Any innocent life lost is a tragedy, regardless of ethnicity or nationality. We, the undersigned campus and community organizations, mourn with all those on this campus for the lives lost in the most recent war between Gaza and Israel.
We believe the best way to honor those lives is by preventing any more from being lost — and to do that, we, as a campus, must be clear-sighted about the root cause of this violence and why people are motivated to kill one another.
The root cause of this violence is apartheid, the institutionalized system of oppression and domination by one ethnic group over another.
Israel today is an apartheid state, designed to deny Indigenous Palestinians their democratic representation and civil rights. Segregated into the bantustans of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians are controlled and their resistance suppressed to prevent any protest against the ethnostate which governs them.
It is this apartheid that carved out the Gaza Strip from historic Palestine in a violent process of ethnic cleansing known as the 1948 Nakba. It is this apartheid that, for nearly the last two decades, has blockaded the Gaza Strip, withholding food, water and shelter from the 2 million refugees trapped there. It is this apartheid that has for years cut off Gazan families from electricity, healthcare and their fundamental human rights, giving Hamas the opportunity to brand itself as the solution to Gaza’s desperation.
It is this apartheid that has killed about 10,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israeli civilians since 2000 across Israel’s various punitive raids against Palestinian civilians. It is occupation, colonialism and apartheid which has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land and denied their return.
It is this apartheid that brought and has kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power. In a March 2019 message, Netanyahu stated that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only it.” It is apartheid that fuels Israel’s descent into fascism under Netanyahu’s “judicial reform” program.
And in just the past three days, we have seen proponents of this apartheid labeling Gazans as “human animals,” promising to unleash “hell” on Gaza under the genocidal call to reduce the Gaza Strip to a “deserted island.”
The tragic violence we see today is the bitter fruit of apartheid for Israelis and Palestinians. All leading human rights organizations, both international and Israeli, recognize Israel as an apartheid state predicated on the racial domination of Palestinian Arabs.
The time has come for Dartmouth to recognize the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and take action to divest from Israeli apartheid — we cannot afford to lose any more lives.
In solidarity,
The Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students
Jewish Voice for Peace Vermont/N.H.
Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective
Spare Rib
Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth
Turkish Student Association
Central American United Students Association
People of Color Outdoors
House of Lewan
Humans of Dartmouth
The Dartmouth Radical
Al-Nur
Science, Technology and Engineering Policy Society at Dartmouth
Dartmouth Graduate Women in Science and Engineering
Ramsey Alsheikh ’26 is the president of the Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students, Hayden El Rafei ’24 is a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective and Roan V. Wade ’25 is an organizer with Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth. They submitted this column on behalf of the above organizations. Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
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