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As a union of university professors and employees in Palestine, it is incumbent upon us to educate. The most recent statements from the current head of the US empire, Donald Trump, are nothing more than a continuation of more than a century of colonial violence. The basic clarity of treating the world as their own property is perhaps the only surprising part of this most recent iteration of colonial oppression. Like four generations of Palestinians before us, we adamantly refuse the nefarious intentions of colonial imperialism of the current US administration and its allies.
This kind of colonial gaze that sees a land without a people is not new to Palestinians. As Palestinians recently heard the president of the US empire speak of “developing” a sea-side resort in Gaza, he was echoing the desires of empire and settler colonialism for more than century. Harnessing the most basic audacity of capitalism’s cruelty in the typical language of real estate development, Trump represents the banal result of the history of colonialism and imperialism. While cruel and violent, this is neither new, nor surprising for Palestinians. After all, Palestinians can and do teach this history of colonialism as a core part of our resistance to it. However grand, or in the case of Trump, dazed and confused, these plans may be, we also teach how unrealizable they are, as they have always been.
Palestine is not for sale. Gaza is not a development project. Neither the sea nor the mountains are real estate projects…Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea. But we want to take this opportunity to teach. The kind of real estate rhetoric of Trump’s is at the core of the colonial-capital matrix, where the attempted genocide of an entire people is justified as the means to bring about real estate development and turn Palestine into a commodity for sale. We, all Palestinian, reject every element of this equation.
It is shame that such criminal rhetoric can be so easily employed in so-called international diplomacy, even though it circumvents all of the basic rules of international human rights law. It is even more audacious in light of last year’s cases at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought about by several international governments at the heart of international advocacy against the settler state. We honor this ongoing work in the Hague Group. Our self determination is not confined to these international arenas, courts or parliaments. We know, as our allies do, like those among the Hague Group and so many others throughout the world, that our self determination represents the future, one where the likes of Trump are mere footnotes in the history of how Palestine led the world in getting free.
Union of Professors and Employees of Birzeit University
Occupied Palestine
6 February 2025
