To our communities from Princeton to Palestine:
We write you at the start of a new semester and after nearly a year into this horrific chapter of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, provisioned by the United States and institutions therein—including our own. Israel commits violence with renewed impunity while peddling narratives that deny reality.
Here at Princeton and beyond, students, faculty, and staff return from a summer of witnessing, reflecting, and exploring—witnessing what children look like when their bodies are charred beyond recognition; reflecting on the normalization of entire families reduced to parts and of those parts piled into plastic bags; and exploring what follows. What follows when Princeton University remains silent, even after PIAD’s meticulously researched and carefully worded proposal for divestment from this diabolism? (The ‘established channels!’) The Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) is as silent as the ‘world’s most moral army’ after promising to investigate itself. The University continues to invest in companies that enable Israeli apartheid and to produce research for the military-industrial complex. Unlike other universities, Princeton has refused to drop charges against 15 student protestors arrested in April. The United States and U.S. institutions remain deeply invested in Israeli apartheid and genocide.
The U.S. student movement that sprouted from seeds in the spring and blossomed across the globe demonstrated the power and prevalence of international solidarity with Palestine. Our Popular University encampments were acts of protest that built community, where we educated each other on connections between a free Palestine and bodily autonomy, queer liberation, a clean environment, and dignified labor conditions.
The Popular University Wire: From Princeton to Palestine continues political and cultural education work that developed at the Princeton encampment and built on student campaigns from the past two decades. Our writers and editors are Princeton students, alumni, and community members who coalesced through Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest, aligned against a persistent dearth of political and cultural education on Princeton’s campus and in the Princeton orbit at large. In doing so, we recognize ourselves as the ‘outside agitators,’ who are never truly so ‘outside.’ We aim to agitate, not as an end in itself, as bad-faith use of the term implies, but rather to agitate readers to defy and deconstruct. The political education practice of deconstruction, after all, is also a process of constructing anew. In this first drop, we feature pieces that begin to unpack the lexical front of Zionism’s violence, address local mainstream media’s anti-Palestinian biases, analyze the liberal university model’s core failings, and explore the almost inextricable entanglements between the University, the tech industry, and Israeli apartheid. In the coming weeks we will share personal narratives, long-form pieces examining spectacle and state, and other pieces both analytical and prosaic.
If these pieces move you, infuriate you, compel you—allow them to. Zionism thrives off our paralysis and desensitization. And if it is what they fail to say that compels you, then write for and with us. We welcome written and multimedia work from Princeton students, alumni, faculty, staff, and local community members. Please send pitches to puwire@gmail.com.
May we create the spaces we wish to inhabit together, from Princeton to Palestine.
In solidarity,
The Popular University Wire’s Managing Editors