Solidarity with UBC People’s University for Gaza Encampment
The following was approved by the CUPE 2278 Executive Committee on May 13, 2024:
CUPE 2278 stands in solidarity with the UBC People’s University for Gaza liberated zone. We reiterate our demands that UBC immediately divest all funds from financial interests that perpetuate settler colonialism here in Canada and abroad. As the Israeli state invades the city of Rafah, it is absolutely critical that we continue the fight for Palestinian liberation.
As a collective of workers at the University of British Columbia, we continue to grapple with our employer’s historical and current complicity in settler colonialism and genocide, both in Turtle Island and throughout the world. It is our responsibility as workers and educators to understand, criticize, and work to transform these systems through education and protest.
Across Turtle Island, the complicity of institutions of higher education in militarization, occupation, and dispossession runs deep to the core. We have watched in disgust as universities across the continent deploy highly militarized police forces to violently disrupt peaceful protests in a callous attempt to suppress our colleagues’ solidarity with Palestine and protect institutional profits. In this light, we are deeply concerned that UBC continues to work closely with RCMP–a colonial occupying force that disproportionately harms Indigenous and racialized people–to establish near constant surveillance of the peaceful encampment.
We unequivocally support the fundamental right to protest, and commend our colleagues and friends for their bravery and resolve. The People’s University has shown us the power of community care and allows us to imagine a world where we centre the dignity of all human beings over the relentless pursuit of profit.
We urge UBC to meaningfully address the following demands of the encampment:
Divest from all companies complicit in the Israeli apartheid regime and in the oppression and genocide of the Palestinians.
Participate in the global academic boycott of Israeli universities and institutions.
Publicly condemn and demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, and condemn the scholasticide in Gaza.
Keep cops off our campus.
Reaffirm Palestinians’ right to return as enshrined under UNGA Resolution 194 and the right to resist as outlined under UNGA Resolution 2625
CUPE 2278 Executive Committee