in 🍉 solidarity: calling on our industry
in Palestinian solidarity (2023) + signatures // open letter (2020) + signatures
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To our friends, colleagues, teachers, and leaders within the architecture, planning and design industry in “Canada”,
We, a collective of students and architecture workers, call on our community to take accountability for its role in Palestinian oppression, both at home and abroad. We urge you to join us in mobilizing our shared resources, skills, and knowledge for justice in Palestine.
[RECOGNIZE]
As the settler colonial state of Israel continues to indiscriminately exact mass devastation upon Palestinians, we set aside our grief and anguish to seek necessary change from within our ranks. We recognize that our industry continues to play a pivotal role in Israel’s operation to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their ancestral lands and has thus enabled the oppressive force’s horrific actions over the last month. For 75 years, architecture has been employed as a weapon by the Israeli apartheid regime. An architecture of oppression aims to surveil, control, segregate, and displace —ultimately expelling Palestinians or condemning them to an undignified death as second-class citizens in an apartheid state. Moreover, we recognize that Canadian architects, academic institutions, and governing bodies fund, endorse, and benefit from Israeli development at the expense of Palestinian livelihoods. As students, designers, and architectural workers, it is our moral duty to recognize that our profession has been co-opted to violate international law and the legal rights of the Palestinian people. Evidently, architecture, planning, and design are tools which can be used to destroy and occupy, but we believe they can also be used to liberate if we have the courage to do so.
[CONTEXTUALIZE]
The present situation is impossible to ignore. Over the past month, we have witnessed —and continue to witness— large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza carried out by the Israeli state which shamelessly circumvents international law. We are watching as carpet bombing operations erase neighbourhoods and entire families from existence. We are watching as Israeli missiles are rained on civilian homes, cultural institutions, churches, mosques, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Neither first responders, journalists in press vests, nor children are spared. From limiting humanitarian aid to disabling communications within Gaza and to the outside world, the Israeli occupation seeks to perform a genocide away from the public eye. But we are watching.
In the “West Bank”, the ongoing expansion of illegal settlements strategically fragments the Palestinian landscape, cutting through neighbourhoods and separating people from their families and the lands from which they have sustained themselves for generations. We are watching as soldiers and settlers intimidate, punish, and murder civilians to raid their homes. In the Naqab, we are watching as Bedouin villages are crushed by bulldozers, forcibly displacing the inhabitants. In Jerusalem, we are watching as state-sponsored apartheid planning policies operate to expel the remaining Palestinian residents from the city.
Today’s events and the horrors of the past month do not occur in a vacuum. We are critical thinkers, trained to consider the many systems that simultaneously act on a place. Thus we cannot selectively omit the context of 75 years of brutal military occupation that has been designed to expel and erase the Palestinian people. In the last two decades alone, Israel has held Palestinians in Gaza under siege, within the confines of an open-air concentration camp, enclosed by concrete walls and gun towers. This blockade on the Gaza Strip subjects Palestinians to brutal massacres, depriving them of basic services (food, clean water, and health care), and denying them the opportunity to rebuild what has been destroyed. Evidently, the events we have observed over the last month are only the most recent horrors in Israel’s long history of brutal occupation. It is thus vital that the fight for Palestinian justice today, and in the future, centers on a truthful, fair, and comprehensive understanding of the Palestinian experience. This is the only path to a sustainable and appropriate solution.
[OUR STANCE]
As a BIPOC-led collective committed to protecting everyone’s right to a dignified and safe life, we refuse to be silent or complicit as we watch millions of innocent people being systematically dispossessed and displaced. At the time of writing this, over 10,328 have been murdered within the last month —a number which grows every day at an alarming rate1. We hear and amplify the calls for action emanating from the Palestinian people and their allies around the world in their fight for freedom. Through their grief and anger, we join all civilians who have been wronged by imperialist and fascist nations and stand alongside them in their struggle against apartheid, colonization, and state oppression. We stand confidently with the knowledge that the fight against white supremacy, colonialism, and anti-semitism is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
From Turtle Island to Palestine, settler colonial spatial practices and apartheid policies impact our built environment and our communities in more ways than we know. Behind every oppressive regime and apartheid are those who design and build its physical parameters. As students and workers of architecture, planning, and design based in Western countries run by imperialist and fascist states, we were founded on the commitment to advancing decolonization and racial-socio-economic justice through anti-racist and design justice principles. That has not changed.
[OUR INDUSTRY]
In the past few years, an intense shift has swept through the architectural and design industry. A global acknowledgement of our complicity in white supremacy, settler colonialism, and incarceration has resulted in calls for anti-racism and decolonization, with an emphasis on indigenous rights. We witnessed coordinated efforts by students, architecture workers, planners, and designers across the world calling for a change in pedagogy, content delivered in studios and lecture series, and hiring practices with an aim to center anti-racism, inclusivity, and social justice. Our industry, especially academia, must demonstrate continuous learning and adapt to the world around it if it seeks to have any impact beyond the classroom.
It is clear that the oppressive and racist tactics used against Palestinians echo those used by Western states against their BIPOC communities. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand and acknowledge that the Palestinian struggle is not separate from the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and the Land Back movement, or the reparations for Black communities within the diaspora. In their ongoing struggles for liberation, Palestinians continuously remind the world that decolonization is not a theory. Rather, it is their daily reality. Palestinians resist not only the forces that seek to exterminate them but also a greater power structure, of which we are a part, that demands submission from the oppressed. As allies, we must hold our industry accountable for their performative and selective activism, cherry-picking between oppressed peoples to suit their agenda.
We are disappointed by the response and lack of action from the Canadian government, elected representatives, our institutions, and our industry who—time after time—voice their overwhelming support for apartheid Israel, fund military violence with our tax and tuition money, and justify the ongoing siege of Gaza and the “West Bank”. Given the settler-colonial foundations of the country we currently know as “Canada” —which continues to exploit and steal Indigenous land and lives— we are not surprised. Submissive neutrality, however, from our own industry and academic leaders who claim to push boundaries whilst maintaining a deadly status quo, is hypocritical and unacceptable. Silence, while Palestinian allies are publicly demonized, contributes to an atmosphere of increased racism, policing, intimidation, and fear for Palestinians and their supporters in our community.
We are further disappointed by the lack of critical discourse within our academic and professional spheres dedicated to dispelling the alarming amount of misinformation surrounding the Israeli apartheid. Despite an abundance of reputable evidence and educative resources —especially ones pertaining to our industry’s complicity in Palestinian suffering— our leaders and educators continue to misdirect and seek to silence rather than teach. Architecture cannot retreat from context. When misinformation and obfuscation play a pivotal role in silencing Palestinian voices, willful ignorance is complicity. Palestinian members of our communities and their allies have long been silenced; to continue on this path in their time of dire need is to deem them and their contributions as second-class and the Palestinian people as unworthy of justice.
[OUR CALL]
We encourage and call on members of our community to recognize that these injustices, both here and elsewhere, are not theoretical, abstract, historical, or foreign. We must acknowledge that our profession continues to be used for violent and forcible dispossession, expulsion, and dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. We must act to correct these facts.
As a highly militarized colonial power, the Israeli state's architecture of apartheid methodically succeeds in its continuous illegal occupation of Palestinian land through the following2:
- The state-sanctioned execution of Palestinian people
- The deliberate maiming of Palestinian bodies
- The collective punishment of the Palestinian people
- The violent displacement and forced removal of Palestinian people from their homes
- The punitive destruction and demolition of Palestinian homes
- The fragmentation of the Palestinian territories
- The expansion of Israeli settlements against international law
- The denial of access to healthcare and education services
- The design of discriminatory planning and permit policies
- The racial segregation of roads and infrastructure
- The siege, imposing crippling blockades on Gaza to destroy and massacre Palestinian people
- The restrictions on movement throughout the “West Bank” and occupied territories
[ACTIONS TO TAKE]
As designers, we oppose the apartheid policies of the Israeli settler colonial state. We commit to amplifying the voices, stories, and histories of Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation. We ask all members of our community —including those who align themselves with Stop Cop City movement, the Land Back movement, and the Design Justice demands (developed by Design as Protest Collective)— to join us through the following:
1
Mobilize your network —academic, professional, and personal— to demand that their representatives call for an immediate ceasefire, the lifting of the siege on Gaza to allow for immediate humanitarian aid, and an end to the arms trade with Israel.
We demand the support of our industry leaders on such urgent requests.
We demand the support of our industry leaders on such urgent requests. Moreover, action must not stop here but should also include a permanent end to the apartheid state, and so-called Canada's complicity in Israel's war crimes and occupation of Palestinian land.
We demand the support of our industry leaders on such urgent requests. Moreover, action must not stop here but should also include a permanent end to the apartheid state, and so-called Canada's complicity in Israel's war crimes and occupation of Palestinian land.
