Portland Jobs with Justice Statement of Solidarity with Student Movement for Palestine Liberation.

Portland Jobs With Justice is choosing to stand in total and complete solidarity with the Palestine liberation activists who are pushing Portland State University to divest from Israeli apartheid. As a coalition of more than 100 labor, community, faith, and student organizations, we know that there is power when we come together in unity in our demands for a better world. We are now over six months into a genocide in Gaza, where over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed with weapons and funding from the United States.

Our principles guided us to immediately join the call for a ceasefire, and to take up the demands that have come from our union siblings in the Palestinian labor movement. We have continued to support this effort to create a lasting ceasefire in Israel-Palestine and to push for an end to over seventy-five years of displacement, colonization, and ethnic cleansing, and to build a new future of equality for everyone who lives in the land.

This mission has guided our decision to enthusiastically endorse the student-led encampments happening around the country, where activists are taking up the long-held tradition of college activism as a way of highlighting the complicity many of our educational institutions have in imperialist violence. We intend to continue to support these activists as they fight to maintain an encampment at the university they pay for, and their effort to push PSU to divest from companies profiting off of Palestinian suffering.

We also want to publicly condemn the Portland Police Bureau and other law enforcement agencies who brutally dispersed the encampment and arrested activists, as well as the University President, Ann Cudd, who has ordered this violent attack on the student body. We are joining many community members, tax payers, faculty, and alumni in voicing our outrage, and will join the call for their resignation.

Ultimately, we intend to support the Palestine solidarity movement in the same way that we offer aid to all movements for social justice: we want to unite our community behind a vision for a better world. The first step today is an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the retribution being taken out on activists voicing dissent.