The Trump administration moved on March 7 to cancel $400 million in federal contracts to Columbia University, citing “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The announcement follows Columbia and Barnard College’s expulsion of student activists. Trump also vowed to imprison and deport students who participate in what he called “illegal protests,” implying that First Amendment rights do not apply to anyone on a visa.
To that end, secretary of state Marco Rubio has launched a “catch and revoke” AI program effort to cancel visas of students critical of Israel. U.S. permanent resident and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested March 9, with Rubio vowing to deport what he calls “Hamas supporters” and Trump announcing proudly it was “the first arrest of many to come.” This effort came home Tuesday as federal agents descended on Somerville’s Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a Turkish national, doctoral candidate and Fulbright scholar, and took her to a Louisiana detention center.
Khalil’s disappearance is indeed part of a broader wave of intimidation. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents recently abducted Rumeysa Ozturk, doctoral student at Tufts, who attracted the ire of a Zionist doxing group Canary Mission for contributing to an opinion essay. It took a court ruling to prevent the gestapo from also detaining Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Korean American at Columbia who holds permanent residency. Rubio has boasted of 300 such cases. “Who has the right to have rights?” wrote Khalil from prison, alluding to Hannah Arendt. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here.”
Over the past year, Columbia students have built on an old tradition of student activism, one activated during the reign of Hitler and during the Vietnam war. Their goals were modest but popular. Students demanded the school divest from Israel like it did with private prisons and fossil fuels. Soon, their encampment and sit-ins inspired us in Cambridge and MIT.
But Columbia officials rejected their demands and took unprecedented steps to lock down the campus and arrest students en masse. Across America, thousands of us have also faced the jail cell. Many were barred from campus. Others beaten, doxed or harassed by agitators.
Like Columbia, the pretexts for this violence are often dubious reports of antisemitism serving a reactionary agenda. The truth is our movement represents the fabric of American society, including Jewish voices. Many suspected antisemitic acts are perpetrated by outsider nonstudents or Zionists themselves. Last April for example, a pro-Israel agitator at Northeastern yelled “kill the Jews.” Officials proceeded to arrest everyone.
Trump’s attack on Columbia shows that no matter how aggressively a school punishes its students, it will never be enough. There is no hope of appeasing Trump when it comes to Israel on campus. The man is a bully, willing to intimidate and break laws to get his way. The best way to deal with bullies is not to appease them, but rally and fight back. Organized offense is sometimes the best defense.
In the past weeks, Israel has reimposed a total siege on Gaza, preventing the world from sending humanitarian supplies. Addressing the “People of Gaza,” Trump recently threatened to kill everyone. Some of the worst massacres of the war on Gaza happened March 20, when three relatives of my old host brother were killed by Israeli airstrikes. He himself was killed with his immediate family in August. The head of the Israeli armed forces has ordered troops to seize more territory in Gaza and move out the civilian population. Meanwhile, Israeli crimes in the West Bank continue: home demolitions, mass expulsions, settler attacks and imprisonments without trial.
Recent leaflets dropped by Israel on Gaza declare, “No one will notice you, no one will ask about you. You are left alone to face your inevitable fate.” But they are not alone, and we notice. The time has come for Boston’s universities to move together and divest from the Israeli occupation. As one student wrote, “Columbia’s case proves that you will lose funding regardless, why not keep your soul intact?” If one believes, like the great New Englander Theodore Parker, that the arc of history is long but bends toward justice, then divestment from Israel is inevitable.
Massachusetts is an auspicious place for first movers toward this eventuality. There’s no law against “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movement in Massachusetts, unlike in 38 states in America. Greater Boston and Cambridge is home to 44 institutions of higher learning, many with deep pockets and envied reputations such as Harvard, MIT and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Taking institutional ethics seriously builds on New England tradition. Thanks to abolitionists, Massachusetts became one of the first states to end slavery and grant Black men suffrage. In 1843, it was the first to end the ban on interracial marriage and first to desegregate public schools in 1855. We were also the first state to pass legislation divesting state pension funds from South African apartheid. Massachusetts schools such as Amherst and Hampshire College were first movers on apartheid divestment.
Officials can frame the decision in self-interested terms: Given uncertainty, why invest in controversial relationships with the Israeli government or its weapon suppliers? A coordinated announcement among Boston-area schools can reduce reputational fallout and trigger a cascade of similar institutional decisions. It will also address core student grievances. By meeting our demands, officials will undermine motivation for protests, which could bring further public scrutiny.
But the strongest case for divestment is not strategic, but moral. In occupied Palestine, millions of people live under a 21st century colonial regime. They are barred from voting in the country that controls their lives. The state that rules their historic homeland was not created for them. It was created for Zionists. Palestinians are barred from marrying Palestinians in territories formally annexed by Israel (not to mention Jews). Their movement is restricted by checkpoints, watchtowers, travel permits and Israeli-only highways.
Recent films such as “From Ground Zero” and “No Other Land” capture the horrors of the Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing. These shocking realities are widely recognized. Just read reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. One doesn’t have to be a flaming campus radical to recognize this arrangement is wrong and that occupied peoples will resist it, with force of arms when necessary.
The best time to divest from Israeli crimes was years ago. The second best time is now.
Richard Solomon, Kinnaird Street, Cambridge
The writer is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying political science and a leader of the MIT Coalition for Palestine.
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Superb. We need to shake off the sense of fatalism and fear when it comes to these things. Divestment is possible, popular, moral, and inevitable. I have tears in my eyes thinking about these students and their courage. May they succeed where my generation has failed.
I especially like the part where the writer blames Jews (using the euphemisms “Zionists” and the ever-popular “outside agitators”) for antisemitism.
I mean… https://www.yahoo.com/news/pro-israel-agitator-shouts-kill-163956737.html
Well written piece and a strong argument!
We’re always told that peaceful protest is the only appropriate way to protest. Could any protest be more peaceful than a simple refusal to do business with an institution you disagree with?
Slaw is right. The truth is pro-Israel agitators do stir up shit for no reason! They lie and cry wolf, and then when you investigate it’s so anodyne. At MIT, they went to Congress and claimed Jewish students were being prevented from attending class, which was a lie! Meanwhile, children in Gaza are having their heads crushed under concrete. So twisted. Why do some people’s delicate feelings matter more than other people’s lives?