Pro-Palestine Campus Organizers: Demilitarization & Democratization Go Together

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Universities have long been pivotal hubs of the global solidarity movement with Palestine. During Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza and its annihilation campaign against Palestinian educational institutions, students across the world transformed universities into sites of protests and encampments. A central demand united this movement: that universities cut their ties with Israel’s machinery of war and occupation. Concretely, this meant divestment from corporations enabling the Gaza genocide, and pushing institutions to break with weapons research. This upsurge built on long-standing traditions of campus movements challenging university power structures linked to war and militarism.

Over the past year, campus movements for Palestine have used tactics like compiling reports documenting their university’s ties to the Gaza genocide, and some have even sought a voice on the governing bodies at universities. Truthout recently spoke to representatives from three different organizing efforts tied to this movement.

Richard Solomon and Mila Halgren are Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who helped research a December 2024 report published by the MIT Coalition for Palestine on MIT’s ties to militarism and Israel’s occupation.

Benicio Maesa is an undergraduate at the University of Warwick in England who helped publish a similar October 2024 report by the Warwick Student Staff Solidarity Network.

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American attorney and human rights activist who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement and was an organizer of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was brutally attacked by Israeli commandos in 2010. Arraf is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and has supported Palestine solidarity organizers on campus, most notably by running for a seat on the university’s board of regents and providing legal support for students.

Derek Seidman: What’s the background of your Palestine solidarity coalitions at MIT and Warwick?

Richard Solomon: The MIT Coalition for Palestine emerged after October 7 with the central demand that MIT cut its ties to the Israeli military. It’s made up of over 20 campus groups. We grew out of a previous recognized student group, the Coalition Against Apartheid, that was banned from campus.

There’s a tradition here. The name Coalition Against Apartheid was a reference to the MIT group that called for divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. During the U.S. invasion of Vietnam in the late 1960s, there was a mass student and faculty movement at MIT, with luminaries like Noam Chomsky. People see MIT as the “Pentagon on the Charles” and think engineers are fairly apolitical, but there’s also a vibrant tradition of activism at MIT.

Benicio Maesa: The Warwick Student Staff Solidarity Network (SSSN) has been around for a decade. We also have another coalition, Warwick Stands With Palestine, a student group focused specifically on Palestine that works with SSSN.

Warwick University was formed in 1965 and the culture of activism has been there since the beginning. There was past organizing around South African apartheid and solidarity with West Berlin, but it was recently with the genocide in Palestine that we really found our sense of solidarity on campus.

The main inspiration for our coalition is the Palestinian people. We’re driven by our desire to see a free Palestine during our lifetime. We were also inspired by Palestine campus activism in the U.S., especially in the face of extreme repression. Our encampment was established after the U.S. encampments were erected.

Seidman: Why did you decide to publish your reports, and what were some main findings?

Solomon: The report was inspired by similar efforts at the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics. The biggest findings are, first, that MIT researchers develop technologies directly sponsored by the Israeli military. They say it’s “basic research,” but these technologies have military applications.

Second, MIT has direct institutional collaborations with companies that profit from the Gaza genocide, like Lockheed Martin, Maersk and Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest military contractors. Companies like Lockheed and Elbit manufacture bombs and artillery, but especially drones that are used in Gaza and the West Bank.

Elbit has been a particularly stark grievance for us because it has an engagement with MIT through the Industrial Liaison Program, which gives Elbit privileged access to the campus and to MIT faculty and staff. [Editor’s note: facing protests, Elbit ended its lease of office space in Cambridge last year.]

Maesa: Warwick is a big research university, so we looked at research projects that have arms companies as partners. Rolls-Royce, for example, is a massive British-based multinational that is literally powering the genocide in Gaza. We found that their engines are used in vehicles and aircraft that Israel is using against Palestinians. Another example is Rolls-Royce subsidiary MTU, which produces engines for Israeli Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers. They’ve been used to destroy buildings in Gaza and kill people.

Last year we occupied a building on campus called the International Digital Laboratory, home to the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG). Companies like Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems were involved in the creation of WMG, which we consider the most complicit department at the university.

Seidman: Huwaida, as an alum, how did you get involved supporting students at the University of Michigan?

Huwaida Arraf: The students at University of Michigan initiated everything on their own, and they were phenomenal. After October 7, I joined alumni groups that were supporting the student organizers. We helped spread the news and circulate petitions, and we rotated going to the encampments, often bringing food. We pledged, as alums, not to support the university financially or otherwise, in solidarity with the students. I did some speaking and webinars. Now, I’m trying to support them by suing the University of Michigan for violating their constitutional rights after it singled out pro-Palestine protesters for academic discipline and shut down the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on campus.

I was proud of the young Palestinian and Jewish American organizers for what they did, and also proud that this was happening at the University of Michigan. I wanted to serve as a resource for moral support and help with whatever I could.

Michigan is one of the only states in the country where you can elect the board of regents for our flagship universities. The students wanted to run somebody to represent them on the board. They knew about the work I’ve done on Palestine and that I was uncompromising about Palestinian rights, and they reached out.

Seidman: Why did the strategy of trying to get on the board of regents make sense to you?

Arraf: The students needed somebody inside the board of regents. I would have only been one of eight regents if elected, but the students needed a voice inside to try to protect them and their civil liberties. That was my number one motivation. But I was also impressed by their willingness to engage in electoral organizing, particularly because so many young people don’t get involved in the political process, and I wanted to encourage that. My slogan was “Leadership that Listens.” The students, the staff, the faculty, the community: that’s who the board of regents works for, and they don’t have enough of a voice. In fact, the university administration and the board of regents are using their power to silence those voices.

