Photo by Rainer Lee/OutWrite
Content warning: genocide, settler colonization, police brutality, violence
OutWrite Newsmagazine calls for an end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine. Israel has brutally murdered at least 34,000 Palestinians and counting. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state necessitates the extermination and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian people. Israel razes Palestinian hospitals, massacres Palestinians seeking food and aid, and casts 2 million Palestinians out of their ancestral homes to induce conditions of famine, terror, and death. This past week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to invade Rafah, a city in Gaza harboring an estimated 1.5 million refugees.
We, as UCLA students and the American people, are complicit in the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide that our tuition and taxes fund; we are all complicit when we are silent. Even as we demand Palestinian liberation, the systematic, horrific destruction of Palestinian life and society continues.
On Tuesday night, April 30, an armed mob of Zionist counter-protestors attacked the Palestinian Solidarity Encampment. They beat students with sticks and metal rods and assaulted them with harmful chemical sprays. They hurled fireworks into the encampment and shouted slurs at Black and Brown students.
The university stood by and did nothing. The police watched.
The UCLA administration has made their disregard for student safety and human life abundantly clear. On Wednesday night, May 1, hundreds of riot police terrorized peaceful pro-Palestine protestors. For hours, police flung flashbangs and tear gas into the crowd. They fired rubber bullets into the encampment and arrested over 200 students, staff, faculty, and community members.
OutWrite denounces the university’s blatant endangerment of students. We denounce the university’s use of militarized police to silence political dissidence and reinforce the power structure of ongoing settler colonialism.
We emphasize that what we see on the UCLA campus is only a sliver of the atrocities Palestinians are experiencing at the hands of the Israeli state. Pro-Palestine movements at UCLA and across the nation continue to fight for Palestinian liberation. OutWrite stands with the student movements and the Palestinian people. Free Palestine.
In solidarity, with hope for liberation always,
The OutWrite Editorial Team