A sign reads “Protect Freedom of Speech on Campus” at a May 1, 2024, protest on Ohio State’s campus. The event followed the arrests of 36 demonstrators during a Pro-Palestine protest on the South Oval April 25. Credit: Paloma Martinez-Cruz
Jonathan Combs-Schilling, associate professor of Italian at Ohio State, submitted this letter on behalf of the university’s chapter of Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine. FSJP comprises faculty, graduate students and staff advocating for Palestinian self-determination.
As the academic year wraps up, over 600,000 Palestinian students in Gaza have lost yet another year of education due to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Within the first 100 days of its war on Gaza, the Israeli military systematically destroyed every single university on the strip, revealing its practice of scholasticide.
Scholasticide is “a Palestinian concept that refers to the physical destruction of centers of knowledge, educational resources, infrastructures, and archives as well as the silencing, censorship, and repression of Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity,” according to the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
As we witness from the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rameysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Ranjani Srivasan and a growing number of others, the Zionist regime’s academic repression has extended beyond Gaza and Palestine and into U.S. and Canadian universities.
In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. government has revoked at least 300 visas from international students as of Thursday, proving universities are not only failing to protect their students, faculty and staff from arrest and deportation, but working in conjunction with entities such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This crackdown on Palestinian students and pro-Palestinian student activists is connected to the larger repression and closures of diversity, equity and inclusion programming on college campuses, including the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 1 — which was officially signed by Gov. Mike DeWine last Friday — and the Ohio State College of Medicine’s cancellation of its annual Global Health Symposium, according to an email from Dr. Carol Bradford, the college’s dean. This, in turn, silenced a keynote speech by Dr. Nick Maynard that was intended to address “Gaza: A War on Healthcare.”
As scholar Noura Erakat wrote for Democracy Now!, “there is no way to defeat fascism at home without combating empire abroad.” As learners, teachers and scholars — and those who bear witness to the ongoing attacks against Gaza and subsequent repression against those who defend Palestinians — we have a duty to protect our free speech, our academic freedom and to protect one another.
