In the past 75 years, the colonization and occupation of Palestine has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Before October 7th, 217 Palestinians had already been killed in the year 2023 alone.[1] Additionally, Gaza has been under a complete blockade -by land, sea and air- for the past 16 years by the Israeli military.[2] This violence has reached a new level of depravity in the last five months. There have been well over 30,000 Palestinian deaths since October 7th; 92% of these deaths are civilians, with nearly half of these civilians being children.[3] Over 50% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, including hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and essential infrastructure for human existence, such as electricity and water.[4,5] In the West Bank, outside of Gaza, an additional 413 people have been killed since October 7th, 107 of whom were children. Countless more have been injured or detained indefinitely, often without charge.[6] Furthermore, 853 West Bank citizens have been made homeless by demolitions. As we were writing this document, Israel approved 3476 more houses for illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.[7] As this unspeakable violence continues to claim more Palestinian life every hour, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions has called “on [their] counterparts internationally and all people of conscience to end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes – most urgently halting the arms trade with Israel, as well as all funding and military research,” further emphasizing that “this urgent, genocidal situation can only be prevented by a mass increase of global solidarity with the people of Palestine and that can restrain the Israeli war machine.”[8]
We, the academic workers of the UC Santa Cruz Physics Department, commit to honoring this request of solidarity by:
- Withholding academic labor benefiting militarism.
- Refusing research collaboration with federal military institutions as well as private arms and defense companies.
- Calling upon faculty and PIs in our department to disclose funding sources, resist suppression of political speech, and support their students in divesting their labor in the pursuit of ethical research.
The United States is Israel’s foremost benefactor. It has provided a cumulative $158 billion (non-inflation adjusted) in bilateral aid to Israel, 86% of which finances a sixth of the Israeli military budget, providing the military infrastructure used to carry out this genocide.[9] The University of California received $295 million in funding from the Department of Defense in 2022 alone, with UCSC receiving $10.5 million dollars to support research to make violence on this scale possible and efficient for the perpetrators.[10,11]
Additionally, demilitarization is a climate crisis necessity. The United States military produces more emissions than entire industrialized countries.[12] There is no teaching or learning on an uninhabitable planet.
For these reasons, demilitarizing our department and school is an ethical priority for graduate researchers and the faculty alike. Beyond our own department and in solidarity with the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, we call on University of California graduate researchers and faculty to:
- At minimum, disclose all sources of funding that support your research and students. Support students who wish to divest their intellectual labor in pursuit of “ethical science.”
- Fight to withhold your research and patents from military applications. Campaign your institutions to reclaim ownership of your intellectual property and its applications.
- Disclose and critically consider collaborations with any Israeli companies, NGOs and academic institutions that have shown themselves to be complicit in the genocide. Support of the military action, economic strangling, and colonization of Palestine, even without active contribution, are some examples of such complicity.
- Make your anti-genocide position clear to Israeli collaborators, share information on the actions of the military and human rights violations, and open discourse on what can be done from within an Israeli university to take action. Academic institutions have long been bastions of free speech and revolutionary thought, and so have acted as natural homes for the fight against oppression and tyranny. Encourage the condemnation of the Palestinian genocide by Israeli citizens, especially respected public figures like professors.
- Critically evaluate the appeal of your work to military applications. For example, plenty of astrophysics of star formation and evolution, as well as fusion energy research informs nuclear weapons testing and development.[13] Lasers are integral to guided munitions as well as plenty of other military purposes. As the ones performing this research we have a unique responsibility in understanding the possible consequences of our work and advocating for our work to not be used to these ends.
- Spread these actions beyond our department and into your own.
In solidarity,
As faculty in the physics department we commit to supporting our graduate students and postdocs in their goals as outlined above:
amazing !