Interface Statement of Solidarity
Justice for Gaza,
Freedom for Palestine
We, the editorial collective of Interface, stand in steadfast solidarity with the Palestinian people in their enduring struggle against elimination, apartheid, and dehumanization. We denounce the current genocidal belligerence being faced by Gaza at the hands of the Israeli Occupying Forces as not only acts of physical eradication and crimes against humanity, but systemic forms of hostile aggression that are facilitating the cultural and epistemic erasure of Palestine. As a non-commercial open access academic journal committed to critical education, we also remain deeply concerned and condemn Israel’s orchestrated campaigns of scholasticide, educide, and epistemicide, which have targeted universities, schools, research institutes, scholarship, and the right all Palestinians should enjoy to collectively imagine and co-create liberated and life-affirming futures through their education system.
In Gaza, universities have been bombed and schools obliterated while students, teachers, professors, poets, artists, cleaners, journalists, scientists, nurses, farmers, doctors, and children alike have been harassed, assaulted, and imprisoned—if not killed. Public libraries, hospitals, health centres, historical archives, refugee shelters, community gardens, and indigenous food systems—key sources of collective memory, cultural heritage, and communal health—have been razed and reduced to ashes. The premeditated attacks by the Israeli state and settlers are intentionally aimed at annihilating the intellectual foundations, land relations, conditions of life, and warranted resistance of subjugated Palestinians who have been fighting for survival and self-determination for generations. As we write, a professional army bankrolled by imperial power is uprooting and murdering defenseless civilians. Enough is enough.
Globally, the appalling yet blatant complicity—if not active participation—of governments and universities in accelerating the Gaza genocide is as conspicuous as it is unconscionable. Financial investments, research contracts, and collaboration agreements with arms companies that commercially benefit from the horrific machinations of war, demolition, and dispossession all starkly reveal academia’s role in perpetuating the systematic destruction of Palestine. Simultaneously, the repression of pro-Palestinian student movements and peace encampments—through surveillance, censorship, smear campaigns, police brutality, and state violence—casts critical light on the bitter lengths to which university leaders will go to vindictively silence students, punish dissent, and suppress critical consciousness as a means of shielding their vested interests and pathological commitments to shamelessly maintaining “business as usual”.
This complicity is an indictment of university managers and senior leadership teams who, whilst hiding behind closed doors and futilely attempting to absolve themselves via equivocation and obfuscation, continue to prioritise profit, superficial PR campaigns, concentrated power, and their own outsized and unearned salaries over empathy, compassion, and ethical practice. More broadly, it lays bare the failure of universities worldwide to uphold their purported commitments to equity, inclusion, serious inquiry, and producing and protecting the “socially conscious global citizens” they so frequently pride themselves on. Across academia, the bottom line, obsessive fixations on growth, and individual career ambitions must not take precedence over international solidarity, supporting student mobilizations, and the wholesale decimation of Palestine’s education system. For any university staff member who claims to value, perform, and see merit in diversity, carework, and mutual aid—now is your time to act.
On these points and in light of the ongoing occupation of Palestine and merciless siege on Gaza at present, we reject all empty rhetoric and hollow appeals to “complexity”, as well as any deceptive narrative that attempts to elide empire, omit historical context, or cunningly diminish the genocide of Palestinians as merely a “humanitarian crisis”. We further repudiate any feckless assertion suggesting institutional silence vis-a-vis complicity with Israeli settler colonial atrocities is the best way forward. Equally, we deplore any glib argument that education, classroom content, and research agendas should be “neutral” and “objective.” Such fraught contentions are at once oblivious fictions and tacit recourses to inaction, abandonment, and disavowal—not to mention deliberate political decisions taken and choices made to uncritically reproduce an oppressively racist and ruthlessly lethal status quo.
With respect to higher education, university managers, administrators, researchers, professors, students, and service staff comprise a global community. We are accountable to others, regardless of difference or distance, and bear the responsibility of being guided by this reality and offering sanctuary accordingly—borders be damned. Apathy, indifference, acquiescence, and denial in the face of deracination and genocide is unacceptable and must be refused. Education is either a means to critical discernment and collective liberation—or it is nothing. We stand with Palestinian colleagues, students, and communities in their fight for freedom, justice, and self-determination. The extermination of their loved ones and erasure of their knowledge, voices, stories, songs, and dreams cannot be met with contemptuous silence, liberal bystanding, and cynical lip service. This is a matter of life and death.
As a scholarly journal committed to collective ethics, global solidarity, and principled action, we therefore call for the following:
- An immediate end to investments, research partnerships, and funding agreements with arms manufacturers, corporations, and subsidiaries complicit in the occupation of Palestine.
- The amplification of Palestinian scholarship, histories, voices, and testimonies in defiance of the hostile systems, states, and occupying settlers that seek to erase and eliminate them.
- A collective academic boycott of institutions participating or complicit in Israeli apartheid, settler colonial violence against Palestine, and genocidal actions and war crimes in Gaza.
- Active support for pro-Palestinian student movements and an end to the repression of activists as a means of ensuring that universities remain places for solidarity and dissent.
- An immediate end to all university involvement with or support for civil and criminal cases targeting staff and students who have been involved in opposing the Gaza genocide.
An injury to Gaza is an injury to us all.
For a world where many worlds fit …and a free Palestine,
The Interface Editorial Collective
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