Dear Whitman community,

We are not sure how many of you are aware but three of our students (one senior and two first-years) are engaged in a hunger strike to protest the college’s failure to revisit the divestment proposal sent to the trustees about a year and a half ago. Hunger strikes are taking place at a number of colleges and universities right now (including Princeton, Yale, and Occidental). We write this message to express our solidarity and support for their convictions. We are moved by their commitment to Palestinian lives. In a time when the Trump administration works to enact its fascist desires and to criminalize and silence pro-Palestinian speech, our students stand defiant. They are not only refusing to comply in advance (as many college administrations are doing), they are extending a long history of hunger strikes as a political tactic  – including the often celebrated examples of the struggle for the independence of India and the long Civil Rights Movement in the United States – to draw the line at genocide. Many of our students are appalled by the normalization of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. The title of Omar El Akkad’s recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, gestures to the world’s capacity to rework the past to make it comfortable to live with. Our students are tirelessly working against this retroactive complacency by refusing to let the Whitman administration and the trustees forget about the genocide. The students are demanding that the trustees take a clear stance against genocide and end the collaboration of this institution with the companies that profit from the death and destruction of the Palestinian people. This is the dire situation that our students are trying to change. And we stand with them in that endeavor.

Sincerely,

Zahi Zalloua, IRES

Camilo Lund-Montaño, History

Robert Flahive, Politics

Tarik Ahmed Elseewi, FMS and Asian and Middle East Studies

Libby Miller, Art History

Andrea Sempértegui, Politics

Rachel George, Anthropology

Lauren Osborne, Religion

Yukiko Shigeto, Asian and Middle East Studies

M Acuff, Art

Xiaobo Yuan, Anthropology and Religion

Daniel Schultz, Anthropology and Religion

Kaitlyn Patia, Rhetoric, Writing, & Public Discourse

Nicole Simek, Gender Studies and IRES