Dear Chancellor Lyons,

We, the undersigned parents and allies of UC Berkeley students, are deeply concerned about the offering of the DeCal class "Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis." Based on course descriptions, promotional materials, and a prior syllabus, this course presents a biased and factually incorrect narrative of Israel’s founding, promoting antisemitism and inciting hatred. It teaches the same rhetoric [1] used by organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to justify violence [2] against Jews and Israel and to call for the destruction of Israel [3] and the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish and Arab citizens.

Academic Freedom vs. Bias, Indoctrination and Political Organizing

While UC Berkeley values academic freedom, it must not be used to justify one-sided political indoctrination. Academic freedom encourages diverse perspectives and open debate, but this course promotes only a distorted and ahistorical view. It fails to meet the critical, evidence-based standards that define a university education. Moreover, it does not explore alternate frameworks for understanding the region's complex history, including the Arab conquests and colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa and the continuous Jewish presence in Israel for over 3,000 years. UC Berkeley courses should not serve as a forum for political organizing, and this course has all the hallmarks of political organizing. It is a calculated attempt to criminalize and vilify Israel, Jews and anyone who thinks Israel, the only Jewish state, has the right to exist. It has the same validity as submitting Jewish religion to a “ritual killing analysis,” which would be considered a blood libel. This analogy is not far-fetched. While "ritual killing" was considered the greatest evil in the middle ages, "settler colonialism" is considered one of the greatest evils in our post-colonialism era. Both serve as blood libels and used to incite hate and violence.
Moreover, this course is an unscholarly attempt to delegitimize Israel under the guise of a pseudo scholarly analysis. Would you approve a UC Berkeley course titled "Islam: a neuro-pathological analysis" which defines and treats Islam as a mass psychosis attempting to violently take over and subjugate the world? Such a course would not be approved by UC Berkeley regardless of how many Islamophobic scholars one can cite who actually treated Islam as psychosis.

Course Content and Academic Standards:

The course title alone, "Settler Colonial Analysis," misrepresents Israel’s history. Colonial powers are not indigenous to the lands they colonize, yet Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, who have lived there continuously for thousands of years. Historic and genetic evidence links Jews to the land, a fact that the course deliberately ignores. The portrayal of Zionism as a colonial movement is libelous, as Zionists did not establish a foreign colony but rather revived their nation in their ancestral land. The Jews did not come to the land with weapons to conquer, rather they joined Jews who lived in the land for thousands of years with rakes and hoes to cultivate often swamp-infested land they purchased from absentee landlords. After the Holocaust, the state of Israel was established by international law (1948). The Jews also did not seek to replace the Arab population [4] that lived there, a fact that is established through historic documents, Israel’s declaration of independence and the fact that 20% of Israel’s population is Arab who are Israeli citizens. While the Israelis were interested to live peacefully among their neighbors within the meager boundaries they were allotted, five Arab countries attacked Israel in the War of Independence, which resulted in the displacement of 700,000 Arabs, most of them fled a war zone but were not expelled, and 900,000 Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries and territories where they lived for thousands of years. This war was one of many that Muslim extremists committed against the Jewish state to deny Israel’s right to exist [5]. Positioning the creation of Israel as a foreign colonial power which dispossessed the natives, serves the objective of vilifying Jews, but does not fit reality.

The use of sources like Fayez Sayegh, who first coined Zionism as settler-colonialism, raises concerns. Sayegh was affiliated with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Nazi-influenced, fascist organization during the Holocaust, as such he cannot be considered a reliable source. His unfounded assertion that Jews only began seeing themselves as a nation due to 19th-century European colonialism is easily disproved: for 3000 years, Jews have collectively called themselves the “Nation of Israel” (עם ישראל). The evidence for this is excessive, present in thousands of years’ worth of preserved texts. In fact, Sayegh himself admitted that Zionism does not fit any conventional colonial model since Jews did not arrive to establish a colony of another nation.

Bears for Palestine shared a sample of the course content on their Instagram page [6] showing false land ownership maps of the region. Their graphic claims that the entire land of the future “British Mandate of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael” in 1918 was under ownership of the Arabs and is labeled “Palestinian land”, which is factually incorrect under any historical or international law definition. At no point in history was it a Palestinian state or Palestinian land (until the Oslo accords), and by 1918 hundreds of years had passed since it was last under Arab control - the result of Arab conquests. Discussion of the rest of the maps and why they are false and libelous can be found here [7].
These are just a few of a many falsehoods and omissions promulgated in this course, which entirely elides the real complexities of the region. A full rebuttal of the syllabus is beyond the scope of this email but we are happy to provide it in a separate document.

