The key to protecting students? Divest from genocide and uphold free speech. 

In times of global crisis, universities should take their responsibility for student well-being seriously. Instead, they have been fostering hostile environments that endanger the lives of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students and activists on campus and beyond. Even worse, universities are actively profiting from Palestinian death and the destruction of Palestinian civil society through their investment portfolios, against the will of the students they should be protecting, but have decided to repress instead. To combat this, alumni have come together to protect students at their respective universities.

The National Alumni for Justice in Palestine is a diverse collective of professionals and academics representing 21 universities across the United States, united by a shared commitment to freedom and justice for Palestine. As alumni, we are essential to our university’s educational missions through our financial and professional support. We are deeply disturbed by continued investments in Israeli apartheid and by the dehumanizing rhetoric, assaults on academic freedom, and punitive measures adopted by our alma maters to systematically stifle pro-Palestinian activism. 

The repercussions of such actions became tragically evident on November 25 when three 20-year-old college students of Palestinian descent — Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ahmed — were shot in Burlington, Vermont, simply for wearing traditional keffiyehs and speaking Arabic. As alumni, we see ourselves in Hisham, Kinnan, and Tahseen and are committed to safeguarding the younger generation of students following in our footsteps.

The key to protecting students is to listen to them. Universities must denounce the genocide in Gaza; implement anti-doxxing measures for students and instructors; uphold academic freedom and the right to peaceful protest on campuses; and divest endowments from corporations enabling the Israeli apartheid regime and the slaughter of over 20,000 Palestinians, half of whom are children. 

The recent surge in anti-Arab and Islamophobic hate crimes on college campuses cannot be divorced from the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It is intricately linked to the historical context of colonial violence in the Middle East, as well as the reverberations of post-9/11 Islamophobia. While humans inherently possess strong moral prohibitions against violence, scholars of colonialism, racism, and genocide have studied the conditions under which certain groups can be rendered structurally disposable — what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In fact, research consistently demonstrates that Arabs and Muslims are some of the most dehumanized groups by Americans, largely due to negative and false representations in media and politics. 

Strategies of dehumanization were central to the legitimation of European colonialism, dispossession, enslavement, and genocide since the fifteenth century. After World War II, psychologists documented how the Nazis’ dehumanization of groups, including Jewish and Romani people, facilitated widespread “moral disengagement” from their suffering. Dehumanization is a precondition for normalizing Arab and Muslim death, and recognizing the role of dehumanization in rationalizing violence is essential to preventing future harm.

American academic institutions are similarly engaged in a pattern of racist dehumanization through their repression of Palestinian speech or speech critical of Israel and through their failure to divest. After October 7, universities hastily released statements condemning the loss of Israeli life. Yet, despite the mounting death toll of Palestinians in their homelands and abroad, our alma maters — which include the  University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Harvard, Columbia, and Brown — have not condemned the genocide unfolding before our eyes. As this piece is being written, the death toll in Gaza is 25 times higher than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, and settler violence has skyrocketed in the West Bank. Lopsided university rhetoric obfuscates what over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies have warned — that Israel is committing genocide. Condemning a genocide, especially one currently under judgment in the International Court of Justice, should be one of the most straightforward actions for a university to take.

Instead, universities across the country are actively repressing academic freedom and punishing student activists taking principled stances against a genocide they continue to ignore. Administrations have suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, arrested peaceful student protestors, evicted graduate students from campus housing, prohibited American Jewish film screenings, and censored Palestinian chants for freedom such as “From the river to the sea.” Even tepid attempts by university administrators to defend free speech, such as responses by university presidents at the recent congressional hearing, are met with backlash from university donors and calls for removal by university boards. Since the hearing, two of the three university presidents who testified have been forced to resign under immense pressure from Zionist donors and external lobbyists. 

The consequence of this repression is clear: our alma maters are not safe for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, anti-Zionist Jewish students nor their allies. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a Muslim student was attacked with a knife by a person wearing an Israeli flag. At Stanford, an assailant hit an Arab student with a car while screaming racial slurs. At the University of Michigan, in the midst of mass arrests, a police officer ripped off a student’s hijab. Students advocating on behalf of Palestinians have experienced death threats, verbal and physical harassment, and intense doxxing. The shooting in Vermont, which has left Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the chest down, is inextricably tethered to the alarming uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic violence across the U.S.

Meanwhile, universities have continued to invest and pipeline talent in companies whose weapons, technologies, and surveillance tools are used to commit war crimes against Palestinians. For example, Harvard University invests almost $200 million in companies that the United Nations has tied to illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and at least 30 universities have formal partnerships and joint ventures with Israeli universities, companies, and organizations. Despite relentless calls from students, faculty, and alumni for divestment from Israeli apartheid, institutions of higher learning continue to prioritize donors and profit margins. 

By contrast, when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, colleges and universities cut their partnerships and financial ties with Russia within weeks. The Arizona Board of Regents announced that it “condemns in the strongest possible terms Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine and apparent targeting of civilian populations.” Though Israel is also illegally invading Gaza and targeting civilian populations, universities have stayed silent. 

Fostering a culture of free and open debate and making values-based divestments are nothing new for universities. From the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 and South Africa apartheid protests of the 1970s and 80s to the Black Lives Matter and gun control protests of the 2010s, history shows that student activism has frequently spearheaded social justice movements and shaped public discourse. And, universities have long divested from bad actors and industries—such as South Africa for its apartheid regime, Sudan for its genocide in Darfur, Russia for its war on Ukraine, and fossil fuel companies for their complicity in the worsening climate crisis—to better align with their values. 

Safeguarding speech related to the Palestinian cause is possible, and divestment from Israel would follow precedent. Our collective voices and financial influence are crucial in holding our institutions accountable. We call on fellow alumni to stand with us in shaping a future that is just and ethical together.