President Shafik, 

We write to you as Palestinian alumni of Columbia University. We express our uncompromising solidarity for the steadfast students and their Gaza Solidarity Encampment, while they resist the genocide of our people. We salute the brave students who, after seeing over a hundred of their peers arrested from East Lawn, jumped the fence to restart the Encampment on the West Lawn. From the West Lawn to the West Bank, we will continue to demand the end of Israel’s terror in Gaza and beyond. The students, and their supporters, will not be moved.

Palestinians have been made second class students at Columbia University. Our identity is misrepresented as political by your administration, which has smeared our community with the most racist anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic rhetoric. When Palestinians affirm our own humanity, we are maligned as pro-terror, antisemitic, and all but foreign agents. Meanwhile, pro-Israel students have their politics misconstrued as identity by your irresponsible conflation of Zionism and Judaism. This conflation is especially insidious now, when our anti-Zionist Jewish siblings are among our most committed accomplices.

At last week’s Congressional hearing, you answered 4 hours of interrogation, in an attempt to convince the world that you take your duty to protect students seriously. And yet, the very next day, you called the NYPD to brutalize Palestinian students and their allies for peacefully protesting, a raid the likes of which has not been seen in over 60 years of Columbia history. You have made it more than clear that the students you feel compelled to protect are not those committed to ending Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, and certainly not those who are Palestinian themselves.  

It is our families, our friends, and our loved ones being killed by Israel’s assault and siege on Gaza and beyond. While our people face violence in Palestine, Palestinian students in the United States face violence on our own campuses, often simply because our existence as Palestinians challenges Zionism in academia, but especially now, as we organize against the genocide of our own people. Some Palestinian students have already been assaulted with deadly force, and your disproportionate response to peaceful protest puts allied students in similar danger. The dehumanization of Palestinians that lies at the root of Israel’s genocide, that has resulted in international complicity, is not only reflected by US college campuses but honed by them, as evidenced by the policies you have employed at Columbia.

We, Palestinian alumni of Columbia, demand: 

AMNESTY AND REVERSAL OF SUSPENSION OF ALL STUDENTS

REVERSAL OF FACULTY FIRINGS

DIVESTMENT