20 September 2025

The surrender by the administrators of the University of California Berkeley (San Francisco) has been highlighted in a post published on this site five days ago. The response by Berkeley faculty published by Mondoweiss is reprinted below.

Berkeley faculty and staff members: We condemn the school’s surrender to Trump, and we will not be silenced on Palestine

In an open letter, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine condemn UC Berkeley’s collaboration with the Trump administration and pledge to continue speaking out about Palestine and the ongoing Nakba.

By UC Berkeley Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine  September 19, 2025  1

Free Palestine encampment on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, April 25, 2024. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Editor’s Note: The following open letter was sent to UC President James Milliken, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, and UC Berkeley General Counsel David Robinson on September 19, 2025.

As members of the UC Berkeley community, we express unequivocal solidarity with all those who have spoken out and taken action against the genocide in Gaza from the space of our university, including those counted among the 160 faculty, staff, and students whose names you recently released to the US government. We are proud to stand with these members of our community who were hired and admitted for their excellent scholarship, acumen, and service, and who now face a violation of their rights and threat to their well-being from the place of our employment and education. 

Last month, UC Berkeley responded to a request from the Office of Civil Rights, which has put the university under investigation for allegations of antisemitism, by handing over a vast amount of material from cases received by the Office of the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination; the documents would have included cases rejected out of hand because they lacked merit, cases closed with no finding of antisemitism, and open cases (where there should be an expectation of confidentiality). These 160 individuals include members of our community who know nothing of the charges against them, save that their names and personally-identifiable information was handed over to an increasingly authoritarian government. 

We add our voices to those who have rightly decried this action as an attack on free speech. We expect that these reported names, among whom are our own members, will be added to a nationwide list of advocates for justice in Palestine who will be the targets of smear campaigns, intimidation, criminalization, and deportation. 

But make no mistake: in surrendering these names, the UC administration is also closing a loop. Our colleagues’ rights have been undermined for speaking out on Israeli injustice in Palestine– a system of occupation, apartheid, and genocide in which the UC is deeply invested. The handing over of names is not only a capitulation to authoritarianism, but also a securitization of the UC’s financial interest in Israel, which we have repeatedly demanded they end through BDS. 

To protect their investment, the UC administration is furthering a campaign of conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism that seeks to make solidarity with Palestinians a federal offence. This is an ongoing campaign, in keeping with US state discourse on both sides of the aisle; UC Berkeley has been baselessly accused of being an “antisemitic” campus under both the Biden and the Trump administrations. While UC Berkeley officials may claim government overreach while they themselves are under investigation on such abstract charges, they repeat the maneuver by punishing speech on Palestine on their own campus.

We unequivocally reject the conflation—implied in so many of the cases provided as responsible for “antisemitic” incidents—of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The false equation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is intended to neutralize opposition against a criminal military power that is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people, declared as such by international human rights organizations including Amnesty International,  B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and the United Nations commission of inquiry. The script is not new to us; the repression of anti-Zionism through the “charge of antisemitism” in liberal US institutions has been in practice since the 1970s, and this intentional dismantling of the Palestine solidarity movement was announced last year by the Heritage Foundation in their incendiary “Project Esther” policy document. In spite of faculty action to preserve academic freedom and prevent the implementation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, this right-wing Christian nationalist and Zionist playbook is now enacted in the UC system, as on so many college campuses. 

In following these scripts, our institutions imperil our campus community. Consider the case of Lecturer Peyrin Kao, a member of FSJP who is among the 160 whose names were provided to the Trump administration. Kao has been on an indefinite hunger strike since August 27 to protest the genocide. As he shared recently in an interview on KPFA, “My suspicion is that [my name] was handed over because I have spoken out about Palestine, [and] I talked about Palestine to my students. … My suspicion is that [the release of names] has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with the fact that we are speaking out against one of the great crimes of our time.” 

To the Trump administration’s demands, and our university’s capitulation, we respond with our own letter of intent. We will not be silenced, and we refuse to allow members of our community to be harassed, doxxed, and deported with impunity. We will continue to speak and to teach on Palestine and on the ongoing Nakba. We commit to taking action, and will raise our voices in protest on campus and in the streets. We will not cease demanding that the University of California divest from companies with ties to Israel, just as it did so many years ago (and critically so) against South Africa’s apartheid regime. 

We are building toward Palestinian liberation, starting with the world as it is now. Having witnessed nearly two years of genocide, tens of thousands of deaths, and the horror of the destruction of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine currently underway, those who demand justice for Palestine are so numerous that we cannot all be named. Join us in this struggle.

Fiat Lux,

Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine – UC Berkeley