2
Deny any participation in the research, design, and construction of the Israeli settler colonial project, which includes initiatives that promote hostile architecture and military-centred spaces.
We call on our institutions and industry leaders to refuse any engagement in partnership with entities that enact or implement Israel’s apartheid policies. This includes projects that benefit from the dispossession of Palestinians.
We call on our institutions and industry leaders to refuse any engagement in partnership with entities that enact or implement Israel’s apartheid policies. This includes projects that benefit from the dispossession of Palestinians.
3
Advance the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
We urge our institutions and organizations to boycott (withdraw support from Israel's apartheid regime and all entities engaged in violating the human rights of the Palestinians), divest (withdraw investments from all entities that sustain Israeli apartheid), and sanction (pressure governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid and not aid or assist its maintenance). Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the BDS call challenges international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism —ultimately pressuring Israel to comply with International law. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
We urge our institutions and organizations to boycott (withdraw support from Israel's apartheid regime and all entities engaged in violating the human rights of the Palestinians), divest (withdraw investments from all entities that sustain Israeli apartheid), and sanction (pressure governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid and not aid or assist its maintenance). Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the BDS call challenges international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism —ultimately pressuring Israel to comply with International law. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
4
Hold accountable those who undermine academic freedom within our institutions and industry by silencing, threatening, or bullying students, staff, and faculty who speak up against Israeli State violence.
We oppose the dismissal of Palestine advocates—an action that protects relationships between our institutions and enactors of the Israeli apartheid.
We oppose the dismissal of Palestine advocates—an action that protects relationships between our institutions and enactors of the Israeli apartheid.
5
Educate and engage in continuous learning about architecture, design, and planning's complicity in settler colonialism and apartheid.
We demand that institutions and organizations stop deliberately excluding discourse about the Palestinian struggle from relevant existing curricula. We demand that our institutions critically review the validity of resources that further the Israeli settler colonial operation. Finally, we demand that our educational curricula expand to include education about Palestine that centers on Palestinian voices, experiences, and scholarship.
We demand that institutions and organizations stop deliberately excluding discourse about the Palestinian struggle from relevant existing curricula. We demand that our institutions critically review the validity of resources that further the Israeli settler colonial operation. Finally, we demand that our educational curricula expand to include education about Palestine that centers on Palestinian voices, experiences, and scholarship.
6
Collaborate and build coalitions with BIPOC-led organizations focused on advancing abolitionist and decolonial struggles.
We demand institutions and organizations to actively pursue long-lasting connections with local communities and grassroots entities that will promote equity, diversity, and inclusion within our academic and professional spaces.
We demand institutions and organizations to actively pursue long-lasting connections with local communities and grassroots entities that will promote equity, diversity, and inclusion within our academic and professional spaces.
7
Commit to non-stop learning to deepen our understanding of abolition, the Land Back movement, Indigenous sovereignty, and what that means for our work as designers and our approach to architecture.
Along with standing in solidarity with Palestinians, our leaders must also reflect on what Land Back and decolonization could look like in our respective communities, which includes our architecture schools and industry. It is imperative that we investigate what each of our roles are in fighting back against imperialism, fascism, and white supremacist power structures across Turtle Island and Inuit Nunangat.
Along with standing in solidarity with Palestinians, our leaders must also reflect on what Land Back and decolonization could look like in our respective communities, which includes our architecture schools and industry. It is imperative that we investigate what each of our roles are in fighting back against imperialism, fascism, and white supremacist power structures across Turtle Island and Inuit Nunangat.
Have courage. We know that to stand with Palestinians is to stand against settler colonialism and white supremacy in all of its forms. To stand with Palestinians is to stand against so-called Canada’s role in global imperialism. To stand with Palestinians is to stand for the liberation of all Indigenous peoples. Apartheid is a threat to all, and none of us are free until all of us are free.
[RESOURCES]
We acknowledge that discussions regarding existing power structures are often obscured to protect colonial systems of oppression. Now more than ever, it is of utmost importance that we are critical of the information provided to us, historically and at this moment. We must keep questioning. We encourage members of our community to explore this collectively compiled and actively growing resource index. We begin with educating ourselves.
Authored by:
Anti-Racism Call (DAS - ARC), a collective of BIPOC students and alumni from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science, formed to call on our institutions, industry, and profession for actionable change.
Toronto Metropolitan University is located in Tkaronto (“where there are trees standing in the water”) on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Despite the fact that Tkaronto is currently home to many of Turtle Island’s indigenous people, our built environment often fails to reflect this reality.
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