CC Students in Solidarity with Palestine Letter to Editor

To the editor:

The anonymous opinion article criticizing CC Students in Solidarity with Palestine in the last edition seeks to misrepresent the goals, priorities, and efforts of CCS4P, and, as an organization, we would like to respond.

It becomes immediately apparent that the anonymous contributor is more content to criticize the perceived limitations of an autonomously organized student group with whataboutisms than to engage with us in good faith. From attending our meetings, one would know that various crises and sites of exploitation around the world such as in Sudan and the Congo have been subjects of discussion, and that our organization sees all liberation as interrelated: no one is free until everyone is free. It is clear that the call for divestment is a call to divest from all funding of military weaponry – a call that impacts many places around the world, including domestically. The reach of American imperialism is vast, expansive, and corrosive; it harms many countries and many peoples through the imposition of American military bases abroad and international deals to sell weapons. Divestment would abate Conn’s involvement in funding militarized harm in all of those places. 

The anonymous contributor’s dismissal of divestment is also a historical mistruth. Divestment is not a protest action yielding immediate gratification, it’s true, but it should by no means be dismissed as a tactic with both concrete and symbolic importance. It can work and it has before – South Africa, where apartheid ended after decades of economic sanctions and divestment isolated the country culturally and economically, is a famous example. Conn played a role in that struggle by divesting from South Africa in the early 1990s. As CCSP has established repeatedly in our communications to the broader campus community, divestment discourages economic participation in systemic injustice and signals to those in power that investing in imperialism, colonialism, and genocide are not profitable. It is rare that governments, especially capitalistic and oligarchical ones like ours, will listen to moral arguments; it is common that they will listen to what impacts their bottom lines. Here at Conn, divestment also sends a symbolic message to other NESCACs — who are undergoing their own divestment battles — and its own community about what Conn as an institution is willing to represent. 

Furthermore, the criticism of CC Feminist Coalition (CCFC) for supporting CCS4P actions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what it is that feminism represents. Feminism must be intersectional and attend to issues of race, class, gender, ability, religion, indigeneity, sexuality, citizenship status, and so on. The genocide occurring in Palestine is an intersectional issue and concerns feminists internationally. There is nothing inconsistent about a feminist organization condemning a nation-state for its systemic oppression and brutalization of a group of marginalized people. On a similar note, if the anonymous contributor would like to attend a CCFC meeting and suggest ideas of topics that a small grassroots student organization could explore, they are welcome to do so – it is telling that they have not bothered to do so before misrepresenting the organization.  

This kind of inaccurate criticism indicates a lack of initiative that is incompatible with student organizing. If the contributor would like to see student organizations formed and more action taken surrounding Sudan, Congo, or Ukraine – among other countries experiencing horrifying injustice – CCS4P is in full support and would love to collaborate in the future. But setting an unreachable bar for moral purity for one specific student organization on campus, rather than putting in the work to see the events and actions they would like to see, is an unfair and porous argument. 

Finally, the anonymous contributor portrayed CCS4P’s work on campus as ineffective and not creating “real change” while simultaneously instructing us to do things, such as writing to legislators, that the vast majority of members already do regularly. As was covered in the same issue, CCS4P has held well-attended rallies increasing student awareness and support, advocated for the creation of the Muslim Cultural Center, and raised over $800 for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. On a small level, our work has already had a real impact. The fight for divestment is one part of our larger goal: liberation for Palestinians, and, indeed, all marginalized peoples.

Sincerely,

Members of CCS4P