On April 30, Columbia University called the NYPD to arrest students occupying Hamilton Hall, exactly 56 years after doing the same to students protesting the Vietnam War. The students renamed the building Hind’s Hall, in honor of 6-year-old Hind Rajab who was killed by the Israeli military during its brutal assault on Gaza.
I was among those arrested outside of Hind’s Hall, for linking arms with others in defense of those inside. More than 100 Columbia students were arrested by police in a quasi-military operation using flash bang explosives. One officer fired his gun in the Hall.
I graduated from Columbia in 2016 and was a member of the Barnard/Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. In my senior year, we and our friends in Jewish Voice for Peace launched a campaign to pressure Columbia to divest from companies which profit from Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid system.
We founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) as part of a non-violent international movement that seeks to place economic pressure on Israel to comply with international law. As Columbia students, we looked to our elders who protested our alma mater in 1968 for her complicity in the Vietnam War and in the 1980s to demand she divest from South African apartheid. We also followed the example of our classmates, who successfully pressured Columbia to divest from private prisons in 2015 and thermal coal in 2017.
When we founded CUAD, we understood the urgency of our campaign; that every year of Israel’s occupation was another year in which Palestinians faced the theft of their land and homes, in which millions were forced to live as refugees, and in which countless faced brutal repression from Israel’s occupying army. We could not have imagined how much more urgent the demands of our campaign would become.
We’re now in the seventh month of a ruthless Israeli military campaign that both the International Court of Justice and a U.S. federal court have determined may amount to genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. It has killed more than 34,000 people, mostly women and children, injured more than 76,000 others, and displaced 1.7 million more.
Israel has blocked most food and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, leaving more than 1.1 million people to suffer catastrophic starvation with an estimated more than 50,000 children under five being acutely malnourished. Israel has systematically targeted doctors and hospitals, decimating the health care system.
Last month, another mass grave with the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians was discovered at the Nasser Hospital compound. All universities in Gaza have been destroyed and most primary schools have been closed or serving as shelters.
Students across the United States understand that this is the most catastrophic humanitarian crisis of the century, that it was deliberately created by Israel, and that their universities have deep financial ties to the industries that are carrying it out. They are demanding an end to this complicity.
Few of the core demands of CUAD’s campaign have changed in nearly a decade of campus organizing. Students are demanding that Columbia disclose and divest its endowment from any companies complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and in Israeli apartheid.
By investing in these companies, Columbia is using the tuition students pay to fund the weapons, technology, and institutions that build illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land, imprison Palestinians indefinitely, without charge, destroy their fresh water and agricultural infrastructure, and bomb them relentlessly and indiscriminately.
Students are also demanding that Columbia cut ties with Tel Aviv University and close its Global Center in Tel Aviv. In situating itself within Tel Aviv, Columbia not only shows its commitment to pouring billions into Israeli institutions, it also shows its complete disregard to its Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and those vocally critical of Israel who are regularly refused entry or deported by Israel on the basis of their race, faith, national origin, and political viewpoint.
If Columbia offers educational programming that any of its students is unable to access or must do so under conditions of apartheid, Columbia will be in violation of U.S. law.
In its interim ruling, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide. As the world watches Israel flout the ICJ’s orders with impunity, many are at a loss for what can be done to help end the horrific slaughter in Gaza and Israel’s decades long oppression of the Palestinian people. Students and Palestinian human rights defenders have had the answer all along: Boycott, divestment, and sanctions until Israel complies with international law and respects Palestinian human rights.
Avila Chevalier is an alum of Columbia College, Class of 2016, a former member of Students for Justice in Palestine, and a co-founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
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