhelming amounts of Terror attacks inside the borders of Israel this includes 144 suicide attacks that were carried out by Hamas the palace Jihad alongside the tanzim fatah all aspects of the PLO and at the same time Israeli retaliations were not limited to trying to Simply arrest those who were carrying out violence there were massive military retaliations that include Target through the targeted assassinations included bombing areas from which violence was launched the nature of the second idifada was a lot more what is considered armed assaults on both sides……” (2021 talk)
Myth 19: Terrorism is a phenomenon motivated by violence, religious zealots, hate, and nothing else
Myth 20: “Violence on both sides” with military parity
“the second IND was between the years give or take 2000 and 2005 and it involved both the Kamas movement and the military wings of the Palestine Liberation Organization carrying out acts of violence against Israel unclear exactly to what end because the PLO said that they were aspiring towards achieving their own State however that was what the negotiations Were Meant to achieve” (2023 talk)
Myth 21: The PLO betrays Israel and the “peace process”
5. The Oslo Accords and the Two-State Solution
“a lot of Palestinian local activity like Hamas the Muslim Brotherhood was able to flourish in this area alongside these negotiations extremists from both sides reacted very harshly Hamas and the Palestinian Islam and Jihad saw any negotiations with Israel as a betrayal a religious betrayal and a nationalist betrayal of both Islam and how the Palestinian nation and they start a massive campaign of suicide attacks in Israel in order to circumvent the deal in turn on the Israeli side” (2021 talk)
Myth 22: The two-state solution of the Oslo Accords is peaceful and the only way forward
Myth 23: The Oslo Accords is meant to reduce the atrocities by introducing postcoloniality
Myth 24: The PLO was in fair negotiating position with the Israeli state
“this famous handshake between prime minister Rin and chairman yaser Arafat with Bill Clinton in the middle almost pushing them together and they agreed to come together and resolve the conflict peacefully to start a process called the Oslo process in order to arrive at a two-state solution Hamas violently objected to this seeing the PLO as traitors that they are dividing pales between a Jewish entity and a Muslim entity and the Kamas movement started a campaign of suicide bombings” (2023 talk)
Myth 25: Palestians sabotaged the “peace process”
Myth 26: Hamas violently rejected the “peace process” and started the conflicts, Israel is innocent
“……in 2002 Israel following a series of suicide attacks Israel launches operation defensive Shield that operation which is these tanks in this picture here with overwhelming Force Israel retakes Palestinian towns in the West Bank those towns that it withdrew from during the Oslo agreements retakes those towns leaving a lot of decimation dismantling and arresting thousands of Hamas cells and tanzim cells and really breaking down the infrastructure of these groups in the West Bank” (2021 talk)
Myth 27: Israel is merely defending itself
Myth 28: The Oslo Accords is a good faith security coordination between two sovereign states
“……in 2005 the disengagement plan following the second intifada and Israel’s recognition that it cannot maintain 8 500 settlers living inside an enclave of 2 million Palestinians with constant daily Terror attacks Israel carries out a complete evacuation of the Gaza Strip maintaining its forces around the strip pulling up all settlers and all military presence inside the Gaza Strip” (2021 talk)
Myth 29: Israel acknowledge Palestinian resistance and disengage voluntarily out of righteous choice
Myth 30: The Gaza Strip is mostly not occupied by Israel anymore
6. Hamas control of Gaza
“……starting in 2009 there are hundreds of un Supply humanitarian Aid assistance coming into Gaza through Israel……at the same time Hamas is utilization of most of the humanitarian Aid that comes in towards building up more armaments building attack tunnels building all kinds of things together ” (2021 talk)
Myth 31: Israel contributes much to the humanitarian cause in Gaza, which was appropriated by Hamas
“……at the same time Hamas has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist has refused to engage any negotiations with the Israeli State directly all negotiations occur indirectly and as a result this is a continuous stalemate that has existed since 2007 you can even say probably since long before that is continuing till today with continuous Spirals and flare-ups……” (2021 talk)
Myth 32：Israel (or any other state) has the right to exist and the rejection of that is terrorism
Myth 33: Refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist is a call to genocide
7. Israel’s War on Gaza
“……the fact that Israel for the first time in 50 years is actually declared war against another entity and the first time in history against a group rather than a sovereign state” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 34: Israel has never waged war on Palestine, this is the first time
Myth 35: Israel has always abided by international law and pursued peace
