11/23/2019
To the UCSB campus community,
At Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSB, we recognize and support the mass Palestinian resistance to the Israeli Occupation. It has come to our attention that individuals on our campus are misunderstanding our usage of the term “Intifada.”
Intifada, the Arabic word for “shake off,” is colloquially used to refer to grassroots uprisings against oppression. Currently, the Lebanese people have generated their own popular movement, which many deem the “Lebanese Intifada,” against their corrupt and sectarian government. During the First Palestinian Intifada, thousands of Palestinians, led predominantly by women organizers, participated in a series of mass strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations against continued attempts by Israel to assert physical, political and economic domination over all of the occupied territories. This settler-colonialist agenda, as Israel’s former deputy Yigal Allon proposed, requires the strategic and permanent control of the Jordan Valley while granting limited autonomy to isolated Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, thus denying Palestinians of their rightful political and human rights. As a result, seeds of deceit and oppression were sown into the hearts of the Palestinian people, leading to the eventual eruption of animosity towards an oppressive government which continues to occupy Palestinian land and lives.
During the First Intifada, the Israeli government and military responded with orders by Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to “break their bones,” resulting in over 175,000 Palestinians arrested and 1,376 killed. One human rights organization reported "23,600 to 29,900 [Palestinian] children required medical treatment for their beating injuries [caused by the Israeli military] in the first two years of the Intifada." And in 1994, an American-Israeli terrorist murdered 29 and injured 125 Palestinian Muslim worshippers in Hebron. Intifada is not only a call to resistance against oppression but a human cry for the right to exist with dignity and to live in peace.
Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSB strongly condemns all violence committed against civilian populations and any violation of human rights. Additionally, the miscommunication about the term Intifada is connected to a larger context of attempting to vilify Palestinian resistance. Our usage of the term Intifada stresses the need for grassroots action against repressive systems that disregard human rights. We invite you to continue to humanize this conversation through a critical lens, absent of preconceived biases.
Until All are free,
Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSB
