More than 170 University of California, Berkeley professors sign letter pushing anti-Israel sentiments; at least one professor uses his classes to promote anti-Israel viewpoints

Defending Education submitted a public records request to University of California, Berkeley seeking emails and documents from faculty who used their positions to push anti-Israel sentiments. Emails showed several faculty attacking Israel in communications to each other. Many of these comments and initiatives were started by Ussama Makdisi, who serves as a “Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley.”

On October 13, 2023, assistant adjunct professor Dzovinar Derderian invited Makdisi to a lecture. He responded: “I wanted to go to this but I’m now flying to Houston for a teach in on Gaza. We each do what we can to avert what is really genocide. Incredible. And the liberal West is so brazen about supporting Israel.” In an email dated October 15, 2023, Berkeley instructor Hatem Bazian told Makdisi: “I would like to set-up an online conversation on Streamyard to focus on the unfolding Genocide and Nakba. We can work on the questions to have maximum benefit to the audience.”

Defending Education received a letter titled “UC Berkeley Faculty Statement of Solidarity of Palestinians.” The letter explicitly attacks Israel:

We faculty members and scholars at UC Berkeley stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza facing genocidal Israeli state violence. We stand in solidarity with our fellow educators in occupied Palestine who have renewed their call for international academic institutions to stand with, and not against, the subjugated, brutalized, displaced, and terrorized Palestinian people.

The letter then added: “We refuse to remain silent as we watch a systematic genocide underway, supported by the United States government.” The signers of the letter then appear to attack other Berkeley staff: “There can be no justice for Palestinians without an end to apartheid, and there will be no end to apartheid so long as so many tacitly or openly accept, condone and justify the ongoing structural and colonial violence and discrimination against native Palestinians.”

The letter is signed by more than 170 Berkeley faculty, including Makdisi. These faculty work in a wide array of departments, including Ethnic Studies, English, History of Art, African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Education, Sociology, and Public Health.

In an email dated October 17, 2023, Makdisi explained that he was part of the group “that has worked together to write this petition to speak up against genocide in Gaza and express solidarity with the Palestinian people.” He was asking other faculty to sign onto the letter.

Defending Education received a curriculum from a history class for spring 2024 that Ussama Makdisi taught. The class attacked the idea of “Zionism” and promoted that the area is stolen territory: “We have read, of course, the Russian Zionist Vladimir (later Ze’ev) Jabotinsky describing and admitting how Zionism in Palestine constituted to the natives a coercive colonization that required the crushing of Palestinian hopes which he acknowledged were native hopes.”

One assignment for students stated: “Every project must engage with the course readings and primary documents and must include specific engagement with Mitri Rehab’s Decolonizing Palestine.” The curriculum also discussed an “ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” despite a country called “Palestine” never existing. The curriculum has over 700 pages of content.

The curriculum can be accessed at this link.

Defending Education also received a history curriculum from a fall 2023 class that Makdisi taught. One note in the curriculum appears to show that he canceled a class to attend a teach-in event about “Palestine”:

To be clear, the event does not replace the seminar and there is no expectation that you attend. However, because of the relevance to some of the themes that we have covered in the seminar, we wanted you to have the information.

This curriculum is nearly 1,000 pages and can be accessed at this link.