April 2, 2024
CUPE 3902 has a long history of support for a peaceful resolution to the state of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In 2015, our membership overwhelmingly voted in favour of answering the global call to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) campaign against the state of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Our local’s BDS campaign asked our members to boycott Israeli commercial products and companies that actively support the violation of human rights and recommended that the University of Toronto, as well as CUPE 3902 members, withdraw their participation from partnerships with Israeli universities that actively support the violation of Palestinian human rights. We firmly believe that boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning is a peaceful way to exert pressure on the Israeli state to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
Thus, we rise in solidarity with the U of T Occupy for Palestine collective’s occupation of Simcoe Hall. This occupation is an effort to hold U of T accountable for the role it plays in the state of Israel’s persistent violations of international law and the ongoing violence taking place in Palestine. This action comes after years of student, contract-educator, worker, and faculty efforts for the University administration to divest its endowment away from companies that provide armaments and military services to the state of Israel.
We support U of T Occupy for Palestine’s calls for U of T to (1) terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or sustain the occupation and illegal settlement of Palestine and (2) publicly disclose all university investments, including names of holdings and portfolio shares.
We ask the U of T administration to meet the university’s mission of “fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity, and justice.” We look forward to the university administrators’ response with timeliness and respect to these demands.
In solidarity,
CUPE 3902 Executive Committee