News and Updates

PRSA Statement on the Repression of Student Encampments and Palestine Solidarity Work

May 7, 2024

The Executive Council of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA) condemns in the strongest possible terms the escalating repression of Palestine solidarity work taking place across the United States and especially on college and university campuses.

For more than 200 days, Israel has laid siege to the people of Gaza, prevented aid from reaching a starving population, and indiscriminately killed Palestinians in full view of the entire world, resulting in over thirty-four thousand Palestinian lives stolen. Calls for an immediate and complete ceasefire have been ignored as Israeli officials threaten a second nakba. Recognizing not only that the United States is a partner in the unfolding genocide in Gaza, and settler colonial rule in Palestine more broadly, but also that institutions of higher education provide both material and ideological support for Israeli violence, students across the U.S. are demanding the complete divestment of their universities and colleges from the war machine. Reminiscent of the shanty-towns built on campuses during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in solidarity with South Africa, students across the country and around the world are building encampments in order to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians and force administrators to listen to their demands. These students are asking us to recognize how colleges and universities are deeply bound up with settler colonial violence and the state of permanent war that exists for so many around the globe. 

As students and academic workers, it is incumbent upon us to recognize how the Israeli assault on Gaza has targeted its educational institutions in an effort to wipe out repositories of Palestinian knowledge production. There are no universities remaining in Gaza due to Israeli bombardments and ninety-four university professors have been killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Palestinian professors, including those in the West Bank, who are seen as threatening the occupation or opposing the genocide have experienced harassment, arrest, and even torture. This attack on Palestine’s intellectual infrastructure has occurred while partnerships between Israeli universities and U.S. universities, such as study abroad, fellowships, and exchanges, continue largely unabated. The movement for Palestine that is taking root on campuses across the country is a rejection of the idea that we can continue sitting in our classrooms while Palestinians experience not only genocide but also what the Palestinian Feminist Collective has asked us to recognize as “scholasticide.”

The PRSA Executive Council denounces the repressive police violence universities have unleashed on these brave student organizers. We have seen university and college administrators in direct coordination with elected officials mobilize police to violently dislodge students from campus. From state troopers on horseback at the University of Texas at Austin, to NYPD preparing to raid Columbia University via tactical vehicles, to police snipers perched with their guns aimed at students at Indiana University, we are seeing forms of past and present colonial violence boomerang back to our campuses. Further, while student protesters are smeared as outside agitators and Hamas operatives, at UCLA there were actual outside agitators associated with fascist and zionist groups allowed to enter campus encampments and brutalize students with the tacit acceptance of law enforcement and administrators. 

As people who come from and study the colonized archipelago of Puerto Rico, we understand the atrocities of settler colonialism and dispossession. We are also intimately familiar with the militarized violence colonial governments and institutions wield to silence the demands of those who struggle for liberation. Today, the Executive Committee of the PRSA reaffirms our solidarity with Palestinians fighting for freedom and builds on our previous statement issued on October 23, 2023. We also stand alongside the thousands of students and university workers across the country and around the world refusing to be complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.  

We call for an immediate end to the repression of encampments and solidarity protests for Gaza. We call for the withdrawal of police presence on our campuses. And we call for universities to defend their student organizers and clarify that criticism of the State of Israel is not antisemitism. Above all, we too call for a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege on Gaza, and a free Palestine.

In Solidarity,

The PRSA Executive Committee