WHO WE ARE

DOPE+ Palestine (D+P) is a group of scholars, researchers, teachers, learners, organizers, and activists from over 20 universities worldwide who came together through DOPE networks to foster a space to collectively organize in solidarity with Palestinian scholars for Palestinian liberation.

DOPE has long been a space that fosters community amongst scholars engaged in radical, politically committed research accountable to social movements. Frustrated by the ongoing complicity of our institutions and the complacency of many of our departmental homes, D+P formed as a space to work with scholars across institutional contexts organizing in solidarity with Palestinians.

We welcome scholars across disciplines and scholarly foci committed to Palestinian liberation by:

1. Building transnational communities of practice with Palestinian scholars who have long been marginalized in political ecology and academia-at-large and work together to materially support their research; 
2. Centering Palestinian struggle and scholarship by Palestinians in our universities, classrooms, conferences, scholarship, and syllabi;
3. Organizing against the institutional crackdown on Palestinian scholars and those working in solidarity;
4. Researching and mobilizing to end the complicity of academic institutions and organizations in Israeli settler colonialism.

OUR APPROACH

Through research, education, and in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we push for an internationalist politics articulated through the specific interventions of political ecology and settler colonialism and an unwavering academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

Why Political Ecology and Settler Colonialism? 

Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine is one manifestation of the many forms of settler colonialism around the world, which seek to dehumanize people and colonize land. The conditions of scholasticide, genocide, ecocide, and sustained settler colonial logics challenge many of the premises of critical political ecology. Recognizing that settler colonialism has always been carried out alongside ecological imperialism, we set out to foreground and uplift Palestinian resistance and scholarship that challenges the settler colonial drive to weaponize the environment and obliterate Palestinian existence.

Academic and Cultural Boycott

We recognize that Israeli academic institutions are deeply embedded in Israeli genocide, occupation, and apartheid against Palestinians. For those of us scholars situated in the US, we also recognize that the settler-colonial institutions where we work fund and collaborate directly in Israeli genocide.

Understanding that successful boycotts are targeted boycotts, and heeding the call of Palestinian civil society, all D+P organized activities adopt the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel and are committed to the broader Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, including University divestment from all investments and financial relationships that support the state of Israel.

POINTS OF UNITY

• We support Palestinian self-determination in all its forms. This includes the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli settler colonialism, which manifests through land theft, ecological and genocidal violence, and the historic and ongoing displacement of millions in historic Palestine and the diaspora from their ancestral lands. We also embrace the right of Palestinians to safely return to the land that they were violently uprooted from—historic Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. 

• We understand settler colonialism to operate through ecological imperialism across different genocidal scales and spacetimes. From the U.S. to Palestine, experiments in colonization require the discursive and material dehumanization of people and the land they cultivate. As such, settler colonialism weaponizes violences against the environment in order to displace people and deteriorate their relationship with the land. Israeli settler colonial attacks on Palestinian water wells, olive groves, and native plants are one manifestation of how settler colonialism’s drive to erase and dehumanize the Indigenous and oppressed people around the world. Answering popular struggles around the world, D+P grounds our organizing in anti-imperialism and internationalism. 

• We stand in solidarity with Palestinian farmers and communities fighting for food sovereignty while also resisting annihilation, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, farmers are conceiving of agricultural projects under heavy bombardment and destruction of livelihoods, cultural foodways, and the ongoing ecocide with toxic ramifications for future agricultural production systems. In both Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian farmers operate in a context where, through both legal and extra-legal but often state-sanction means, their livelihoods and access to land, water, seed, and other resources are intentionally limited. In addition to Israeli overuse and destruction of resources, Israeli laws, policies, and practices function to destroy access to Palestinian cultural foodways. Additionally, Israeli propaganda (“hasbara”) campaigns continue to eliminate, erase and appropriate Palestinian histories of agriculture and food production. Access to land, seed, water, and cultural foodways is crucial for agrarian livelihoods, but also to the broader Palestinian society whose identity is largely intertwined with food and agriculture.

• We stand in solidarity with Palestinian institutions of knowledge and culture – including universities, museums, town and city records centers, cultural heritage sites – as well as with the students, teachers, professors, and elders who steward histories and archives. Since October 2023, Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza and hundreds of Gazan schools, public libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and research facilities. Israel's ongoing scholasticide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank targets intellectuals and systematically murders, detains, and harasses Palestinian university students, faculty, and staff. As workers in the academy, we condemn Israeli scholasticide in all its forms and refuse to remain silent as our Palestinian colleagues are killed and institutions of higher learning destroyed. 

• We stand in solidarity with university students, faculty, and staff organizing on campuses all over the world in support of the Palestinian struggle and towards an end to their institution’s complicity in Israeli genocide and settler-colonialism. We condemn university attempts to silence these efforts and reject the erroneous and bad faith equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism so often used to justify this repression. We condemn the neoliberal university’s collaboration with the carceral state by inviting cops onto campus to brutalize students, faculty, and staff, and we wholeheartedly stand for students’ right to assemble, protest, organize and hold their institutions to account. 

GET INVOLVED

DOPE + Palestine has several ongoing projects and collaborations. We meet online at 12 EST the last Friday of every month. If you politically align with our points of unity and are interested in joining us or learning more, please email [ dopepluspal at gmail.com ] and we’ll be in touch!