Dear Comrades, On October 7th, 2023, the right-wing terrorist group Hamas staged an attack on the state of Israel. According to Israeli officials, 1,400 Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers were killed in the attacks. This unprecedented attack was followed shortly after with an extremely disproportionate retaliation against Gaza, one which explicitly targeted civilian populations. In the three weeks since Oct. 7th, 8,000 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians, have been murdered in Israeli bombings. Furthermore, approximately 51% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed, leaving 1.4 million Palestinians homeless. Gaza, the largest open-air prison in the world, has been cut off from humanitarian aid, food, water, and electricity, and has had any route of escape bombed or blocked off. Genocidal rhetoric comparing Palestinians to “demons” and “animals” is, to many Jewish activists opposing the occupation, a haunting reminder of the ways in which such rhetoric led to the Holocaust.
We know, of course, that the efforts of the apartheid state of Israel to displace, imprison, dehumanize, and murder Palestinians through bombings, starvation, dehydration, and terrorist shock forces composed of Israeli settlers armed by the IDF have not been restricted to the past weeks. Since 1948, the beginning of the Nakba - the ongoing dispossession, displacement, and murder of Palestinians - America has funded Israel with $150 billion (not adjusted for inflation), for the purpose of establishing
Israel as an imperial proxy in the region. Barring only few nations such as Ireland, Western European powers and America, like the state of Israel, bear the burden of countless Palestinian deaths.
To be silent is to be complacent. GEOC stands in solidarity with the Palestinians and their brave struggle against genocide. The labor movement in America must give its support to those struggling, exploited, and murdered by the imperial profiteers of the world. We encourage our Union members and every student and worker at Wayne to give their support to groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voices for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine, as their incredible work has relentlessly held the murderers of Palestinian civilians accountable, and has expressed in massive numbers support for Palestine. For more information on ongoing Palestinian liberation efforts, visit BDS Movement.
Solidarity forever,
The Graduate Employees Organizing Committee - AFT #6123