“……in two of these in 2009 and in 2014 Israel invaded the Gaza Strip otherwise all of the other operations were instances where Hamas launched Rockets….I’m going to talk about some numbers in a moment where Hamas launched rockets and missiles from the Gaza Strip into Israel and Israel retaliated with aerial bombings and sometimes bombings from the sea only in two instances did Israel actually invade and take over parts of the Gaza Strip just to give us some accounting between the years of 2007 and 2022 Hamas fired nearly 177,000 rockets and missiles specifically 16884 into Israel causing the deaths of 92 Israelis and just over 5,000 people who were injured in these operations 204 Israelis were killed and another 9,000 were injured meanwhile between 2007 and 2022 in Israeli retaliations again these bombings from the sky and the invasions roughly 5,400 Palestinians were killed and over 23,500 Palestinians were injured in the West Bank and excuse me in the Gaza strip one of the things that’s important to note I’ll say again that while this was constantly going on it was a stalemate absolutely nothing was changing in terms of the political map or the balance between the two” (2023 talk)
“……Hamas publicly says that they do not recognize any previous deals that were signed between Israel and the Palestinians they do not recognize Israel’s right to exist as far as they’re concerned their mandate and their mission is to destroy Israel in turn Israel also does not recognize the Hamas movement does not recognize its legitimacy and in 2007 we start what I call the Gaza stalemate” (2023 Oct talk)
“……Hamas’s attack as I said is unprecedented on many levels this causes a lot of echo a lot of shock waves across the entire middle east region” (2023 Oct talk)
“……so in the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict there have been cases of hostages Israeli hostages taken before the most amount of hostages ever taken were taken in 1976 by hijacked plane to anbe there were hostages then Kamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad who were joining with them in the attack their attackers managed to kidnap back into the Gaza Strip” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 40: Israel is always on the victim side of hostage situations
“it is unprecedented by the amount of people who were killed in this initial attack on October 7th roughly 1,200 to 1300 Israelis were killed by by comparison in the entire second in Def so over five years of violence thousand Israelis were killed here 12 1300 were killed within about 10 to 14 hours it is unprecedented because of the kidnap people is unprecedented because of the attack I will also note it is unprecedented on International scales with the exception of 911 this is the biggest attack carried out by an organization on any scale the amount of attackers that came in the amount of people who died in a single attack and the amount of hostages taken so or the amount of hostages taken is the second or third largest attack to happen in history……however what is happening since then is also unprecedented Israel’s retaliation is also unprecedented in the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 42: Hamas is extremely brutal and violent towards their hostages
Myth 43: Israel wants their hostages back
Myth 44: Israel is anti-violence and not genocidal at all
“……there have been military operations there have been different escalations Israel has never declared war against an organization in fact Israel has never declared war against anyone for over 50 years the last time Israel was an official state of war was in 1973” (2023 Oct talk)
Myth 46: The problem will be solved if Israel has a more liberal government
“……from a military analysis standpoint I will say that’s unlikely to happen Iran has made a lot of threats against Israel and has never actually sent any forces to fight Israel however as I said what is happening here is entirely unprecedented so given that it’s unclear what exactly is going to happen” (2023 Oct talk)
Appendix 2 Resources for Students Concerned with Palestinian Future
1. Reading Lists and Teach-ins:
- Decolonize Palestine
- Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
- Solidarity with Palestine: feminist decolonial reading
- Liberation Reads by Pluto Press
- Free Palestine! A Reading List by Haymarket Books
- Jadaliyya Palestine in Context Teach-ins
- Project 48
- Jewish Voice For Peace
- Palestine, in your inbox
- Palestine: a Comprehensive Document for Palestinian Liberation
- The Popular University of the Palestinian Youth Movement Presents Our History of Popular Resistance: Palestine Reading List
- Free Palestine: A Verso Reading List
- Palestine Book Awards
2. Action Items to Support Palestinians
- Donate money or time to legal organizations against repression
- Start a boycott or divestment campaign in your community
- Push your union local to support Palestinian liberation
- Organize or visit your representative’s office locally or in DC
- Demand a ceasefire and an end to all aid to Israel
- Register your events with AFSC’s “No Tax Dollors for War Crimes”
- Join a Protest
Read more: Week of Action Toolkit for Palestine
Appendix 3 Alumni Open Letter
Dear Prof. Chambers and Political Science Department,
We, an Alumni Collective of the Political Science Department at UCI, would like to express our utmost support for the current students of the program and the open letter that they have shared with you.
