Claremont faculty and staff rally against Gaza scholasticide outside library, condemn Pomona’s repression of student organizing

On Dec. 3, Faculty for Justice in Palestine hosted a “rally against scholasticide in Gaza” on the south lawn of Honnold Mudd library. Speakers representing Staff for Justice in Palestine and the Intercollegiate Ethnic Studies departments condemned Pomona’s illegal suspension of 12 students, and criticized a recent Pomona Board of Trustee email reiterating the board’s refusal to divest from the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 48 people attended the rally, mostly faculty and staff from across the Claremont Colleges.

In a press advisory handed to student reporters at the rally, FJP wrote that the rally was meant to “mourn the losses of scholars and students killed in the ongoing war in Gaza and Lebanon waged by the state of Israel with the support of the US State Department,” noting that the Zionoist bombardment destroyed every major university in Gaza within the first 100 days.

At the rally, two faculty members read the names of 33 Palestinian academics who have been killed by the Zionist entity since Oct. 2023, as well as poetry from Palestinian poets.

Pomona Religious Studies professor Erin Runions read excerpts from the Pomona Board of Trustee’s Dec. 3 email to the school, in which they restated their refusal to divest from the Zionist occupation, to the crowd, eliciting boos — as well as laughs at Runions’ “translations.”

“Memo: Our educational mission requires us to help students analyze and understand the complex histories and cultures around the world. It is not our role as an institution to take sides or intervene. Translation: education should not translate to real world experience, it is observational only,” Runions said.

Professors from the Intercollegiate Departments of Asian American studies, Chicano/a and Latino/a studies, and Africana studies read a joint statement calling for the immediate reinstatement of suspended and banned students. 

“Our very departments and fields of study exist because of civil disobedience and student-led protests challenging a higher education status quo that violently disenfranchised most of the world by intellectually excluding and devaluing the knowledge and experiences of people of color,” Scripps Chicanx/Latinx Studies professor Rita Cano Alcalà said. “We stand in solidarity with our students as they call upon all of us to center our conscience and ethics as educations and engaged citizens in response to the ongoing, expending Palestinian genocide and land grabbing imperialism of Israeli forces undergirded by military aid from our own United States.” 

A speaker representing 7C Staff for Justice in Palestine spoke out against Pomona’s pitting of student protesters against Claremont staff, calling for solidarity in condemning Pomona’s refusal to divest from genocide as the root problem.

“The work left for staff to clean up and restore the building [after the Carnegie Hall takeover on Oct. 7, 2024] was a byproduct of an administration whose only response to calls for divestment has been to ignore or punish its students,” a staff member, who asked to stay anonymous for safety concerns, said. “The solidarity between socially committed students and 7c staff runs deeper than the single incident of a building’s defacement.”

Around 12:15 p.m., two campus security officers appeared to be monitoring the rally from the fourth floor of the nearby Kravis Center building. The officers left the roof about 10 minutes later.