Over 100 scholars, teachers, and researchers of Bangladesh demand US push for ceasefire in Gaza

Scholars and researchers in Bangladesh condemned the US government's continued support for Israel's genocidal war.

"We see through their attempts at gaslighting the world about Israel's actions; we take note of their double standards on democracy and human rights; and we denounce their crackdown on academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly on university campuses," reads a press release signed by Nagesh Rao, associate professor at the Department of English and Modern Languages, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB) and Samina Luthfa, associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka.

"We, scholars and researchers in Bangladesh, demand that the US back a full and permanent ceasefire, stop funding and arming Israel, and put a stop to this genocide," adds the release which mentions 126 names of signatories.

The signatories commended the students of Columbia University, US, who stand in solidarity with the global student movement for Palestine, and demand an immediate end to the persecution of students and faculty protesters.

"We call on all universities and institutions of higher education here in Bangladesh and the rest of the subcontinent to sign on to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel," they said in the press release.

The statement also reads, Israel has embarked on the final phase of its genocidal war in Gaza, bombing Rafah where more than a million Palestinians have been driven by repeated evacuations from the rest of the Gaza Strip. Today, they have nowhere left to go. 

Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the occupier in seven months, most of whom are women and children. Hundreds of thousands more are injured. More than a million people have lost their homes, and the infrastructure of life has been obliterated by the occupation's indiscriminate bombing.

"Netanyahu's policy of forced starvation has created a famine in Gaza. International organizations are unable to carry out adequate relief operations in the face of Israeli bombings and Zionist mobs preventing the entry of aid trucks. Genocidal actions are being carried out in the West Bank as well. Entire villages have been literally burned down by Zionist settlers backed by soldiers, bulldozers, and tanks," reads the release.

The people of Gaza are being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homelands. Yet again. Driven out by the ethnic cleansing that we know as the Nakba of 1948, today the children of those refugees, their children and their children's children, are being subjected to a vicious and brutal genocidal campaign.

The Nakba never ended, and the occupation's violence has been relentless in the 75 years since; and yet Israel has somehow managed to craft an image of democracy and rights while maintaining a brutal apartheid system. Today, as the apartheid state reaches its nadir, its inevitable ignominious fate as a pariah state, its actions are being live streamed onto people's devices.

One of the many heinous war crimes committed by the occupation forces is the crime of scholasticide—the systematic destruction of education infrastructure and personnel. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed by the occupation forces, their libraries, their research, their archives, all reduced to rubble with impunity; 80 percent of Gaza's schools have been destroyed or damaged; Gaza's Central Archives, housing 150 years of history, have been obliterated. Thousands of students have been murdered, along with teachers, university professors, poets, and artists. Alongside this scholasticide is the systematic decimation of more than 190 heritage sites, 227 mosques, and 3 churches.

This genocidal campaign continues only because the Zionist state receives arms, funding, and diplomatic cover from a handful of Western governments, the United States and Germany in particular.

In the face of a plethora of evidence of war crimes and plausible genocide as per the ICJ ruling, US spokespersons continue to deny any knowledge of war crimes being committed.

Instead of taking immediate steps to stop the war, the US government has taken steps towards criminalising any criticism of Israel. Hundreds of students and faculty have been arrested for speaking out against genocide, many have been brutally assaulted, in flagrant and despicable violation of academic freedom, and freedom of speech and assembly.