Satyel Larson

As of September 2023, Larson had signed a public manifesto titled: “Palestine and Praxis: Open Letter and Call to Action.” The manifesto referred to Israel as a “settler colonial state” that promotes policies that “constitute apartheid, bolstered by a brute force that enshrines territorial theft and the racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals.”

The manifesto also stated that signatories commit to advancing the manifesto's values in the “classroom and on campus” using practical measures. It also claimed that Palestinians are going through an “ongoing Nakba.”

The letter also committed signatories to “Pressuring our academic institutions and organizations to respect the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel by instating measures that remove complicity and partnership with military, academic, and legal institutions involved in entrenching Israel’s policies.”

As of September 2023, Larson was also a signatory to a Princeton “Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” published in May 2021, during Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls (OGW).

The statement condemned “the ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza by the Israeli armed forces, which represent the latest chapter of a nearly-fifteen-year blockade.”

The statement also condemned “the displacement of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem—part of a decades long campaign of warfare, expulsion, unequal residency rights, and discriminatory planning policies that advances the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem.”

The statement also claimed that “Israel’s systemic discrimination and violence” should be called “Apartheid.” It then said that Israel’s “brutal system” was “ideologically founded upon Jewish supremacism” and referred to Israel as a “settler colonial state.”

The statement ended by endorsing the Palestinian “right of return” for those “Palestinians dispossessed by the State of Israel.”

As of September 2023, Princeton’s website said that Larson would teach a Fall 2023 course called “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” which would feature Puar’s book “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.” Puar’s 2017 book reportedly claimed that “the bodies of Palestinian children ‘were mined for organs for scientific research,’ by the [Israeli] military.”

According to Puar’s publisher, Duke University Press, Puar’s book aimed [p.21] to analyze “the role of targeted debilitation whereby Israel manifests an implicit claim to the right to maim and debilitate Palestinian bodies and environments as a form of biopolitical control and as central to a scientifically authorized humanitarian economy.”

The book reportedly argued that debilitation was “extremely profitable economically and ideologically for Israel’s settler colonial regime” and that Israeli profit was “derived from the dismemberment of [Palestinian] reproduction, a function of capitalism without labor.”

In the year before Puar’s book was published, on February 3, 2016, Puar gave a lecture at Vassar University titled: “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” where she suggested that Israel harvested the organs of terrorists killed during the 2015 “Knife Intifada.”

During her 2016 speech, Puar also suggested that Israel did not want a two-state solution because “the outcome is not so much about winning or losing nor a solution, but about needing body parts, not even whole bodies, for research and experimentation.”

Puar was also quoted as saying: “And again part of my argument is that keeping Palestinians alive is crucial to this economy and it’s precisely crucial to this equation of who is the genocided population. The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”