Statement on the blossoming student movement in solidarity with Palestine

Malaya Movement USA stands in solidarity with the thousands of students in universities across the US who are rising up in protest against the genocide in Gaza.

On April 18, 2024, more than 100 courageous students at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University were met with fascist repression by the administration and mass arrests by the NYPD, but this only fanned the flames of fearlessness in students across the nation.

Since then, student encampments demanding divestment from genocide and Zionism have spread like wildfire to dozens of campuses including NYU, University of George Washington, UT Austin, USC, University of Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, Tufts, Emerson, The New School, Emory, Ohio State University, Princeton, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Cal Poly Humboldt, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. In just one week, the student movement has also spread internationally to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Australia. Just like the University of the Philippines’ Diliman Commune in 1971, students today understand their historical responsibility to look beyond their own issues and stand in solidarity with the urgent struggles of the world.

We stand with the students in outrage against the over 200 days of Israel’s genocidal siege in Gaza, which has now claimed the lives of at least 34,845 people including 14,500 children, with more than 8,000 still unaccounted for. Just this week, over 300 desecrated bodies were discovered in mass graves near Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, showing evidence of inhumane extrajudicial killings where the Israeli military recently conducted siege operations.

In complete disregard of these heinous Israeli war crimes and the nationwide protest movement sweeping the US, on April 24th President Biden signed into law a $95 billion foreign military aid bill, providing Israel with $26 billion in additional aid with a minimal amount going towards humanitarian assistance in Gaza. This unconscionable bill also includes an additional $500 million in military aid to the Philippines, where the Marcos Jr. regime has been ordering bombings and aerial raids on peasant and indigenous communities as well as extrajudicial killings of activists, in collaboration with the US military and using Israeli-made weapons.

We want to remind ourselves and others that these human rights violations from Columbia University, to the Philippines, to Gaza are not occurring separately from each other. We recognize that US militarism is heightening across the world, whether on US soil via police brutalizing protesters, on Philippines territory via US boots on the ground, or US control of global regions via partners in occupation like Israel. We need a mass movement to counter it, and the students are giving us that inspiration.

We utterly condemn this new military aid package, which blatantly violates the US’ own Leahy Law, which prohibits the provision of military assistance to foreign security forces that have committed gross violations of human rights. We urge Congress members to refuse complicity in these illegal acts of the Biden administration. Put action behind Biden’s empty token calls for ceasefire by immediately cutting all military aid to Israel!

Permanent ceasefire now!

Stop the genocide in Gaza!

End all US military aid to Israel and the Philippines now!

From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the US war machine!