Response to Chancellor Gillman’s October 10 Email about Israel and Palestine

On October 24, AGS passed a resolution affirming our commitment to supporting all UCI graduate students and condemning the failure of Chancellor Gillman to acknowledge the violence experienced by people in Palestine.

On October 10, Chancellor Gillman sent an email to the student body that acknowledged the “horrific massacre of innocent individuals in Israel by Hamas.” However, he failed to acknowledge that, at the time of his email, Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza had already killed 830 Palestinian civilians. Violence against Palestinian civilians has only continued to escalate; as of October 24, more than 5,700 Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank have been killed, and over one million have been displaced.

We also recognize related acts of violence that have occurred globally in the past two weeks, including a Berlin synagogue that was recently firebombed and a 6-year-old Muslim Palestinian child who was stabbed to death in Chicago.  Additionally, we have seen professors in the UC system pen op-eds telling employers not to hire students who support Palestine and students who have supported Palestinians at other universities subjected to doxxing campaigns. We recognize what a difficult and scary time this is for our community, and offer our support to all students in this environment. We call on UCI to affirm their support for students who speak out against global injustice and to issue a revised statement that clarifies that UCI, as an institution that purports to care about diversity and inclusion, seeks an end to all forms of violence and discrimination that negatively affect its students, including (but not limited to) Islamophobia, antisemitism, colonization, and racism.

We also want to highlight some of the resources that exist for graduate students on campus:

Counseling Center

Immigrant Legal Services/DREAM Center

Take care,

Zoë

Zoë Chaetana Miller-Vedam
President, Associated Graduate Students, 23-24