7 October 2026, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Durham, North Carolina
Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine (DASJP) join with members of the campus and community on 7 October 2026 to mark over 100 years of Palestinian resistance to Western and Zionist colonization and three years of Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, which has been under a U.S.-backed blockade since 2007. Zionist brutality has (again) expanded to the remainder of Palestine and Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran with multidimensional brutal warfare, occupation, and land confiscation.
We wear red to symbolize a line we draw against Zionist genocide, war crimes, and lack of accountability. We also wear red to signify continuing struggle on every front by the free peoples of the world – the global majority – for Palestinian liberation and justice and broader decolonization.
Our flameless lights illuminate the night and Israeli murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the maiming and permanent injury of at least that many, the widespread ecocide and infrastructural destruction of Gaza, the torture, rape, and murder of thousands of Palestinians held in brutal detention, and the starving of over two million people living in the world’s largest concentration camp.
This genocide is only possible with the continuing flow of billions of dollars annually from the U.S. to Israel in aid and weaponry. Every major U.S. tech company, including those whose leaders and beneficiaries were or are on the Duke University Board of Trustees, continue to profit from “cloud” and “AI” contracts for genocidal warfare that targets Palestinians of all ages in their beds, in food lines, and on the streets.
Duke ASJP is a collective of Duke academics and staff who support Palestinian liberation as Palestinians determine its contours. Our collective includes tenured and non-tenure track faculty, staff, librarians, post-docs, residents, nurses, and graduate employees, among others. We come from across Duke’s departments and schools.
We understand the struggle for Palestinian freedom to be aligned with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and struggles all over world, many of which are ongoing.
We reject the conflation of support for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism; we stand against racism in all its manifestations.
We challenge Zionist apologetics and distortions of solidarity with Palestine and Palestinian life and struggle.
We demand a permanent halt to U.S. funding, arming, and other support for the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine by government, military, corporate, and institutional bodies.
We insist that the prioritization of imperialism and war in Palestine and elsewhere in the world sustains a predatory economic and political class and system that comes at the cost of the planet’s survival and the living, thriving, and economic and social development of billions of people. Durham itself suffers from police violence, high rates of racialized imprisonment, a poverty and housing crisis, unequal schooling, indebtedness, commodified and expensive healthcare, and environmental devastation accelerated by our ruling class’s insistence on “AI” and data centers. We know the class that pays and suffers and the class that reaps the benefits and profits of war and imperialism.
In our place of work and study, Duke ASJP has documented institutional repression of resistance to the genocide and even of education and communication about Palestine. Such restrictions have come from “responsive” leaders and entrepreneurial bureaucrats who have surveilled, punished, and threatened workers and students for expression, learning, research, and political association and gathering. Administrators have canceled spaces or refused permission for independently organized discussions and panels throughout the university over the past three years and have securitized and attempted to cancel many others. The Palestine Exception is operative everywhere at Duke and has intensified since the genocide.
Duke ASJP supports the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. We are part of a national network of faculty and staff for justice in Palestine. We support and work with other groups aligned with our principles and priorities.
Since our establishment in December 2023, Duke ASJP has organized demonstrations, teach-ins, art events, fundraisers, divestment campaigns, social events, research, and public actions against genocide and for Palestinian liberation and justice. We welcome as new members Duke academics and staff aligned with our principles and willing to work on ongoing and emerging projects alongside the most friendly, principled, and dedicated people on campus in a comradely fashion that challenges how the university deliberately contains and compartmentalizes us by status, class, and geography across the campus.