As a student of UBC, I call on the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern (AMNE) Department to commit to immediately ending their complicity in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by 1) cancelling the archaeological field school on stolen Palestinian land indefinitely and 2) refusing to approve any archeological digs in Occupied Palestine in the future. This is in line with a much larger call for universities across the globe to cut all ties with zionist educational institutions, especially those operating in occupied Palestine.

Gregg Gardner, an Associate Professor with tenure in the AMNE department, runs an archeological field school in Occupied Palestine in a stolen part of al-Khalil (“Hebron”) at a site renamed as “horvat midras.” Zionists destroyed Palestinian villages in the area such as Bayt Nattif and ethnically cleansed the area of its Palestinian inhabitants. Today, the land is known as the “Adullam Grove Nature Reserve”.

This trip is run through the Go Global program and requires departmental approval. It is run under the AMNE course code 395/595, which is the course code used for all archeological field schools.

The course description contains only a vague allusion to students “producing knowledge of the region’s rural settlement patterns”. At a university where land acknowledgements are baked into academic activities and inform how we interact with and learn on the land, the fact that the course description does not even mention that the entire reason the course is able to exist is because of a violent, genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign that forced 750,000+ people off their land is shocking and unacceptable.

Furthermore, this specific field school is done in collaboration with the Hebrew University of [occupied] Jerusalem (HUJ), a university that is well known for their active participation in genocide and apartheid.

From its inception, “israel” has been a genocidal, apartheid regime. Palestinians have been rightfully resisting the occupation for decades, along with fighting for a single, Palestinian state. It is crucial that the AMNE department sticks to their anti-colonial values and takes tangible action against their complicity in the genocidal, settler-colonial, apartheid regime of "israel".

"israel" has used archaeology as a discipline to seize Palestinian land, deny and erase Palestinian history, and to legitimize the occupation. Over the course of its 76-year existence, the military has systematically and intentionally destroyed countless Palestinian archeological sites and looted historical artifacts in a genocidal attempt to expunge the history of the Palestinian people from collective memory.

The AMNE Department has committed to address the presence of coloniality and racism in the archaeological field. However, as has been demonstrated, this course legitimizes the occupation, apartheid, as well as the ongoing, unjust, and illegal theft of Palestinian land. The continued existence of this course represents a glaring contradiction of the AMNE department’s own commitments to addressing the presence of coloniality and racism in the archeological field.

Since October 7th, 2023 "israel" has escalated its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. In its ongoing genocide, the occupation forces has killed an estimated 186,000 people through means of bombing, starvation, disease and execution. It has also committed numerous other war crimes including blocking aid from reaching civilians, the relentless bombing of hospitals, and the deliberate targeting of journalists. In the past weeks, "israel" has expanded its invasion into Lebanon, killing over 3,000 people, and has continued to bomb Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Given that increasingly, countries around the world are cutting ties with "israel" in protest of its genocide in Gaza, apartheid system, and illegal occupation/settlement of the Palestinian West Bank, the responsibility for UBC and the AMNE department to withdraw support from "israeli" academic institutions as demanded by numerous global campaigns is greater than ever. Academic boycotts have long been used to oppose injustice abroad, for example in the case of apartheid South Africa.

In 2022, UBC cut off ties with Russian Universities that had been included in its Go Global programs. The failure to do so in "israel’s" case reveals a stunningly racist and anti-Palestinian double standard that the AMNE department continues to uphold.

Signatories on this petition demand that AMNE immediately end their complicity in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by 1) cancelling this archaeological field school permanently and 2) refusing to approve any archeological digs in occupied Palestine in the future until international humanitarian law is comprehensively respected in occupied Palestine and Palestinians are able to exercise their full right of return as stipulated under UN Resolution 194. This is in line with a much larger call for universities across the globe to cut all ties with zionist educational institutions, especially those operating in occupied Palestine.