We write this letter to you as students who chose voluntary starvation to express our deep dissent and disgust over UBC’s double standards and hollow values. For 12 days we abstained from the basic necessities of life to highlight UBC’s refusal to abstain from its investments in death, to highlight the deliberate and forced abstinence from food, water, and power in Gaza, where Apartheid Israel has engineered conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of 2 million Palestinian lives.
The administration would want you to believe that nothing is happening — no systematic destruction of universities, mosques, churches, municipal records, wells, hospitals, water treatment plants, roads, houses — no grinning looting soldiers pawing through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women, no terrified 5-year old girl left mutilated with 300 bullets in her body, no quadcopters shooting children in the head.
But we have all seen, over and over again, depravity after depravity. The things we were always told must never happen again, yet do. We are told to look away and ignore everything, because allies are committing the genocide, and the people being murdered in droves are brown. We retroactively paste the label of terrorist on their broken bodies, their babies and their elderly, to somehow excuse their slaughter. They don’t count as human.
Over the past 12 days of this hunger strike demanding UBC divest from weapons manufacturers and corporations guilty of genocide, spanning the UBC Vancouver and Okanagan campuses, we were met with both admiration and admonishment. Students, staff, faculty and community joined us in acts of solidarity. Others voiced their misplaced anger and discomfort over seeing students across UBC overwhelmingly support divestment from Israel’s war crimes. We took the path of starving ourselves only because the UBC President and Board of Governors has consistently chosen to ignore our calls and commonsense proposals.
During the last 500+ days since the accelerated genocide of Palestinians began, the University of British Columbia has persistently chipped away at the righteous efforts of its community to stop profiting from war. Letters, protests, demonstrations, encampments, press releases, and meetings are met with apathy. UBC claims to foster critical inquiry and ethical research as a place of learning. Why then, are our inquiries into UBC’s proven investments in ethnic cleansing and illegal settlements met with rebuttals? How is academic freedom enhanced by UBC’s contribution to the total destruction of all universities in Gaza? Why are we met with silence when we ask UBC to desist their support for the targeted killings of Palestinian professors?
Our hunger strike has laid bare the hypocrisy of UBC and its duty of care to students. Students are left with no option but to starve to call out injustices waged by our own institution, while UBC refuses to acknowledge its own liability and its role in contributing to death and destruction in Palestine. How many more children must die beneath the rubble before UBC ensures its endowment does not support weapons and technologies of war? How many more lifeless emails and statements will we see from administrators that avoid even voicing the word Palestine?
Eight thousand students voted YES in a referendum espousing a two-day strike for divestment. Hundreds upon hundreds of students marched and picketed the bus loop in the rain to shut down the busiest bus line in North America for six hours as bus drivers honked in appreciation. Staff, faculty, labour groups, and other allies stood with us, hour after hour, supporting student actions through chants, song, music, and teach-ins, all speaking with one voice, calling upon UBC to divest from genocide.
A question lies ahead of us. The fear-stricken rhetoric of violence and criminality and invasion has historically pointed at Palestinians and other people of colour, but it is not their influence which has wrought the beatings, repression, kidnappings, unlawful arrests, and increased securitization of North American campuses. It is the decision of so many universities to prioritize their ties to Apartheid over their ethical responsibilities to their students which has led us to this point of starvation through a hunger strike.
What more must we do for UBC administration to recognize that one day they will all be against the holocaust of this century?
We have seen now the true nature of the cowardly UBC administration, where they ignore our arguments and selectively refuse us (but allow others) entry to decisionmaking meetings. We have seen how the administration has ignored the death camp conditions endured by 1 million Palestinian children, and so we are not surprised that they fail to consider the starvation of their students. We are now ending this strike on our terms. As our demands have been made clear, and as we have left no space for UBC administration to claim their investment aligns with the requirements of the institution, and as we are still met with inaction, we have to ask - what comes next?
Stay tuned. No matter how much the administration hopes and wishes to wait us out, this problem is not going to go away. The long arc of history is on our side. The administration may want to extinguish our flames of rage and integrity, but we will reclaim our agency and burn brighter and hotter the longer they delay.