Meet Students at 4 Colleges Where Gaza Protests Win Concessions

This news is funded by viewers like you, please support our work at democracynow.org. College campuses around the world have been sparked by a global uprising of

students

protesting Israel's attack on Gaza, from New York to Berlin. Students in San Francisco and Sydney have set up Gaza solidarity camps. Calling for a ceasefire and demanding that their schools disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel, many universities have responded by calling police to their campuses to violently break up the camps. In the United States alone, more than 2,000

students

, teachers and supporters have been expelled. arrested at dozens of universities over the past three weeks, but as the campus crackdown continues, students at several universities have managed to negotiate deals in which administrators have exceeded the demands of some of the protesters.

One of the first was Pittser College in California on April 1 today. We are joined by students from four universities

where

school administrations have agreed to a number of key demands, including publicly calling for a ceasefire and G and exploring Israel's divestment from Brown University, which reached an agreement last week. Rafay accompanies us. as a sophomore majoring in urban studies, part of the Brown Jews for Ceasefire Now and the Brown Divestment Coalition, will join us from Providence Road Island at Midbury College, which reached an agreement on Sunday. Duncan joined us and graduated as a senior from Middlebury,

where

he is majoring in mathematics.

He was part of the Middlebury pro-Palestinian solidarity camp and joins us from Middlebury Vermont at Evergreen State College in Washington, which reached an agreement last week. We're joined by Alex Marshall, a junior who joins us from Olympia Evergreen is the soul. mother of Rachel Corey, the American peace activist killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza on March 16, 2003 and records that the University of New Jersey was attached with a seal. A Palestinian student in Ruers who has family in Gaza. She is part of Students for Justice in Palestine. We welcome. all of you to democracy, now let's get started at Brown Rafi Ash, you're a sophomore in urban studies at Brown, can you talk about the camp that was set up and then what followed?

Yeah, so we set up camp a week or two ago at this spot. period and uh our camp was on the main green our central quad on campus and we set up for uh 7 days um and while the administration raised its uh disciplinary threats over the course of those days it didn't really um, you know, influence the students and as the administration was trying to start preparing for the start and the pressure grew on them to really start to, you know, force us to come out or come to the table and we were able to force them to the table last Monday. week and that led to a multi-day negotiation process and you know, I think these negotiations didn't really seem like a possibility before these camps started, but through them we were able to, in fact, you know, push it to force a vote . divestment and um that's a vote that has never happened before at Brown and that's something we've been pushing for a long time for our Corporation Board of Directors um to first have a more informative session on divestment without a vote, but then followed by um at the

meet

ing after a guaranteed vote and you know that's not the end of the story, we still have a lot more work to do and we need to make sure that that vote is a yes on divestment, but that was a huge step that came out. from an escalating camp a while ago there were a series of arrests on campus there were

protests

after um Hashem aani, who is the brown student who was shot in Burlington Vermont when he and two of his best friends from Friends Academy in Rala, who had come to the United States to go to college, where her families thought it was safer, was shot by a white man on her porch when they were taking a walk on the way to her grandmother's house. um Hashem is now paralyzed, can you speak? about what happened after that and the number of breaks that took place and the administration's response to that and if they are there, the dismissal of those charges is also part of this discussion with the administration, yes, so we had last semester 61 arrests on campus. 20 of them in early November before the shooting and then another 41 in the weeks after the shooting and I think there's something that brings it very personally and directly to home that violence against Palestinians is that. that which our University is currently complicit in through its donation yes, that affects that, that not only affects Palestinians in Palestine, that also incites violence against Palestinians here and against Brown's own Palestinian students, as well that, go ahead, yeah, well, well, that, that This makes it very, very personal and, you know, essential for so many brown students to confront the violence of their administration.

I want to bring Duncan into the conversation as a senior at Middleburry College in Middlebury Vermont Duncan talks about creating the camp. and what happened next, yeah, we set up our camp, I guess, early in the morning two Sundays ago, and then we started interacting with the administration on Tuesday of the following week and had negotiations there, I think a notable part of our experience is the atmosphere. We exist in relative calm, we do not experience the counter-

protests

of many other university campuses and also our administration decided not to send the police to its own students, which we want to clarify, we believe is the bare minimum for any administrative response to student activism and freedom of expression, so let's talk about the demands and the negotiations and who is on the team, on both sides, the administration and the students, yes, we met with the four administrators, who constantly represent different aspects of the institution. and then we sent a rotating team of students to spread the burden of those negotiations and also to ensure that multiple voices were heard in that room, but all the decisions were brought to the camp and made as a collective and the students brought the camp down.

Sorry, the students broke down the camp. Yes, then we voted to accept an agreement. After six rounds of negotiations, it was closed on Monday in exchange for significant progress on all five demands. Our administration agreed. to call for a ceasefire um and we also made progress on divestment um the decision to tear down the camp was strategic um we think we could um allocate resources in other ways to continue to apply pressure, especially on divestment and hold the administration accountable to their comments and now we look forward to an upcoming board

meet

ing, where divestment will be discussed, why do you care about this issue?

Duncan, you're a senior math student at Middleberry College in Vermont, yeah, I don't know how I could. I mean, we see what's happening, we see Rafa's invasion before our eyes. This feels, in many ways, like the most terrible thing I've ever seen in my life, to be an American complicit in this and to be a student at an institution directly complicit in this genocide. I couldn't imagine standing by and not taking action. Let's go to Alex Marsh, who is on the other side of the country and is a junior at Evergreen State College. Now Evergreen State College is an Olympia Washington.