Dr. Hatem Bazian's Disturbing History:

The course was traditionally sponsored by Dr. Hatem Bazian, who has a well-documented history of promoting antisemitism and inciting violence. His record includes the following incidents:

- While attending San Francisco State University, Bazian claimed [8] that the student newspaper had been infiltrated by "Jewish spies"
- In 1999, he was quoted in the Detroit Free Press [9] reciting an Islamic hadith that called for the slaughter of Jews
- In 2003, during a protest in the U.S., he encouraged [10] the crowd by saying, “It’s about time that we have an intifada in this country!” The second intifada in Israel (2000-2005) targeted civilians, including women and children, and resulted in the deaths of 1,000 Israelis. This is the violence Hatem Bazian is calling for.
- In 2017, he posted [11] a caricature of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man celebrating, with the caption: “I can now kill, rape, smuggle organs and steal the land of Palestinians”
- Bazian is the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American [12] group. SJP promotes violence against Jews and opposes the right of Israel to exist. Recently, SJP was placed on probation [13] by George Washington University and suspended by Columbia University [14]
- Bazian was named as a defendant under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act for conspiring with, aiding, abetting, and providing material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. The lawsuit alleges that for over 20 years, Bazian and others have helped Hamas infiltrate U.S. universities to spread its agenda and provide material support
- Jewish students at UC Berkeley have complained about Bazian for years [15], citing his promotion of hate and intolerance.

These disturbing incidents make it clear that Hatem Bazian cannot be trusted to oversee a balanced, scholarly exploration of Middle Eastern history.

Failure of Academic Oversight:

This same course was contested in 2016 for failing to meet academic standards, and UC Berkeley initially suspended the course for exactly this reason. The university’s statement at the time noted The 2016 statement continues: “It should also be noted that the Dean is very concerned about a course, even a student-run course, which espouses a single political viewpoint and/or appears to offer a forum for political organizing rather than an opportunity for the kind of open academic inquiry that Berkeley is known for.”
Unfortunately, it was later reinstated without adequate revision, and has contributed to the hostile environment towards Jewish and Israeli students we see today.
In his arguments from 2016 Hatem Bazian stated that canceling this course is political because no one would have an issue with discussing the settler colonial origins of the United States of America, ignoring the fact that the US was indeed established by foreign powers with a metropole (England) by people who did not originate in America. It is indisputable that the US was established by colonialism, but have you ever heard of colonial settlers moving into a country that is the birthplace of their history? Settlers speaking a language spoken in the land before the language spoken by its contemporary residents? Settlers whose holidays commemorated historical events in the land to which they moved-not in the lands from which they came? The mental gymnastics required to have this discussion is astounding, and the nefarious goal of these distortions are clear. If one wanted to make this outrageous claim in a university setting one would have had to also explain why this definition is contested. We do not believe the sponsor of this course can in good faith do so, indeed the syllabus does not suggest any attempt to balance their claims.
UC Berkeley’s Endorsement:

By awarding academic credit for this DeCal, UC Berkeley is effectively endorsing a highly distorted, libelous view of history, under the supervision of a notorious antisemite. Dr. Bazian’s clear incentive is to recruit more individuals to his anti-Israeli and anti-American agenda. Those individuals, as we have seen later on go and create a hostile environment for Jewish students at UC Berkeley. At a time when Jewish students feel increasingly unsafe, with UC Berkeley facing legal action for failing to protect Jewish students, families are reconsidering whether to send their children to schools like UC Berkeley.

We urge you to withdraw academic credit for the DeCal class "Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis." UC Berkeley should take a firm stand against the spread of antisemitic falsehoods and blood libels, and reaffirm its commitment to creating a safe and inclusive environment for all students.

Sincerely,
UC Berkeley parents and concerned allies

References:
[1]https://www.instagram.com/p/C_gc2AdNAmV/
[2]https://www.instagram.com/p/C_f931pxZf2/
[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/C_gc2AdNAmV/
[4] https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/early-zionists-and-arabs
[5]https://www.amazon.com/Case-Israel-Alan-Dershowitz/dp/0471679526
[6]https://www.instagram.com/p/C_CSwYnJmT6/
[7]https://honestreporting.com/debunked-those-maps-of-palestinian-land-loss-are-misleading-heres-why/
[8]https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/19590/profiles-in-hate-hatem-bazian
[9]https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/8865/hatem-bazian-personal-story
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfv5yaKxNgo
[11]https://www.timesofisrael.com/berkeley-lecturer-apologizes-for-retweet-college-condemned-as-anti-semitic/
[12] https://www.instagram.com/p/C_3WyiSNi76/?img_index=2
[13]https://www.timesofisrael.com/gwu-suspends-two-anti-israel-groups-puts-6-on-warning-ahead-of-fall-semester/
[14]https://news.columbia.edu/news/statement-gerald-rosberg-chair-special-committee-campus-safety
[15]https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/uc-berkley-jewish-students-demand-action-over-antisemitic-professor-515883