(Friday, May 3, 2024)
Dear Notre Dame Administration (and other friends in/at Notre Dame),
I stand in solidarity with the Notre Dame students arrested this week and with all those at the encampment protest because I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
I write as a 2004 Notre Dame graduate, as a former rector (of Duncan Hall) and thus a former colleague. I also write as a veteran of the US Navy; as a former Holy Cross lay volunteer in Uganda; as someone who has visited Palestine and witnessed settler-colonial apartheid firsthand; as a current neighbor to people who have lost family members in this US-supported genocide; and as a Catholic-Christian human being who is moved both by this injustice and the Beatitudes.
That is why I am answering the call from these students to ask you, in your respective capacities, to:
Divest. Divest from all weapons manufacturers including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.
Academic Boycott. Engage in an academic boycott from Tel Aviv University and publicly commit to the University of Notre Dame Tantur to uplifting Palestinians.
Protect Protestors. Dismantle the outdated 15-minute protest rule and set new protest guidelines centered on nonviolence, safety, and freedom of expression.
The question asked by Palestine, asked by people of good conscience, asked by the ND and other student encampments across the country, asked by the Gospel is...what is to be done? What did you/we do to stop a genocide?
The students who were arrested are asking Notre Dame to take material--not just rhetorical--steps to stop this war. Palestinian civil society has been asking the rest of the world since 2005 to materially boycott and divest from apartheid Israel. Notre Dame is doing the opposite, for example with its recent expansion of the Tel Aviv University-Notre Dame collaboration grants. The boycott movement is based on the same theory of change that helped end apartheid in South Africa (a racist imperialist system that the US government, businesses, and universities materially supported until the very end, only later canonizing Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu while whitewashing the history).
Congress and the White House are deaf to our calls to stop this genocide. The weapons keep flowing. And so, we act where we have potential material leverage. Palestinians are asking us here in the imperial core, with the leverage to act, to do so. University investments, especially in our over-financialized age, are one such material target. Divest.
“Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete." (Chris Hedges)
Listen to the courageous students you are arresting. More importantly, listen to the courageous people of Palestine fighting for their lives.
Thank you for your consideration.
In solidarity, and with deep love. Ave crux, Spes unica.
Terry Fitzgibbons
p.s. some free reading if you're interested in learning more about Palestine: https://shorturl.at/aezG1
p.p.s. Why boycott, why divest:
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