Staff for Palestine group launches, hosts Palestine vigil in front of library

On Aug. 26, the first class day of the Fall 2024 semester, 140 students, faculty, staff and community members gathered in a vigil at Honnold Mudd Library for a vigil led by the newly-established 7C Staff for Justice in Palestine. During the vigil, staff read speeches mourning and honoring Palestinians killed by the Zionist entity since Oct. 7, and demanding that their employers divest from and academically boycott the Zionist entity, drop criminal charges against student protesters and include staff in governance and decision-making.

By the medical journal Lancet’s estimate, the Zionist entity’s genocide on Gaza has killed at least 186,000 people since Oct. 7, 2023. Another estimate from doctors and nurses in Gaza says the direct toll is “already greater than 92,000, an astonishing 4.2% of Gaza’s population.” On Aug. 28, the Zionist entity invaded the West Bank, opening fire on civilians near the Jenin Government Hospital. 

7C Staff for Palestine public announced the formation of their group on Aug 17 as “a group of staff from across the seven Claremont Colleges consortium who stand in solidarity with the global movement to divest from the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.” During the rally on Monday, 10 staff members read their principles of unity and denounced 7C administrations complicity in genocide and scholasticide along with condemning the repression of Palestinian solidarity on campus.

“Every day we walk into work environments where we worry that expressing concerns about a well-documented genocide could cost us our livelihood, where we have been driven to distrust even our colleagues, where we are being pitted against students we love and are concerned about,” a staff speaker said. 

Staff speakers also expressed their support for anti-imperialist student organizing in the past year. 

“It fills us with pride to see how they speak out, at great personal cost, against the capitalist and imperialist structures that necessitate the exploitation and death of humankind and the pillaging of resources from Turtle Island, to Palestine, the Congo, Haiti, Bangladesh, and around the globe,” a staff speaker said. 

Speakers also spoke out against Claremont administrators’ repression of this organizing, including allowing the arrests of a professor playing Palestinian music in November 2023 and of 19 students participating in a sit-in on April 5.

“Regrettably, we also bear witness to the callous response by administrators and complicit staff across our institutions who deny our broader community spaces for mourning,” the staff speaker said. “[Who] allowed the arrest of a faculty member engaged in the act of teaching, oversaw acts of intimidation and surveillance by campus safety and called for the brutal arrest of students exercising their right to protest.” 

At the ending of the vigil, staff members asked 10 students to read statements commemorating universities destroyed by the zionist entity in Gaza. Students read statements mourning the destruction of Israa University, University College of Applied Sciences, Al-Azhar University, Al-Aqsa University and the Islamic University of Gaza. 

As of Sept. 2, the zionist occupation has killed at least 10,490 school and university students and 500 school teachers and university educators. This back to school season, 625,000 school-aged children will lose another year of education due to the ongoing genocide. 

Staff encouraged students to write statements on notecards and attach them to the trees in front of the Honnold Mudd library. 

At the end of the vigil, a student from Pomona Divest from Apartheid announced a rally happening outside of convocation the next day and encouraged new students to boycott the event.