UNC Israeli Apartheid Week is taking place

TO THE EDITOR:

On Wednesday afternoon, members of UNC Students for Justice in Palestine posted hundreds of mock eviction notices on the doors of several residence halls throughout UNC’s campus.

The action was intended to call attention to the harsh reality of life for Palestinians.

Eviction notices are routinely given to Palestinian families living under oppressive Israeli occupation.

The goal is to confiscate Palestinian land for Israeli settlements and make life so miserable for Arabs that they have no choice but to eventually leave their land and homes.

Since 1967, approximately 27,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel, as estimated by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

For more than 65 years, successive Israeli governments have used home demolitions to displace the native Palestinian population in order to create a Jewish-majority Zionist state.

This is in violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The eviction notices were clearly fake, and we hope that they will incite a greater dialogue on campus about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a conflict that is clearly influenced by the American government and American universities.

The U.S. has provided over $200 billion in military funding to Israel over the past six decades, and all that we seem to have gotten from it is this apartheid system.

South African anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been frank in his opinion of Israeli apartheid.

In a speech in the United States, Archbishop Tutu said he saw “the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”

UNC has a strong history of student activism and being a voice for those who cannot be heard.
We are proud to uphold this tradition and think it a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a UNC student and citizen of the world.

Use the hashtag #UNCMockeviction to let us hear your thoughts on the mock eviction notice, and please come out to the events for UNC Israeli Apartheid Week next week!

Layla Quran ’15
Global Studies