So, my decision to jump in was really to support the students. They needed to mobilize quickly to register as many people to vote as possible. They registered over 2,000 people as Michigan Democratic Party members in just a few days and started to mobilize. We only had less than three weeks, but the students, and pro-Palestinian voices generally, dominated the convention. They brought their neighbors and their families. There were approximately 1,400 people there, and I got over 800 votes, more than half of the raw votes, though the votes are weighted differently. But more important than the votes was just the presence of such a young and vibrant group.

Instead of welcoming these new members and this new energy into the party, the Michigan Democratic Party treated us terribly, engaging in voter suppression and voter intimidation tactics, refusing to be transparent, and violating their own bylaws to get the results they wanted. This prompted me to file a lawsuit against them, which is now being litigated in federal court.

Seidman: Back to MIT and Warwick. How did your reports support your organizing?

Mila Halgren: Our primer focused on informing our goals of cutting MIT’s egregious ties with the Israeli military and the physical enforcement of apartheid. We’ve sent the primer to senior members of the administration and faculty members on advisory committees that make decisions over research sponsorships, so ignorance of these direct ties is no longer an excuse for the MIT administration.

The report has also led to international coordinated action against MIT’s collaboration with Elbit, which is really powerful. We’ve seen Elbit contested at MIT symposiums in Tokyo, South Korea and Thailand, in part because those activists read our report and realized that MIT and the Industrial Liaison Program was coming to their countries.

Another goal with the report is to foment media scrutiny over MIT’s complicity, because that can put more pressure on MIT than campus activism that might not break into the larger news cycle.

Maesa: The report has been really helpful for publicity on campus. Different groups and individuals have been using the report, and it’s also supported our arguments at the negotiating table with the university. We also sent it to media contacts and to United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

Our report drilled in on Rolls-Royce, which is the darling of Warwick University. Our next campaign is called Drop Rolls-Royce from the HetSys CDT. HetSys CDT is a collaborative doctoral project between the university and a number of industrial and academic partners funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Rolls-Royce is known to be involved in the project since the start, and we are calling on the university to drop Rolls-Royce from the project.

The administration claims Rolls-Royce also manufactures civilian aircraft engines, not military ones, but we argue that you can’t separate the two. Our report’s focus on Rolls-Royce creates a strong argument against the presence of these companies on campus, because arms companies can disguise themselves in civilian clothes.

Seidman: Do you see any hypocrisy with the MIT and Warwick administrations around Palestine? And have you faced repression?

Halgren: When Russia invaded Ukraine, MIT instantly cut its ties with the Skoltech Institute in Moscow and condemned the invasion. MIT also offered full transitional funding for labs and students affected by the cutting of these ties.

MIT also pledged to not renew Saudi Aramco’s membership in the MIT Energy Initiative, and declined any further sponsored engagements between MIT and Aramco, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This contrasts strikingly with Gaza, where 170 journalists have been murdered by Israel. MIT has not condemned these murders, but when a single journalist in Saudi Arabia was murdered, it cut its ties.

MIT has reacted to us with immediate repression and misinformation. For instance, we released an op-ed in the student newspaper about one professor’s ties to the Israeli military, and in response, MIT pressured the student newspaper into retracting the op-ed. MIT also restricted access to its internal grant-tracking software after we published our findings.

Maesa: After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Warwick University immediately put out a statement condemning the invasion, saying that it’s illegal and immoral. It was great they condemned that injustice, but two years later, they refused to put out a statement on Palestine. We even asked them to just release the same statement they put up for Ukraine and change it to Palestine, but they wouldn’t do that. The university has also created a lot of scholarships and academic opportunities for Ukrainians, but they haven’t done anything to that extent with Palestinian students.

They haven’t really said anything about the report itself. It’s like they don’t want to acknowledge that it exists. There hasn’t been explicit repression against Palestine activism at Warwick University, though they invoke “proscribed groups” and the U.K.’s “prevent” framework to imply you can’t say certain things, and this can have a chilling effect.

Seidman: What are your core demands? And ultimately, what should a just university look like?

Solomon: We had three core demands in the primer. First, the MIT leadership must publicly condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Israeli occupation and apartheid. Second, MIT must immediately and publicly end all research funding and sponsorships by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which is engaged in crimes against humanity. Third, MIT should publicly pivot away from complicit corporate partners like Elbit, Maersk and Lockheed Martin, and commit to divesting the corporation’s endowment from firms implicated in the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The ideal university is one that has moved away from military sponsorship in general. We all know when the tobacco industry funds research into lung cancer, or the fossil fuel industry sponsors climate research, those studies are bound to be biased. The same thing applies to the military. It will sponsor projects that have belligerent applications. This is not compatible with a broader vision of human flourishing.

Maesa: Our main goal is to have a demilitarized campus. We want arms companies off the campus because we imagine this university as a place for knowledge production that actually benefits humanity rather than kills them. We want a future university that is free from guilt and complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and other people as well.

I also think the future university should be more democratic and more transparent. We’ve found that the university is intensely bureaucratic, undemocratic and not transparent at all, especially to students and staff. We have a stake in the university and should be involved in deliberations around partnerships.

Demilitarization and democratization go together. We cannot democratize the university without democratic input from students, and we’re not going to have a democratic university if arms companies’ interests prevail in the minds of university bureaucrats that dictate power relations on campus.

Arraf: These prestigious institutions are supposed to be sources of free thought and innovation that create the next generation of people who will make a better world. They represent our students, our state and our future. When these institutions are complicit in the crimes against humanity being done in Palestine, it’s absolutely shameful.

But the students have been exposing it, even though they’re being suspended and repressed. They know what they are risking. These are young students with their whole lives ahead of them, and they’re jeopardizing that to stand up for what’s right. They are an inspiration, and those leading these institutions are absolutely shameful.

These interviews were conducted separately and edited into a roundtable format afterward.