GW Responds to Public Outcry But Falls Short in Supporting Palestinian Students
/GW president fails to apologize for discriminating against Palestinian students
Dozens of GW students marched on campus last Friday DEMANDING EQUAL TREATMENT FOR PALESTINIANS.
WASHINGTON D.C. – George Washington University (GW) is investigating its denial of trauma support services to Palestinian students in the wake of Israel’s bombing campaign last spring.
The investigation comes after a public outcry and a civil rights complaint that Palestine Legal initiated this month.
GW President Thomas J. LeBlanc made this announcement in a university-wide email sent on Monday evening, in which he noted that “members of our Palestinian community and all members of our university community remain our foremost priority.”
But LeBlanc failed to apologize for GW’s decision to cancel a processing space for Palestinians suffering from trauma.
In June 2021, GW’s Office of Advocacy & Support (OAS) sought to provide such a space following Israel’s forced expulsion of Palestinians in Jerusalem and its killing of hundreds in the Gaza Strip, but high-level administrators censored the event.
And while LeBlanc’s statement also claimed that “mental health programs and services are available to GW students, without regard to their national origin,” he made no indication as to whether GW has reversed its decision to prevent trauma support staff from explicitly including Palestinians in their programs, as it has done for other groups.
Nada Elbasha, Advocacy Specialist at GW’s Office of Advocacy & Support, who initiated the civil rights complaint against GW, said:
“While the statement is remarkable in that many universities will not even acknowledge the existence of Palestinians as a people, this is too little, too late. There is no accountability for the harm done to GW's Palestinian community, and there's no recognition that Palestinians were denied emotional support services and solidarity while their families back home were beaten, evicted, teargassed and killed.”
GW Students for Justice in Palestine issued a statement demanding concrete action from GW:
“SJP considers this response vague, inadequate and ineffective. LeBlanc's message offers no concrete action to rectify the obvious discrimination the university partook in. It bizarrely and merely redirects Palestinian students seeking support to go to the very same Office which was prohibited from doing so by the university. The opportunity to collectively heal as Palestinians is a step towards realizing racial justice. Palestinian students, like every other student group at GWU, deserve to process and grieve together.”
Radhika Sainath, Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal said:
“Without an apology and remedial action, Leblanc’s statement is essentially meaningless. It should not take a civil rights complaint, 6,000 people writing and a march to prompt GW to acknowledge that Palestinians have a right to access mental health services on an equal basis. It’s 2021 — not 1961.”
Palestine Legal filed the complaint two weeks ago. Since then, nearly 6,000 people have written to the university demanding that it apologize for its discriminatory denial of services to Palestinians and end its chilling investigation of the Office of Advocacy & Support for attempting to provide such services. Dozens of students marched on campus last Friday reiterating the demands in Elbasha’s letter.
Palestinians and their allies have recently been resisting such discriminatory treatment, wherein Palestinians are falsely presented as anti-Jewish, simply for demanding to live in freedom and with equality.
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