We are currently halfway through the last 10 nights of Ramadan, a spiritually significant time for Muslims across the world. These last ten nights are a time of increased spiritual devotion, when worshippers can focus on prayer and almsgiving. This Ramadan, many Muslims continue to gather in the late hours of the night; shoulder-to-shoulder, not just in prayer, but also in crowded evacuation shelters; in community, but also in grief; worship disrupted by explosions, airstrikes and bombs — bombs dropped and funded by our government.
In the holy month of Ramadan, we have seen U.S.-Israeli aggression in Southwest Asia intensify with the bombing of Iran, air strikes across Lebanon and the exacerbation of continuous genocidal violence in Palestine. Recently, U.S.-Israeli bombs hit oil depots in Tehran, causing massive fires and toxic black rain to fall upon civilians. This news follows reports of the U.S.-Israeli bombing of a girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 160 people. In Lebanon, Israel has aggressively bombed Beirut, killing over 600 and displacing more than 800,000 people from their homes. In Gaza, the death toll from Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people has surpassed 75,000 people.
Each person, each individual killed by U.S.-Israeli bombs, is an entire universe. They are someone’s entire life. Each child murdered by these bombs, like three-year-old Reem, who was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah in November 2023, is someone’s soul destroyed. Mikael Mirdoraghi, a third-grader killed by the recent missile attack on the school in Minab, was the soul of his mother’s soul.
Our government, alongside Israel, continues to act with impunity and total contempt for these lives in the Global South. They continue to perpetrate genocide and expand violence for their empire-building conquests. And UC Berkeley is not innocent. Our institution is complicit in this violence, from campus’s connections to the war industry to UC Berkeley School of Law’s tangible support for the zionist settler-colonial entity via its association with the Helen Diller Institute.
We should be disgusted. Instead, for those with institutional power, it is business as usual.
Last week, on March 11, UC Berkeley’s Edley Center on Law & Democracy held a talk at the law school on “The Presidential War Power: Venezuela, Iran and Beyond.” During this talk, while U.S. bombs continued to tally up casualties in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and professor Elena Chachko spoke of “checks and balances” and international law implications of the U.S.’s current war. Notably, in response to a question about the killing of schoolchildren in Minab, Chachko, a former intelligence agent for the Israeli military, prefaced her answer by stating that International Humanitarian Law does not prohibit killing in war and that there will be casualties in war — that it is difficult to say more about “specific incidents” without knowing the facts (Human Rights Watch, however, had no problem in calling to investigate the attack on Minab as a war crime).
Chemerinsky concluded his part of the panel by giving a feel-good speech about the power that we, the people, have in advocating against unjust and unconstitutional wars. Boldly, Chemerinsky brought up the important role college campuses played in movements against the Vietnam War — an ironic statement, given his own role in repressing and condemning pro-Palestine activism calling for an end to genocide. When courageous lecturers on college campuses have taken a stand against injustice, such as Peyrin Kao, a computer science lecturer who went on a 38-day hunger strike to bring attention to the complicity of tech companies and educational institutions in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Chemerinsky condemned Kao’s action as a “misuse of his classroom,” arguing that the Kao deserved to be suspended for his “diatribe.”
The hypocrisy coming out of our institutions is not just baffling — it is infuriating. As bombs continue to drop and people continue to be killed and genocided in our name, it is time for us to move beyond empty words that are meaningless, unaccompanied by acts of true solidarity. Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine calls upon community members and fellow students to join us in a one-day solidarity fast Tuesday from dawn to dusk.
Why are we fasting? Ramadan, a sacred Islamic month, is rooted in steadfastness and conviction, struggling in the path of belief and justice and rejecting excess. During Ramadan, the Zionist entity has historically intensified its aggression, violence and occupation against Palestinian worshippers. This year, in Al-Quds (Jerusalem), Israel has closed Masjid Al-Aqsa, preventing Palestinian worshippers from praying during the last 10 nights of Ramadan. Nevertheless, the Palestinian people persist — they hold onto their beliefs and continue to struggle against occupation, reflecting the true essence of Ramadan.
Inspired by their steadfastness, we fast to highlight these demands: End “Israel Studies” programs such as the Summer Global Internship Program in Israel in the Helen Diller Institute, which materially enable and benefit from occupation, divest from the war industry and entities complicit in genocide and discontinue the shipment of military cargo to Israel from Oakland airport.
While we recognize that a solidarity fast is largely symbolic, it is a way to refuse silence and mark our collective grief and outrage. But symbolism alone is not enough. Alongside this act of solidarity, we urge members of the Berkeley community to critically examine their own positionality, power and responsibility to challenge the institutions that make this violence possible and to take tangible action toward ending complicity in genocide. In the essence of Ramadan, we ask community members to redirect funds they may have spent on food or have otherwise on mutual aid efforts to provide relief in Palestine.
We must do everything we can to end this complicity in genocide and war. We demand UC divestment, an Oakland people’s arms embargo and an end to “academic washing” occupation and genocide.