Like them, we are concerned with not only the complicit silence of the Department and the university, but also the exclusion and vitriol that the Political Science faculty are enacting toward undergraduate and graduate students in the Department. These concerns are informed by our experiences, recognizing that the Department’s actions are a part of a broader pattern that has been raised to departmental leadership time and time again in various forms and modalities, including during our time as graduate students.
Like them, we are worried about the insecurity and isolation faced by students concerned with Palestinians and what is left of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is egregious that the department’s de facto position has been that any critique of genocide, war, and violence is conflated with anti-semitism and this sophistry is nothing short of propaganda, designed to silence voices and perpetuate the very problems that we, as a discipline, seek to interrogate and resolve through rigorous scholarship. This is not only an abstract concern, but also directly affects the members of your Department.
The current moment has escalated the Department leadership’s legacy of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiments that alumni also faced during their time at UCI. During our time at UCI, we have witnessed faculty laughing at graduate students who requested the hire of an IR/CP scholar who focuses on the Middle East due to the “pernicious acts of Muslim students groups on campus” (referring to the Irvine 11 case), certain faculty have also policed how graduate students describe the Occupation of Palestine, and several faculty have been observed making Islamophobic asides during their graduate and undergraduate courses. This is not to mention the litany of other things that have contributed to the department consistently having the worst department climate, as determined by the external department review, graduate division exit surveys, and the Provost’s taskforce Reimagining Graduate Education that also had a department faculty representative. This legacy of exclusion, selective indignation, and bigotry in the Political Science Department must end. We hope you listen to the letter written by the current graduate students and earnestly address the reasonable changes that they demand.
Like them, we are extremely concerned about the wellbeing of the students and faculty that work and study in the Department. The “unreflective endorsing of Zionist myth-making” in classrooms, meetings, and other university sites creates violence, and it undermines the possibility of having critical dialogues where the merits of ideas win out, regardless of who holds them. These forms of violence and biases are not new, but they have increased since our time at UCI. Many of us experienced exclusion during our time in the Department, but the provocation of graduate students that think or exist differently seem to have gotten louder, more explicit, and more exclusionary. These practices make it harder for underrepresented students to be in the program, to stay in the program long enough to graduate, and to speak from their positionalities, cultures, identities, religions, and experiences. These forms of violence often emerge under a rhetoric of “science” or “neutrality,” which underestimates the intelligence of students and other faculty alike.
Finally, we are concerned with the injustices and divestments of the University and the Department. That our students live under even higher levels of poverty than we did is unimaginable, but it has somehow become a reality that needs to be more strongly resisted. The lack of support for the strike and other opportunities of negotiation is nothing short of a complicit apathy towards the wellbeing of students. The leadership of the Department and some of the faculty fail to take the wellbeing of students with the urgency the issue deserves. When the Department was externally reviewed, the Department claimed that the solution to better mentoring diverse students and building a more inclusive climate rested on the undue burdens of recently hired junior faculty from underrepresented backgrounds. That lack of serious retrospection was raised in the report and by the Provost’s committee.
In general, we urge the Department to act in consultation with graduate students about how to move forward and be inclusive of voices and perspectives that have been Othered in this Department. We hope that the leadership of the Department will rethink its policies on behalf of the students, faculty, and staff who have spoken. The wellbeing of your students is at stake.
Sincerely,
An Alumni Collective from the Department of Political Science at UCI.
Rank and File Irvine 
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