The University of Illinois’ Hostility Against Its Palestinian Students
Jimmy Rodgers
12 December 2023
On October 11th, 2023, the University of Illinois System released their “Statement on Israel and Gaza”, signed by members of administration including University of Illinois System President Tim Killeen, UIC Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda, UI at Springfield Chancellor Janet Gooch, and UI at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Robert Jones.
While there is much to be said about the fact that this statement refers to Palestinian resistance to settler-colonialism and Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza as “terrorist attacks”, there is even more to be said about U of I’s false reassurance that “[they] have listened to [their] students and other members of our University of Illinois System community who are clearly hurting, and they are our first priority.”
This comes only a few days before Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a protest action on UIC’s campus that saw UIC police officers laughing at students for crying while grieving the lives lost in Palestine.
Any UIC student who has attended SJP events, especially recent ones, can see how clearly UIC shows a lack of respect for Palestinian lives. They allow non-UIC students to freely flyer Israeli propaganda around campus, whereas many SJP organized or supported events have been met with hostility from UIC officers for doing the same flyering, simply chanting the names of their martyrs in the quad, or comforting one another by with peaceful, reassuring words of “This too shall pass, inshAllah”.
The University of Illinois System has shown clear opposition against both SJP UIC and UIC’s Dissenters chapter (an organization against militarism in all parts of the world). For instance, on November 16th, UIC PD violently forced Palestinian students and allies out of a public Board of Trustees meeting. Students were simply trying to call out the U of I System’s clear bias, demonstrated by investments in weapon’s manufacturers that supply arms to Israel. It wasn’t long before when SJP hosted a campus-wide walkout on October 25th with the goal being to demand; UIC divest from zionist speakers, institutions, weapon manufacturers and any entity that funds the death of Palestinians, ask UIC to condemn the Israeli attacks against Gaza and also to establish a chancellor committee for and includes Palestinian and Arab students. There were soon whispers of an antisemitic campus wide walkout hosted by SJP for simply wanting to speak out against the killings of their family members (also ignoring that those Palestinian students are Semetic people too).
Why was it okay to antagonize Palestinian students? Why was it necessary for UIC police officers to circle them at the beginning of a protest action in the quad (before leaving later on) as students only shared tears for the lives lost? Why does UIC and the U of I system as a whole continue to be silent against the rampant anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that has begun to brew in the hearts of students when they see a hijabi woman seated in their class? Whatever the answers may be, this too shall pass, inshallah.
Palestinian students in the U of I system are watching the suffering and genocide of their people and families, and have expressed the need for mental health resources to be made more readily available for them to make their lives on campus just a bit more bearable. These requests have gone largely unanswered.
Perhaps this is because UIC has found itself pursuing study abroad programs in the settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel instead. This past year, Palestinian students have been openly speaking out against this program both within the community and through legal action. In response, UIC has actively avoided addressing their concerns, going as far as removing and blocking students with traditionally Arabic names from their Zoom meetings about the study abroad program and were only allowed in once they had changed their names in Zoom to more white sounding names.
UIC has failed to care for its Palestinian students in pursuit of supporting Israel, even recently sending a mass email to all students begging them to continue to purchase from the Starbucks on campus. This came after students declared they would stop going once discovering that Starbucks chains are financial supporters of the settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel.
Students were so surprised by this response that it had become a campus-wide joke. However, other students were less surprised, as on March 15, 2018, U of I released their “Statement on Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement”. This statement stated that the University of Illinois System leadership stands in strong opposition to the BDS movement’s boycott of Israel and states the following; “While we acknowledge and affirm the rights of faculty and students to express their own viewpoints, we believe that actions such as those espoused by BDS would damage academic freedom and may have an intended or unintended anti-Semitic effect which we utterly condemn”.
Not only has UIC recently shown through their reaction to the boycott of Starbucks on campus that the right to express their own viewpoints does not apply to Palestinian students, but it reveals that a fear of “intended or unintended anti-Semitism effect[s]’ arising is enough for them to be in strong opposition to a BDS movement.
Since October 7th, there have been an estimated total of over 14,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, yet there has been nothing from the U of I system to comfort or support its Palestinian students. It’s easy to turn our backs and believe that because Palestine is hundreds of miles away and the U of I system is more concerned with what happens in Illinois (ignoring their study abroad program to do so). On October 14th, just one week after the events that occurred on October 7th, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy named Wadea al-Fayoume was murdered when his mother’s landlord stabbed him a total of 26 times in Plainfield, Illinois. This was an anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic attack fueled almost entirely by a global rise in anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that many U of I students fear they’ll fall victim to as well.
Israel’s settler-colonization and occupation of Palestine has been conflated and misinterpreted as a war between Israel and Palestine that dates back to the first Nakba in 1948, despite the fact that Palestine has no land army, air force, or navy. Israel, on the other hand, has its own military and is backed by some of the biggest corporations and military powers, such as the US. Zionism is an ideology of colonialism and imperialism. This makes recent events a bit easier to understand for those that have found themselves having a difficult time understanding history unfold before their eyes. The simple fact is; there are occupied people and there are occupiers. And it is clear which side UIC and U of I administration has taken.
As recently as the summer of 2021, UIC awarded $2.25M to establish Army HBCU/MI Research Center of Excellence. This money will be awarded across a five-year grant with the goal of “train[ing] the next generation of scientists and engineers for the U.S. Department of Defense in the field of energetic materials”. UIC has notoriously provided for imperialism in various ways over the past few years. This has been something as direct as money or something as invaluable as providing STEM majors with positions within weapon manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin.
Perhaps it’s investments in imperialism like this that prevent UIC from supporting movements like BDS. Perhaps the alignment of imperialist ideas between UIC and the settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel has nurtured a tacit admiration from UIC on behalf of Israel. Perhaps the U of I system just does not value the lives of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim people the way they do others. Perhaps all things are true and if so, then this too shall pass, inshallah.
