Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism – Forty-nine staff members at Harvard University have signed an open letter endorsing the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions movement and student efforts to oppose Israeli apartheid.
“Israeli state violence has devastated Palestinian life through a combination of warfare, territorial theft, and violent displacement,” read the letter. “Unwavering US financial, military, and political support has fueled the systemic domination and repression of Palestinians. In 2018, Jewish supremacy in Israel was given legal sanction through the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which makes the right to national self-determination in Israel unique to the Jewish people and defines Jewish settlement as a national value.”
The letter echoed reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem that document widespread human rights violations against Palestinians and an institutionalized system of segregation and discrimination against Palestinians, in all areas under Israeli control which amounts to a system of apartheid.
“It is this larger context of escalating ethnonationalist violence that the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee addressed in its Israeli Apartheid Week of events. It is also the context that prompted The Harvard Crimson to publish its April 29 editorial in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian liberation,” the signatories said.
