Send an email to the Rutgers administration demanding that they terminate the memorandum of understanding with Tel Aviv University and take action to protect our Palestinian community members!

On November 17th, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway signed an agreement welcoming Tel Aviv University to house operations at the forthcoming Innovation & Technology Hub in New Brunswick. The Hub, a collaboration between the University and NJ Governor Phil Murphy, is currently in construction opposite the New Brunswick train station and set to open in 2024. The agreement commits New Jersey tax dollars to funding at least five future collaborative projects between Rutgers and Tel Aviv University researchers.

President Holloway’s decision to travel to Al-Shaykh Muwannis, the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village which Tel Aviv University now sits upon, to sign the memorandum of understanding for this agreement is thus an affront to Palestinian students and allies in the Rutgers community. The University and President Holloway claim to provide a safe space for political engagement, yet in actuality, their actions give comfort to forces of apartheid and reveal the administration’s failure to stand in genuine solidarity with the Palestinian members of its university. How can Palestinian students and allies expect to safely voice their solidarity when their own University administration engages in such close partnerships with their oppressor?

President Holloway owes an apology to our Palestinian community members for traveling to the state of Israel. We affirm our request from August 2021, which has since been ignored, for President Holloway to publicly affirm the right of Rutgers faculty, students, and staff to voice their solidarity with Palestine, as other institutions have already done, and make clear that the university rejects all attempts to falsely conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

We demand that Rutgers University remove Tel Aviv University from the Innovation & Technology Hub project, and expose any other ties between the University and Israeli apartheid. As we previously requested in August 2021 with no response from administration, we also ask for the University to protect the rights and the safety of its community members by denouncing and taking action against the targeted doxxing of pro-Palestinian students and faculty members on blacklist sites such as Canary Mission, and take action to ensure accountability from administration, faculty, and staff who violate the safe space Rutgers claims to be for activists and advocates of the disenfranchised.

Send an email to the Rutgers administration demanding that they terminate the memorandum of understanding with Tel Aviv University and take action to protect their Palestinian community members!

To read our full statement, see: tinyurl.com/SJPJointStatement