Pratt Alumni for Justice in Palestine
A Statement of Solidarity & List of Demands

We, the undersigned Pratt Institute alumni, express our solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation. We write in support of both student (1) and faculty (2) groups working toward boycott (3), disclosure, and divestment. In alignment with those leading this struggle from within the institution's walls, we demand that Pratt Institute:

1. commit to a cultural boycott of Israel as laid out by the PACBI guidelines (4, 5),
2. disclose all investments in companies that profit from and/or support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and
3. provide a timeline for complete divestment from the above holdings.

As we bear witness to the on-going genocide in Gaza, we understand that these atrocities mark only the most recent escalation in a long campaign of ethnic cleansing and terror by the Israeli state. We understand Gaza to be an enclave of refugees, forced from their ancestral homes at the barrel of the Zionist's weapon. We understand Gaza to be an open-air prison, subject to attempted extermination by both siege and sanction. Flying in the face of all colonial intentions, we understand Gaza to be home to a resilient and steadfast people, a beacon of resistance against unrelenting aggression and oppression.

In a land acknowledgment (6) made public in November of 2021, Pratt Institute notes that the school rests atop unceded Lenape lands. The statement goes on to acknowledge the devastating effects of "genocide, theft of land and resources, forced migration, and systematic cultural oppression" on native peoples. Near its close, the document promises to "challenge the legacy of settler colonialism", a process that includes a commitment to "undo its extractive and exploitative land practices." Today, as we watch armed settlers seize land across the West Bank, settler colonialism challenges us to act against it. Today, as Israel massacres entire Gazan bloodlines, viral videos make clear the "land practices" of its colonial regime. Today, Pratt Institute has an opportunity to uphold its proclaimed commitments.

We demand that Pratt take a first step by discontinuing its exchange program with the Israeli state-funded Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In a recent blog post, the Academy wrote that their students were actively "producing new items for the IDF" (7). In a Times of Israel article from October 2023, Bezalel students were celebrated for workshops in which they produced and mended military equipment (8).  We wonder where fresh fatigues go when they leave the Bezalel campus. Are they worn by the pilot en route to drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps? When the unspecified innovations of the Academy's design studios reach the battlefield, what atrocities do they enable? How many families do they shred and discard? When Pratt Institute speaks of providing "the creative leaders of tomorrow" with "the professional knowledge and experience to make a better world", is this what they speak of? Studies derailed and redirected to engineer and outfit the terror agents of a nuclear apartheid power? As we see it, Pratt's continued engagement with Bezalel Academy serves to normalize and legitimate the genocidal Zionist project.

As alumni, we understand the credibility our work and association lend to the global standing of Pratt Institute. We refuse to support, actively or passively, an alma mater that apologizes for and collaborates with the Israeli state. As such, we pledge to withhold all donations from Pratt Institute until these demands are met in a manner deemed appropriate by students, faculty, and alumni alike. Furthermore, we encourage our fellow signees to limit their engagements with Pratt Institute — critiques, lectures, etc. — and to bring attention to Pratt's complicity in Israel's illegal occupation and genocide in Palestine.

Long live Gaza. Free Palestine.