It is the hometown of his parents. Rachel Corey, in fact, is the soul of Rachel Corey. She was scheduled to graduate from Evergreen in 2003 and she went to Gaza and stood in front of a pharmacist's house while an Israeli bulldozer was coming to demolish it and she was crushed to death by that bulldozer Alex, can you talk about the protest camp when it was set up and then what you negotiated with the Evergrain authorities, the management, yes, thank you for inviting me? So our camp was established on Tuesday the 23rd and negotiations began with the Administration on The next day, Wednesday the 24th, initially there was a rotating team of negotiators, but then a second team was established to intervene on Sunday the 28th, and I was part of that new team, our demands were formulated.

Through a consensus process within the camp, we are focused on divesting from companies that are profiting from Israel's occupation of Palestine, changing Evergreen's grant acceptance policy so that it no longer accepts funds from Zionist organizations that support to the suffocating students. Freedom of expression, as well as police services, creating a community review board structure and creating an alternative crisis response model. Evergreen also agreed to ban study abroad programs in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank until the day comes when Palestinian students would be allowed entry and also agreed to release a statement calling for a ceasefire and acknowledging the genocide investigation. of the International Court of Justice and who were the people who negotiated on both sides Alex, well I was on a team of four and on the administrative side I was the vice president of the university and the dean of students and what do you think was different at your school than in places like Columbia where the police were called twice?

Well, it was Alma mat by Rachel Cory. I think it's significant, she has been absent for 20 years, but the memory of her lives on among the student body and the Olympia community at large. Craig and Cindy Corey came to one of our rallies to speak and I think I remember her, you know. I have learned about her. I have read her emails to her parents in several classes I took at Evergreen. And the memory of her is so inspiring in that way. I also believe that Evergreen has an interest in maintaining its image as a university. that highly values ​​diversity and equity working across significant differences and advocating for student voices and students' abilities to exercise their rights to free speech, freedom to protest uh and um Evergreen uh is a small university uh we've had the university has had a tough few years um after the media storm that occurred in 2017 uh and the administrative administration knew that there would be serious repercussions on evergreen's image if the police were called uh we are extremely grateful uh that all of our students were safe uh and we there were no arrests and no students have been reported for policy violations, uh, and I think that really speaks to the Evergreen cult, the culture of the Evergreen student body, uh, as someone who really emphasizes taking care of yourself. each other, uh, and fight for the fight for justice, let's end up with a seal who is a Palestinian student at Ruer University in New Jersey who has family in GL.

We're just using everyone's name uh because you're worried about doxing uh everyone can you talk about what happened at ruter after the students set up ruter camp yeah hi so last Thursday we finished our camp, it was four days, it was a 4 day camp and as a result of our collective efforts, we were able to have ruggers that the ruggers administration agreed to commit to. Eight out of 10 lawsuits that we are very happy about, and I also want to know that this camp occurred in a three-week period in which we did a second one like it was our second camp because we revived 10 State Universities, um. that's one thing and another thing is also that we are very excited that part of our demands is number one, that we are going to welcome 10 gazen students, some of whom we anticipate will be members of our family, another thing is that we're finally going to have Palestinian Flags um hung um and Holloway will finally recognize his Palestinian students finally um and name Palestine and the Palestinians in his statements instead of like the R region of the Middle East um in the Gaza region and then not only that , but we're also going to hire additional Palestinian studies professors because apparently everyone thinks this started on October 7, so I think that's pretty important, another thing is that we're finally going to have an Arab Cultural Center, why Why didn't we have one before?

That's the real question. uh, we're also finally going to have a Middle Eastern studies department again, why didn't we have one before? Yes, I hope I don't miss anything, but it's one of the standard calls at these campus camps. It has been revealing and disinvesting, it was a problem for the toughest students. Yes, that was our main reason for coming. We demand. divest from Israel apart from Israel in Sellar colonialism and also our second most important demand was to end our relationship with Tel Aviv University and close the construction of the Helix Hub which is right next to the New Brunswick train station, also should be I pointed out that Tel Aviv University is not just any university, it is avery important component of Israeli apartheid and Sellar Colon's ISM.

They make weapons that basically kill my family in Gaza. Not only that, but they also keep the bodies of between 60 and 100 people. 70 um corpses of Palestinians um just for taste also illustrate how close this is to one of these corpses being the cousin of our dear professor nuda arakat um and that and they basically refuse to return these corpses these bodies um um to um Unfortunately, Palestinian families, we were not able to get these agreements, however, we did get an agreement to have a meeting with the joint investment committee with the Board of Governors with President Holloway for divestment, which is a process of divestment, so this It's incredible progress. um in our eyes and in everyone's eyes I think because we've been asking for a meeting for five years and we finally got one um and that's why we decided not to get arrested so we wouldn't leave.

They basically came and shut it down because we had the meeting, we got a lawsuit and we think these are just like incremental steps towards divestment, but it should be noted that we were more than willing to be arrested, we were actually prepared for it um but we decided not to um and you mentioned your family um I wanted to end by asking about your family in Gaza how are they yes, so they are not well um 100 members of my almost 100 members, I think um we I don't know exactly, because of Netanyahu's psychological warfare of cutting off electricity and cellular devices, to be able to contact them honestly, but almost a hundred of my members were martyred, and obviously I still have family left. in contact with them but they are all displaced um our family homes basically destroyed um even photos like they only show that on the wall they say blame Hamas um and it should be noted that none of my family members are in hems um they have nothing to see with them and yes, um, even the photos of Gaza are unrecognizable.

I can't even tell where it is. There are no longer photos on my phone of so many memories I had, they don't even exist anymore. Gaza that I once knew has essentially disappeared. but I am more than confident along with my family that we will return and that we will build it well. Thank you for joining us, Rafi Ash, a sophomore and urban studies major at Brown University, Duncan Creps, a senior at Middlebury College, and Alex Marshall, a junior at Evergreen State College in Washington. Democracy Now is funded by viewers like you, please give to Democracy Now today. organization