Committed to unlearning the war against life that the colonial, modern, anthropocentric, capitalist, and hetero-patriarchal paradigm continuously produces – the Ecoversities Alliance is called to respond to the horrors of the present moment from and within the different voices that constitute our network. With hearts full of sorrow, we send our thoughts to all experiencing death, unbearable rage, pain, and loss.   

Across our different regions, with our different means and capacities, we are committed to organizing, supporting, listening, opening spaces for grieving, and understanding what it means to be in solidarity and part of a wider community. 

We unanimously condemn the military apparatuses making life unbearable and murdering innocent people. We demand an immediate ceasefire of the war in Palestine; an end to the inhuman bombing, and the siege and blockade of Gaza; an end to the Israeli apartheid regime; we demand that the hostages in captivity return home safely; and that those who have committed crimes, on all sides, are held accountable. 

During the past 75 years, Israel has existed as an ethno-fascist settler colonial state, establishing an apartheid regime while silencing the internal opposition among its own population. This genocidal regime and ongoing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian is sowing pain, rage, and indignation in the hearts of thousands of displaced, imprisoned, murdered, and mistreated people every day. The ongoing spiral of violence and hatred, reproducing itself and generating violent and cruel responses, must be terminated; the historical amnesia, the impunity, the false narratives, the instrumentalisation of faiths, and propagandist revisions – need to be uprooted.

We are witnessing the revival of an infamous strategy based on the criminalization of an entire population –  terror and fear being spread again worldwide. While we believe that people suffering occupation and oppression have a right to resistance, we doubt that intentional brutality against women, children, and elders, will serve their cause and we condemn the killing committed by Hamas against innocent civilians. We recognize the pain of those who are mourning right now, and we set intentions for those who have been kidnapped to safely return to their beloved ones. 

We acknowledge the wound of historical trauma opened in the Jewish community, and refuse how governments are instrumentalizing it to legitimize or discount the current violence in Gaza. We call out the many Western governments, financing and supporting the Israeli army and politics – their extractive economy thriving through the military industrial complex. In the midst of multiple economic, ecological, and social crises, there always seems to be money for war!

Together with the decolonization of territories, as Ecoversities we stand for and work towards the decolonization of minds and hearts, to heal from fear, terror, hatred, propaganda and revenge that are conquering the spirit, affecting our human capacities to be human and recognize a human in others.

We ask, how can we reinforce a planetarian alliance to counter the intensification of war, in this and other regions; the militarization of life everywhere; the exacerbation of border regimes; and the agenda of imperialistic powers violently imposing their world order over people and land? 

How do we refuse the false, simplistic, binary narratives of good and evil, interrupt the invention of enemies, violence as a principle, impunity as the norm, the manipulation of fixed identities, and recognize ourselves as implicated and responsible for each other’s lives and alivelihoods?

How can we unlearn war and learn peace, practicing non violence, supporting a dialogue? 

From the multiversal horizon in which we place ourselves – with, within, and beyond the differences of our positions, histories, geographies, wounds, privileges, and irremediable debts and trauma- we affirm the sacredness of life and we insist on walking through (im)possibilities, opening cracks in the systems that dominate us, revoking, striking, unlearning, exiting them. 

We insist on recognizing the multiple connections that, like a mycelial tissue, account for the intersection of all life, beyond the false promises of the nation-states and their borders, and beyond Empire. 

As part of a community that is larger than the human one, together with the olive trees, the seas, the winds, the bacteria, the guardian spirits, the ancestors, and the stars, we need to not look the other way, to stay present, to re-member, invite our radical love, embrace our own pain with that of others, and keep weaving together, prefiguring possibilities of respectful and dignified existences for all. 

In the midst of an ongoing spiral of high and low-intensity wars happening in many regions of the world and for too long and , again and with unfathomable brutally in Gaza at the moment – we insist on dreaming of peace, justice, and freedom. 

We call for a politics of hope, a politics of refusal to counteract the politics of death, occupation, exploitation, and ongoing forms of oppression. 

 We call for everyone to take action, to take the streets, to organize transterritorially – in defense of life.