Drop All Charges Against the CUNY 22!
NYC Labor for Palestine, June 11, 2024
NYC Labor for Palestine stands in solidarity with the CUNY 22—the 22 students, faculty, staff and community members currently facing felony charges after their arrest at the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CCNY—and demand that all charges against them be dropped.
On the night of April 30, the NYPD violently and brutally arrested hundreds of people at CUNY and Columbia who were protesting Israeli genocide, demanding that our institutions divest and calling for a free Palestine. At City College, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment made five demands, including reinstatement of workers fired for speaking out in solidarity with Palestine, CUNY demilitarization and “cops off campus,” as well as a free and fully funded People’s CUNY. The CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment also made the connection between a free and liberated CUNY, and the rights of CUNY workers to a fair contract.
NYC Labor for Palestine strongly condemns this attack on the CUNY community and demands that all charges be dropped. Our endorsement of the Palestinian trade union call for global labor to end the genocide in Gaza means that we must do all we can to go beyond words, to divest our institutions from settler colonial violence and disposession.
We believe that the Student Intifada and Encampments organized in solidarity with Palestinian liberation play an important role in propelling the labor movement to be more militant and to join in the struggle to end the genocide in Gaza. We support them for this reason and because we recognize the most basic labor principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.
We know that the attack on the CUNY 22 is designed to have a chilling effect on the protest movement in New York and across the country. We stand with the CUNY 22 because CUNY is the People’s University, serving New York City’s working class, Black and Brown communities. The attack on the CUNY 22 is an attack on NYC’s working class. And we stand with the CUNY 22 because we believe that labor must stand up to end this brutal genocide and for Palestine liberation.
We call on all of NYC labor to pack the courts on 6/12, 6/17 and 6/18 and join us in calling on CUNY’s Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez to drop the charges and refuse to participate in the prosecution of protestors!
Solidarity forever!
