As we write these words, Israeli airstrikes rain down on Gaza and Israel is preparing to launch a ground invasion on Rafah, which serves as refuge to over 1 million displaced Palestinians — half of the population of Gaza. Mass graves with nearly 400 bodies, 20 of them believed to be buried alive, were recently uncovered at Nasser and al-Shifa Hospitals after Israeli sieges. Mass starvation looms, and Israel’s commitment to constrict Gazans’ access to aid and weaponize their hunger constitutes an unmistakable war crime. The Israeli-conducted AI-powered genocide in the Gaza Strip has been ongoing for over 200 days now, with at least 34,535 Palestinians killed and 77,704 wounded since October 7.
The human toll of the genocide perpetrated against Palestinians is appalling, but it is not the only facet of Israel’s systematic brutalization of the Gaza Strip. Israel’s methodical destruction of approximately 40% of Gaza’s agricultural land and infrastructure, including its olive groves, has been recognized as ecocide. There are no universities left in Gaza because Israel has bombed them all; this systematic destruction of educational infrastructure has been recognized as scholasticide. As the bombs fall, the U.S. government is preparing to send a $22.4 billion military aid package to Israel. We are actively funding the genocide, ecocide, and scholasticide of Palestinians and Palestine, while watching on our phone screens.
No longer will we watch passively. There are no universities left in Gaza and over 1 million people are sleeping in tents in Rafah. In response, students worldwide have established encampments to demand that our countries and our institutions stop funding the genocide. Following in the footsteps of Columbia University student organizers, who have been met with violent administrative backlash and police repression, students have established an encampment at our alma mater, Princeton University. Their demands are simple: that Princeton’s administration divests from Israeli apartheid, calls for a permanent ceasefire, and condemns the genocide.
This straightforward action, taken “in the service of humanity,” was met with punitive violence and a shocking aversion to students’ freedom of expression. Even before students had established the encampment, Vice President for Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun warned the campus via email that “any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct… will be arrested and immediately barred from campus. For students, such exclusion from campus… could lead to suspension, delay of a diploma, or expulsion.” For a university that constantly defends the free speech rights of speakers that deny trans people’s existence, “safety” is now, confoundingly, the principal justification for limits on students’ right to free speech.
Despite threats of arrest and disciplinary action, students were undeterred in setting up the “Popular University for Gaza” at Princeton University. Within the first five minutes of the encampment, campus police arrested two graduate students. The arrested students were banned from campus, given only five minutes to grab necessities from their residences, and initially evicted from their housing until a “designated administrator determined that their bar does not extend to their non-dormitory residences.” Four days later, after the University repeatedly refused to meet with the organizers’ bargaining team, 13 protestors staged a sit-in at Clio Hall reiterating their demands that the University divest from Israeli apartheid, call for a permanent ceasefire, and condemn the genocide. The University sent campus police to arrest them. Meanwhile, press and legal observers were told that if they did not leave before 5:30 p.m., they would be arrested. Although they left shortly after, one student observer was banned from campus for 90 days.
As the first two arrested protestors were escorted to a campus bus to be processed, hundreds of students, faculty, alumni, and local residents surrounded the bus, refusing to move until the protestors were released. Princeton town police threatened the community members blocking the bus with arrest, but the crowd held their ground until they received assurances that criminal charges would be dropped against the arrested protestors. After 25 minutes, the two protestors inside the bus were let go. The remaining 11 protestors being held in Clio Hall were let go in small batches; none of the protestors’ charges were dropped. The 13 Clio Hall protestors have been charged with trespassing on their own campus, evicted from their University housing, and banned from campus — an uncharacteristically punitive response that effectively achieves the conditions of suspension while they await further disciplinary processing.
This repression of free speech is inconsistent with the University’s stated values. Despite President Eisgruber’s citation of “time, place, manner” and “safety” considerations to justify the suppression of free speech, students have done nothing but build an inclusive, multi-faith community that demands an end to death. For many students, the encampment is the first time they have connected with community members outside the “orange bubble” — a term referring to the self-enforced partitions between Princeton students and communities beyond the university’s gates.
The Princeton community, including faculty, alumni, and local residents, has mobilized to bring food, medicine, and other necessities to the encampment in an intergenerational show of support. Over plates of maqluba, community members have expressed their joy and pride that we are demanding our institution divest from Israeli apartheid. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian students have come together to support the encampment and protect each other as they pray. For a university that pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into “community-building” and “community care,” it is telling that many students’ first encounters with the actualization of these principles are at an encampment that the University disavows. We are doing the work that Princeton attempts to theorize. We are creating the community that Princeton purports to endorse.
As Linda Sarsour, former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, noted in her address to the encampment, we are building a microcosm of the world we want to live in: a future in which interfaith community, mutual care, human rights, and the dignifying value of collective study are not just ideals, but realities. For the Princeton students risking their safety and their institutional standing in the name of human dignity, In the nation’s service and the service of humanity is more than marketing copy: it’s a commitment to a more human future. That future starts now. We stand alongside students in demanding:
- Financial Divestment and Disclosure: Princeton University must divest and dissociate its endowment of all direct and indirect holdings in companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing genocidal military onslaught, occupation, and apartheid policies. The University must commit to full financial transparency on all its investments.
- Military Divestment: Disclose and end Princeton research on weapons of war funded by the Department of Defense. This research includes automated software and artificial intelligence technology used to enable genocide.
- Academic and Cultural Boycott: Refrain from any form of academic or cultural association with Israeli institutions and businesses, in line with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. This boycott is of institutions, not individuals. End study abroad programs with Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Stop sponsoring and facilitating Tiger-Trek Israel, and end Princeton’s relationship with the Tikvah Fund.
- Palestinian Affiliations: Cultivate affiliations with Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.
- End the Silence: End its silence and release a public statement calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and condemning Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.
- Amnesty: Amnesty for all students involved in the encampments and the sit-ins
We stand in solidarity with Princeton students in demanding divestment from Israel. Princeton alumni should sign our pledge to withhold donations until divestment here.
So many of these elite universities seem to tolerate different points of view – except for the human rights of the Palestinians. These institutions seem to so fear the wrath of zionist billionaires like Bill Ackman, Josh Harris or Robert Kraft that free speech about the Palestinians is discarded like a soiled tissue.