On Tuesday, the UC-wide student organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, condemned the statement made by the UC Board of Regents addressing the most recent developments in the Gaza strip and West Bank. SJP claims the statement disregards Palestinian people who have endured decades of human rights violations due to the actions of the Israeli government. 

The UC Board of Regents’ statement was published on Oct. 9, in response to a series of attacks from Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7. Hamas entered Israel using paragliders, as well as bulldozers to break through a fence between the Palestinian and Israeli territory. In the attack, over a thousand Israelis were killed and Hamas took hostage at least one hundred. The Israeli government has responded to this attack with airstrikes along the Gaza Strip which have already resulted in the deaths of over 2,800 Palestinians. Israel has also demanded that over one “ … million civilians move to the south of the territory …,” an action which has been condemned by the United Nations.

The statement released by the UC Board of Regents Chair Richard Leib and UC President Michael Drake condemned Hamas’ attack against Israel. On behalf of the UC community, Leib and Drake expressed sympathy towards people suffering from these recent attacks. They, “… hope for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict that has left so many people grieving, suffering, wounded, or killed.” The statement added that all of the UC members in the territory are currently safe and that the UC will continue to monitor developments in the area. 

The UC-wide SJP claims that the UC system fails to address the decades of suffering that Palestinians have faced due to the Israeli occupation. According to SJP, the UC Board of, “ … Regent’s statement directly denies the indigeneity of Palestinians and shows a blatant bias with charged language that is devoid of any acknowledgement of the historical and ongoing daily violence that an occupied people have been subjected to at the hands of a brutal military regime.” 

SJP also stated that the UC system has made it “clear through both this statement and decades of silence that Palestinian students across the UC system are not valued, protected, or listened to.” In their response to UC’s statement on Mideast Violence, SJP lists out four demands for the UC system:

“

1. A formal apology from the entire UC Board of Regents for this egregious statement.
2. An explicit acknowledgement of the lives of Palestinians along with their statehood.
3. A formal message acknowledging and condemning Israel as an apartheid state in line with two of the UC system’s self-proclaimed core values of ‘integrity’ and ‘ethics’. It is only ethical to have proper coverage of this dispraportionate violence against Palestinians. This administration’s implicit biases ultimately result in their failure to uphold their core values.
4. For the UC system to fully divest from corporations that profit from the illegal occupation of Palestine in accordance with the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. This includes cutting relations with any academic institutions in Israel, including study abroad, that are complicit in the occupation.”

These four demands were signed by the Students For Justice in Palestine organizations from all nine of the University of California campuses. 

The condemnation from SJP follows the group’s vigil on Thursday, Oct. 12, where the organization and its supporters gathered in front of Geisel Library to remember the Palestinian lives lost from Israeli military violence.