The people charge the UC Regents, UC President Michael Drake, and Governor Gavin Newsom with complicity in genocide and ongoing Nakba.
The UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine
Understanding
our purpose
The UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine follows on a year of escalating protest across all University of California campuses against the unceasing Israeli genocide in occupied Palestine and beyond. Over the past year, we have borne witness as UC leadership failed to condemn genocide or reckon with the implications of its investment, research, and donor complicity in the destruction and devastation of the Palestinian people. Instead, we have seen UC leaders normalize the Israeli state and defend Zionism while restricting speech and employing militarized police power, exclusion orders, and other modes of repression against students, faculty, and community members for speaking out against the genocide. The erosion of any semblance of academic freedom and shared governance has not escaped us. We will no longer merely protest leaders who have made clear that they are willing to attack their own community rather than acknowledge their demands for justice. Instead, we have gathered as a people’s tribunal to hold the University of California accountable for complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and the ongoing Nakba (“catastrophe”).
What is a People’s Tribunal?
Mobilized from below and to the left by grassroots campaigns for justice, people’s tribunals are forums of justice that critique cultures of impunity around crimes of capitalism and imperialism while building toward better worlds. Unbeholden to authority and unbowed by state violence, they enable social justice movements and organizations to speak truth to power by charging those in positions of power with crimes. In general, people’s tribunals draw their mandate from the 1976 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, which was adopted in Algiers as part of a non-aligned Third Worldist struggle for self-determination against imperialism. Even as some people’s tribunals adhere closely to existing international humanitarian law, others adopt legal frameworks not necessarily tied to received law. Although sometimes referred to as “opinion tribunals,” people’s tribunals serve as an invaluable arena of evidence-gathering that bear the potential of shifting dominant narratives. By furnishing needed political education on institutional and other forms of reactionary and counterrevolutionary violence, they provoke people to act in solidarity against egregious injustice.
What are the goals of the UC People's Tribunal?
The purpose of the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine is to:
Hold the leaders of the University of California accountable for their complicity in Israel’s genocide and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine.
Create a living archive of evidence and testimonials that demonstrate UC complicity while centering the voices of the Palestinian people most affected by this ongoing violence
Mobilize students, faculty, staff, and community members to reassert control over the UC as a space for teaching, learning, and justice where all labor is honored.
Provide an example of how individuals can mobilize collectively to challenge their institutions for justice in Palestine.