<aside> đź“„ For a more shareable version of this letter, you can check out our Substack post
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We’re three full-time 2023 MBA students and Consortium Fellows at the Haas School of Business - Jude, arohi bhatt and Afraz Khan. Together, we’ve been very active in Haas student government, social justice work, and Muslim student engagement on campus. We’ve also participated in Berkeley’s annual solidarity delegations to Palestine for graduate students.
We each came to pro-Palestinian work through different paths:
We’re writing this letter to the MBA community at Haas and beyond because, before we graduate, we feel that it’s important for us to share publicly what we learned from visiting Palestine. We’re especially motivated to share this now given the upcoming 75th anniversary of the Nakba (“The Catastrophe”) this month as well as recent events: the Israeli military’s violence against Muslim Palestinian worshippers during Ramadan and Christian Palestinian worshippers during Easter, the bigoted rhetoric of Israeli ministers to “wipe out” Palestinians and a destructive pogrom carried out upon a Palestinian town.
As MBA students, our privilege and platforms must be leveraged to advance, not undermine, human rights.
See: Why is Palestine relevant to MBA students and graduates?
Thus, we encourage you to educate yourself about Palestinian history and self-determination, and urge you not to attend Israel Treks when they are offered at Haas or other business schools.
Israel Treks (”iTreks”) are offered at over 15 top business schools, and one of the primary ways that b-school students interact with the state of Israel. To learn more about the Israel Treks offered across different b school programs, we interviewed 10 MBA students who’ve attended iTreks across 3 business schools, along with 4 different pro-Palestinian organizers.
Echoing what Palestinians have been saying for nearly 8 decades, multiple mainstream human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tsalem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights have shared groundbreaking reports confirming Israel’s state and settler-led ethnic cleansing and apartheid conditions imposed on Palestinians.
Since 1917, Zionists have seized 85% of indigenous Palestinian land and claimed it for the state of Israel in a colonial project that has created a Palestinian refugee population of over 6 million people around the world, as shown in the map above.
See more: What’s the history here?
Amnesty International: “Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited by international law. Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.”
Human Rights Watch: “Israeli authorities have carried out a range of inhumane acts in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Those include sweeping restrictions on the movement of 4.7 million Palestinians there; the confiscation of much of their land… which has led thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes under conditions that amount to forcible transfer, the denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives... and the suspension of basic civil rights.
“There is no Palestinian who has not experienced visceral trauma under Israeli Occupation.” Palestinian community leader, 2023
We visited a diverse array of Palestinian communities, including “unrecognized villages,” historic Palestinian communities that have existed for over a hundred years, long before Zionists began entering the land. Despite clear records of decades of familial and ancestral ties to the land, the Palestinian villages are now deemed “illegal.”
In both recognized and unrecognized Palestinian communities, Israel manipulates and coerces Palestinians to leave their homes through daily violence on physical, civil, and psychological levels.
For Palestinians, this looks like:
The remains of what a few weeks prior had been a single family home belonging to the village’s doctor, his wife, and three children
Children toys amidst the rubble
Raining trash from the rooftops
“Campuses are supposed to be sanctuaries.”
Human rights work equated to terrorism
Israeli settlers leak sewage into a Palestinian village
“The world’s largest open-air prison”
Many top-ranked business schools offer an annual Israel Trek - Haas last offered one in 2022. When you first hear about an Israel Trek, the trips may seem like a typical business school trip: a group vacation to experience a new culture and party with peers.