Overall Charge: Complicity in Genocide and Ongoing Nakba
The People of the UC
v.
UC President Michael Drake, UC Regent Maria Anguiano, UC Regent Elaine E. Batchlor, UC Regent Carmen Chu, UC Regent Michael Cohen, UC Regent Gareth Elliott, UC Regent Howard Guber, UC Regent Jose M. Hernandez, UC Regent Nancy Lee, UC Regent Richard Leib, UC Regent Hadi Makarechian, UC Regent Ana Matosantos, UC Regent Lark Park, UC Regent John A. Pérez, UC Regent Janet Reilly, UC Regent Mark Robinson, UC Regent Gregory Sarris, UC Regent Richard Sherman, UC Regent Jonathan Sures, Governor and UC Regent ex-officio Gavin Newsom, UC Regent ex-officio Eleni Kounalakis, UC Regent ex-officio Robert Rivas, UC Regent ex-officio Tony Thurmond
The urgency of these times compel us–as faculty, staff, students at the University of California (UC) alongside concerned community members–to confront our institution’s complicity in an ongoing, U.S.-backed genocide and Israel’s longstanding settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid system in Palestine. Deflecting accountability, UC leadership has violently oppressed its own workers and students who seek justice for Palestine, a future for the Palestinian people, and a world free from imperialist aggression. We thus gather as a people’s tribunal to charge UC leadership–UC President Michael Drake, the UC Regents, and Governor Gavin Newsom–with complicity in the crimes of genocide and ongoing Nakba (“catastrophe”).
Israel’s current murderous assault on Gaza represents a textbook, clear-cut case of genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. As an emerging legal doctrine, Nakba encompasses the longer catastrophe imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people–both the 1948 violent expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians and ongoing processes of dislocation, fragmentation, devastation, and genocide that seek to complete the work of erasing the existence of the Palestinian people. Nakba, as a legal concept, further identifies Zionism as the foundational and driving political ideology behind the Nakba.
We charge the UC leadership, which has long benefited from the occupation of stolen, unceded Indigenous lands and investment in the military-industrial-academic complex, with both direct and indirect complicity in the crimes of ongoing Nakba and genocide. The scope of these crimes extends beyond historic Palestine to other arenas that have been targeted by the imperialist war machine and transformed into sites of warfare and counterinsurgency.
UC leadership complicity includes, but is not limited to, the following crimes:
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Charge 1: Investments for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
UC leadership has materially contributed to the crimes of Nakba and genocide of Palestinians through its financial ties to Israel and its unethical investment in the war industries, surveillance technologies, and other corporate instruments of violence.
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Charge 2: Academic Complicity for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
Through institutional cooperations and agreements with complicit Israeli universities, the UC materially contributes to and facilitates the ongoing Nakba and genocide in Palestine.
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Charge 3: Military Research for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
By facilitating research funded by the U.S. government and corporate war industries, UC leadership has played a central role in imperialist devastation, human suffering, and environmental ruin around the globe, including in historic Palestine.
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Charge 4: Donor Influence for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
UC leadership has accepted billions of dollars from Zionist institutional and individual donors, including some that have funded organizations that smear, harass, and threaten UC students, staff, and faculty who have spoken out against the genocide, thereby chilling academic freedom and free speech in the university and contributing to the epistemological erasure and social death of the Palestinian people.
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Charge 5: Institutionalized Zionism for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
By upholding and defending Zionism, UC leaders have normalized the settler-colonial, apartheid, genocidal Israeli state, the root cause of Nakba and genocide. At the same time, they have perpetrated anti-Palestinian racism and weaponized false claims of antisemitism in order to stifle protest, criticism, and study of the genocide.
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Charge 6: Political Repression for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
UC leaders have waged a campaign of persecution, repression, and intimidation against students, workers, and community members in order to silence political dissent in the face of genocide and the ongoing Nakba while approving the purchase of military-grade weapons to further such oppression.
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Charge 7: Complicity in Silence for Ongoing Nakba & Genocide
UC leadership has remained silent in the face of scholasticide, ecocide, the murder of healthcare and humanitarian workers, and the destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, unwilling to lend its considerable resources to protecting and rebuilding the Palestinian educational and healthcare infrastructure and supporting scholars, students, and healthcare workers impacted by genocide and ongoing Nakba.
