Our Vision

We, a collective at the University of Minnesota (UMN), are responding to the call by the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) to form the FLAGS JP group. In solidarity with local and transnational movements that stand with the people of Palestine, we envision Palestinian liberation from 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism, the ending of Israeli apartheid and illegal occupation, and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees. FLAGS JP sees the path to a Free Palestine as intimately and inextricably linked to a Free Turtle Island. The rights and privileges of settlers in the US are contingent upon multiple, overlapping dispossessions of land, life, and labor from Indigenous peoples and Black peoples—this is an irreparable harm (TRUTH Report 2023). It is in recognition of our collective responsibility to unlearn relations of harm and in response to calls from Indigenous peoples in Palestine, in the United States, in Minnesota, and on our campuses that we, the members of FLAGS JP, demand the University of Minnesota, and with it the State, divests from the apartheid state of Israel in this present hour of genocide. 

Our Mission

We are committed to the University of Minnesota’s strategic and total divestment from the apartheid state of Israel. We support and protect the student-led Divest UMN coalition and its member organizations (SJP, SDS, YDSA, Climate Justice) and members of the broader University of Minnesota community and system who support Palestinian liberation, in solidarity with broader community-based coalitions for Palestinian liberation. We adhere to the founding principles of USACBI and will collaborate closely with colleagues at other University of Minnesota campuses and others who respond to USACBI’s call to form FJP chapters nationally to engage in Palestine solidarity work.Given the scale and intensity of Israel’s continual bombardment of Palestine, the famine it has manufactured in Gaza, and the growing number of lives and limbs lost to the U.S.-backed genocide, we demand the Board of Regents divest from the Israeli settler occupation. The University of Minnesota is the people’s university; and we, the people, demand divestment from Israel and justice for Palestine.  

Our Principles

FLAGS JP is a collective of faculty, staff, graduate students, librarians, and alumni who support Palestinian liberation from imperialism, settler colonialism, racism, and military and police violence. Specifically, we respond to the call for an end to the illegal Israeli state’s apartheid and dismantling the wall; equal human, civil, and political rights  for Palestinians in Israel; the end of occupation in Gaza and the West Bank; freedom of movement for all Palestinians; economic justice; self-determination; reparation; and Palestinian refugees’ right of return. We support Palestinian civil society’s call for the boycott, divestment, and sanctioning of Israel and insist on an immediate and permanent end to genocidal acts, including scholasticide; a permanent ceasefire; and the permanent  end of the Israeli assault on Palestinian land and life.

FLAGS JP’s call for Palestinian freedom is inextricably linked to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist movements and struggles in the Twin Cities and other parts of the world. Locally, we stand in solidarity with the Dakota and Anishinaabe people and their demands for land back and reparation and Black liberation movements in their call for ending anti-Blackness, abolition of the prison industrial complex, and reparation. We join in the collective work toward justice and liberation for communities marginalized by interlocking subjectivities to unequal relations of power–race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, class, religion, caste, and citizenship–connected to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Transnationally, we stand with movements for social, economic, and political justice where any form of political organization might deploy fascist strategies to subjugate billions of people and suppress all possible resistance.. We recognize that our naming these movements and struggles is necessarily imperfect and incomplete. If and when members identify ways that we can more effectively align our political commitments with demands for justice, repair, and liberation, we encourage them to name them and work with us to realign our mission. 

FLAGS JP demands that the University of Minnesota divest from companies that support developing, manufacturing, and trading weapons, military strategy, and other resources that facilitate occupation in Palestine. We are committed to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, including the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions until they recognize the rights of the Palestinian people to freedom, and until they end their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law (www.pacbi.org). 

FLAGS JP celebrates and defends an academy free from institutional discipline and restraint, including in the classroom and community; in scholarship and research; in undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate labor; in administrative responsibilities; and in promotion and tenure processes. We also stand firmly in support of political action that upholds and defends academic freedom, including speaking and writing on matters of public concern, as well as rallies and protests.

FLAGS JP will build regional, national, and cross-campus coalitions with other universities and will coordinate its activities with the national FJP network. FLAGS JP supports and defends the student-led Divest UMN Coalition (comprising member organizations SJP, SDS, YDSA, and Students for Climate Justice) and other pro-Palestine student movements at UMN, as well as the work of the Jewish Voice for Peace-Twin Cities Chapter and the Free Palestine Coalition

FLAGS JP is committed to protecting those among us who are more vulnerable because of systemic inequities  in race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, immigration status, dis/ability, entanglement with carceral systems, class, religion, creed, caste, and employment rank. We refuse to recognize hate, particularly where it manifests structurally, as a legitimate moral, ethical, or political creed.