By N. IRAZU
On March 14, hundreds of students at the University of Massachusetts walked out of class and joined a protest with four central demands:
1) End UMass Amherst Support for Occupation and War Profiteering!
2) Protect Palestinian Students and Pro-Palestinian Activism!
3) End All U.S. Aid to Israel Now!
4) Drop the Charges Against the UMass 57!
The first three demands are self-explanatory. The fourth demand comes from an event that occurred last fall, where instead of listening to students’ demands that the university cut its ties to military companies’ complicity with genocide, the university administration decided to arrest students doing a peaceful sit-in.
The March 14 protest was organized primarily by UMass SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) activists. We printed thousands of flyers to hand out and put up all over campus, and chalked announcements of it into the walls and pathways of the university. When Zionists ripped our posters down, we put up new ones. This allowed us to reach students who did not follow the SJP Instagram page and would not have known about the protest otherwise. We also collected the signatures of 16 other organizations, including political and cultural groups, so as to invite the broadest group of people possible to the action.
The protest started with a rally at the Student Union in the center of campus. The first speech was given by a Jewish faculty member, who spoke against the ethnically cleansed “homeland” that Israel offers her and fellow Jews. Her powerful denunciation of Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza energized the rally from the start.
After the initial set of speeches, we set off to the engineering quad. The choice of the engineering quad as the first stop of the protest was due to the university-to-military-industrial pipeline that the students and faculty alike wanted to denounce. Many students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education), particularly in engineering, are nudged toward taking jobs in military companies after they graduate. With enticing salaries and benefits, as well as job security, this is an understandably popular career path for many students. The administration encourages this by signing agreements with companies like Raytheon and other “defense” companies.
Students from the Prison Abolition Collective read Palestinian poems. A faculty member recalled the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1982, and how all that it took to put a stop to it was U.S. President Ronald Reagan (of all people!) telling Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to stop the bombing immediately. The bombing of Beirut stopped 30 minutes after that phone call.
After listening to speeches in the engineering quad, the protest proceeded towards Whitmore, the administrative building of the university. Here the final round of speeches was given. The author of this article, a member of Workers’ Voice, gave a speech hammering on the importance of understanding Israel as a guardian of U.S. interests in the Middle East and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance against the Zionist onslaught, without placing any demands on them. The speech ended by honoring the life of Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force serviceman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in February.
One student, a member of SJP and Dissenters, laid bare the colonial connection that the United States and Israel share, and how we must understand how settler-colonialism is built into the foundation of both countries.
These speeches were regularly interrupted with cheering and “Free Palestine!” chants. The organizers of the protest announced that those who wished to do so would be going into the administrative building. The interior of the building was soon covered with sticky notes, papers, and posters expressing our anger and sorrow over the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the administration’s complicity with it by refusing to divest from the military companies providing the weaponry that made the genocide possible. The names of martyrs, messages of solidarity, and heartfelt letters covered the main hallway leading to the chancellor’s office. The sit-in lasted until closing, at which point the students left the building.
It is important to note that the protest’s organizers intentionally excluded calls for a ceasefire in the core demands. This decision came from the understanding that, although much of the Palestine solidarity movement endorses this demand, it is easily misappropriated by politicians who can confidently insist that “ceasefire” means that Palestinians must lay down their arms.
Overall, it was a successful protest, bringing in a well-sized crowd with new people who had not been in protests before. As the first protest action of the semester, it allowed us in SJP to understand the extent of our reach to the student population and how to extend it in the future.
This will not be the last action of the semester. Students in our university and around the country, young people in high schools, and the working youth will not stop mobilizing for Palestine until it is free.