The scholars and ensemble of the New School of the Anthropocene pledge our collective support for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural
Boycott of Israel. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian people and call upon other alternative educational institutions to publicly pledge their support for PACBI. 

NSotA is a response to the mainstream university’s institutional suppression of responses to the threats of social crisis and ecological ruin in the Anthropocene. Academic freedom is meaningless if it does not work towards the practices of liberation. We will not be intimidated by the attacks on individuals working within higher education who speak out in the name of justice.

 

PACBI is a boycott of Israeli institutions that are not working towards dismantling their own state's genocidal apparatus. This boycott acknowledges the power asymmetry of the settler colonial apartheid regime over a people struggling for liberation. Universities within Israel are supporting apartheid by repressing criticism of the Israeli Government, withholding scholarships for students who have not served in the military, cultivating martial theories for direct application, and developing Israeli weapons and surveillance industries. Research departments maintain close ties with arms developers such as Elbit, who test technologies on Palestinians and export them globally (source: bit.ly/VP-israeliunis). Israel’s systematic destruction of all the educational institutions in Gaza is a strategic act and
a further abomination in the field of human rights.

NSotA is a response to the contested field of the Anthropocene, the origins of which are rooted in histories of settler colonialism and the dispossession and eradication of indigenous and traditional ways of life. The war on minorities, other ethnic groups and other nations are intimately linked to the general war on the biosphere that was intensified by the European conquest of Turtle Island and what would become known as the Americas from 1492. The New School recognises that its primary duty is to make these complex links visible and intelligible, which is why we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

 

Palestine has a particular helix of vulnerability as a territory under occupation in one of the most climate-vulnerable places in the world. Early estimates indicate that the planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza alone were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Those emissions include CO2 from aircraft missions, tanks and martial vehicle fuel, as well as those from the manufacture and detonation of bombs, artillery and rockets. The immediate effect of toxic pollution from the assault is a threat to the people of Palestine, the soil that sustains them and the ecosystems upon which they rely. We cannot ignore the devastating and toxic costs of war and occupation that enable the domicide of Palestinian land and life. 

 

The New School of the Anthropocene stands in opposition to all forms of genocide and ecocide. It supports the resistance of colonialism and oppression, whether it be manifested in Rojava, Yemen, Ukraine or anywhere. Palestine is a prism for the world in that the current situation is so extreme, so visible and so indicative of the intersecting crises of colonialism, Western hegemony and climate breakdown. Climate justice cannot be achieved without social justice. These struggles are one and the same.