Students at a growing number of U.S. colleges are gathering in protest camps with a unified demand from their schools: Stop doing business with Israel — or with any companies that enable its ongoing war in Gaza.
The demand has its roots in a decades-long campaign against Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. The movement has gained new momentum as the war between Israel and Hamas passes the six-month mark and stories of suffering in Gaza have sparked international calls for a ceasefire.
Inspired by the ongoing protests and arrests last week of more than 100 Columbia University students, students from Massachusetts to California are now flocking to campuses by the hundreds, setting up camps and pledging to stay where they are until the their requirements are met.
“We want to be visible,” said Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who noted that students at the university have been pushing for divestment from Israel since 2002. “The university should do something about what we are asking for, about the genocide that is happening. happening in Gaza. They should stop investing in this genocide.”
The campus protests began after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 hostages. During the ensuing war, Israel killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, which makes no distinction between combatants and non-combatants but says at least two-thirds of those killed are children and women. .
Students are calling on universities to separate themselves from any companies that are enabling Israel’s military efforts in Gaza – and, in some cases, from Israel itself.
Demands vary from campus to campus. Between them:
__ Stop doing business with military weapons manufacturers who supply weapons to Israel.
__ Stop accepting research money from Israel for projects that aid the country’s military efforts.
__ Stop investing university endowments with money managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors.
__ Be more transparent about what money is received from Israel and what it is used for.
Student governments at some colleges have approved resolutions in recent weeks calling for an end to investments and academic partnerships with Israel. These bills were approved by student bodies at Columbia, Harvard Law, Rutgers, and American University.
Officials at several universities say they want to talk to students and honor their right to protest. But they are also echoing the concerns of many Jewish students that some of the protesters’ words and actions amount to anti-Semitism — and they say such behavior will not be tolerated.
Sylvia Burwell, president of American University, rejected an Undergraduate Senate resolution to end investments and partnerships with Israel.
“Such actions threaten academic freedom, the respectful free expression of ideas and views, and the values of inclusion and belonging that are fundamental to our community,” Burwell said in a statement.
Burwell cited the university’s “longstanding stance” against the decades-old Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The movement’s protesters drew parallels between Israel’s policy in Gaza – a small strip of land located between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, where around 2.3 million Palestinians live – and apartheid in South Africa. Israel imposed an indefinite blockade on Gaza after Hamas took control of the strip in 2007.
Opponents of BDS say its message veers into anti-Semitism. In the last decade alone, more than 30 states have enacted laws or directives that prevent agencies from hiring companies that support the movement. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called it a “pernicious threat” in 2019, saying it fueled prejudice against Jews on U.S. campuses.
Asked this week if he condemned “anti-Semitic protests”, President Joe Biden said yes. “I also condemn those who do not understand what is happening to the Palestinians,” Biden said after an Earth Day event on Monday.
At Yale, where dozens of student protesters were detained on Monday, President Peter Salovey noted in a message sent to campus that, after hearing from students, the university’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility has recommended against divestment from weapons manufacturers. military.
Columbia President Minouche Shafik said there should be “serious conversations” about how the university can help in the Middle East. But “we cannot allow one group to dictate terms,” she said in a statement Monday.
MIT said in a statement that the protesters have “the full attention of leadership, who have been continually meeting and speaking with students, faculty, and staff.”
On many campuses, students advocating divestment say they don’t know the extent of their colleges’ ties to Israel. Universities with large endowments spread their money across a wide range of investments and it can be difficult or impossible to identify where it all ends up.
The U.S. Department of Education requires colleges to report gifts and contracts from foreign sources, but there have been problems with underreporting, and colleges sometimes dodge reporting requirements by routing money through separate foundations that work on their behalf. name.
According to a Department of Education database, about 100 U.S. colleges reported gifts or contracts from Israel totaling $375 million over the past two decades. However, the data says little about where the money came from or how it was used.
Some MIT students have published the names of several researchers who accept money from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for projects that the students say could help with drone navigation and missile protection. In all, pro-Palestinian students say, MIT has accepted more than $11 million from the Ministry of Defense over the past decade.
MIT officials did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
“MIT is directly complicit in all of this,” said sophomore Quinn Perian, leader of a group of Jewish students calling for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. He said there is a growing push to hold colleges accountable for any role they play in supporting Israel’s military.
“We’re all drawing from the same fire,” he said. “They are forcing us, as students, to be complicit in this genocide.”
Motivated by the Columbia protests, students at the University of Michigan camped out on Tuesday in the campus square demanding an end to financial investments with Israel. They say the school sends more than $6 billion to investment managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors. They also cited investments in companies that produce drones or warplanes used in Israel and in surveillance products used at checkpoints in Gaza.
University of Michigan officials said they have no direct investments with Israeli companies and that indirect investments made through funds amount to a fraction of 1 percent of the university’s $18 billion endowment. The school rejected calls for divestment, citing a nearly 20-year-old policy “that protects the university’s investments from political pressure.”
Harvard and Yale students are demanding greater transparency along with their calls for divestment.
Transparency was a key demand at Emerson College, where 80 students and other supporters occupied a busy courtyard on the downtown Boston campus on Tuesday.
Twelve tents with slogans such as “Free Gaza” or “No Dollars for Israel” lined the entrance to the courtyard, with sleeping bags and pillows poking through zippered doors.
Students sat cross-legged on the paving stones, typing finals and reading for exams. The semester ends in a few weeks.
“I’d love to go home and have a shower,” said film expert Owen Buxton, “but I’m not leaving until we meet our demands or I’m dragged away by the police.”
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