Footage from the MIT SAGE movement authorized for use is available here. The sharable link for this press release: https://tinyurl.com/sage-may10 The video of today’s press conference is available here. For more information, interviews or comment, or request for footage, please contact: SAGE Media Liaison Email: eyesonmit@gmail.com |
We are the MIT Scientists Against Genocide activists, a broad collective of student organizations, asking MIT to end all research contracts sponsored or funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. We have been campaigning about this issue for months, and have joined hundreds of universities around the world in staging an encampment to bring attention to our institutions’ ties with a foreign military engaged in the genocide of Palestinians. And while MIT remains unwilling to cut research funding that amounts to just 0.03% of its total research budget, we have personally bore witness to how much money MIT is willing to spend freely on militarizing its own campus to target and surveil its own students.
Today at 4 AM, more than 200 armed riot police came to dismantle and destroy our protest encampment, and continued to arrest MIT students and workers engaging in peaceful protest. This was the second instance of violent arrests following the May 9th nonviolent protest, during which nine students engaged in peaceful civil disobedience against our institution’s participation in the slaughter of over 40,000 people. Despite 2 weeks of negotiations that we approached in good faith, MIT administrators and President Sally Kornbluth have decided to respond to us with physical assault. Just one day earlier, the Kornbluth administration suspended over 20 students and workers, including our entire negotiation team, and sent eviction notices to them, revoking their student housing and access to food.
History will remember today, and history will vindicate the students and workers who spoke truth to power, just as it has for the American invasion of Vietnam and MIT’s investment in South African apartheid. MIT’s administration claims that these historic parallels cannot be drawn, and that our movement is simply against another group of students on campus. This is a transparent attempt at deflection of responsibility by President Kornbluth and the MIT administration. We acknowledge that there are students and faculty on campus that disagree with our criticism of the Israeli military and government, but our fight is not with them. Our fight is against the continuation of unethical research and development happening between MIT and Israel’s military.
The MIT President and administration would have you believe that we are not representative of the student body; that we are aggressive, violent, and bring chaos to campus. However, we stand here as a multi-ethnic, cross-faith coalition of students and workers representing the democratic majority opinion of our campus. Over 70% of MIT graduate student-workers and over 60% of MIT undergraduates have voted definitively for MIT to get out of the business of genocide. This matter does not stop with students: we have a broad base of support from faculty, staff, alumni that are calling for MIT to stop research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Over 70 faculty and over 700 alumni have released statements in support of our demands.
The encampment is just a symbol of our movement, and the movement cannot and will not be arrested. As a collective of students, workers, faculty and staff across MIT, our organizing capacity remains strong to continue to advocate for our reasonable and moral demands.
We will not stop, we will not rest. MIT: disclose, divest.
The administration wants the world to believe that we are campaigning against the interests of Jewish students. That this is an issue of Jews versus Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs. This is a lie. This lie causes unnecessary division and endangers us more. A large group of Jewish students, representing the MIT Jews for Ceasefire, myself included, and more Jewish staff, faculty, and alumni have all been an integral part of this protest from the beginning. Our Jewish values guide us in this moment to act, because we know that we are only safe if our Palestinian siblings are safe. We are only safe if we are all safe.
As scientists and engineers studying, working, and teaching at one of humanity’s most famous and prestigious scientific institutions, we believe that the goals, means, and ends of scientific and technological research must be guided by, and accountable to, the democratic views of those who do this work.
Our request has precedent. After Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, MIT divested from research with Russia overnight. Our demand is simply that MIT be consistent in its ethics. While Israel bombs, tortures, and starves children and adults to death, MIT tells the world that what we are asking for is impossible, citing the “academic freedom” of professors to decide where they take research funding from. To quote our predecessors during the 1968 protests on MIT's campus: “the principle that people should not kill other people is more important than notions of freedom to do any kind of research one might want to undertake.[1]”
Instead of divesting from Israel’s genocide dropping research funds that are only 0.03% of total MIT research funding, and 0.2% of MIT’s defense funding, the administration has chosen to pay for countless staff and police officers to surveil, intimidate, harass, arrest, and brutalize its students. This is supposedly done for the sake of “student safety”. The only thing making us materially unsafe on this campus is the intense police state that this administration has constructed around us. The only physical violence that we have experienced since the erection of the encampment is from the police invited to it. We keep us safe, but the school has shown us time and again that it puts the interests of a foreign government above the interests of MIT students. MIT, there are 40,000 people dead, you’re arresting us instead!
Our encampment has been a peaceful and beautiful testament to the diverse community of MIT. We’ve held shabbats and a Passover Seder. We have danced, gardened, read, written poetry, and made art together. We have provided food security and community for MIT students in a way that the school has never done for us. And yet. MIT overtly prefers to arrest pro-peace students rather than enact disciplinary action on pro-war student groups and professors, who have intimidated, harassed, and doxxed us, who have blasted genocidal songs on campus calling for Palestinians to be “shot like rats.”
We call on MIT to stop using our intellectual power to develop weapons and tools for the Israeli government in violation of international law. The International Court of Justice ruled more than three months ago that Israel’s war on Gaza plausibly constitutes an act of genocide in both intent and effect. It has ordered Israel to immediately cease military operations that kill Palestinians. The Genocide Convention of 1951 itself criminalizes a secondary party’s complicity in genocide. Meanwhile, the international human rights community, including Israel’s own veteran human rights groups, have characterized Israel’s laws and institutions as enshrining a regime of apartheid – the domination of one group over another on the basis of a racial or ethnic identity. Israeli apartheid has become horrifyingly clear in the laws of Israel that restrict Palestinian rights to internal movement, marriage, habeas corpus, immigration, work, housing, free speech, voting, and water.
By providing both material and symbolic support to the Israeli military, MIT is violating the Genocide Convention. It is also violating the Geneva Conventions, the Apartheid Convention, and federal bans on providing material support to abusive militaries and state sponsors of terrorism. For political reasons, our national governments and university institutions have manifestly failed to hold themselves accountable to these obligations. It thus falls to students of conscience in the anti-war, anti-apartheid movement to pressure our institutions through peaceful but disruptive acts of civil disobedience. That is why we are here. We believe Palestinian life in Gaza is worth fighting for.
MIT now has an opportunity to lead by example: stop brutalizing your students. Show the world that you stand by your own mission to “work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.”
I am here on behalf of more than seventy concerned faculty who are encouraging MIT's administration to come back to the table and negotiate to arrive at a positive solution regarding the conflict between academic freedom, freedom of speech, and campus safety. We faculty are here as educators; we are here because we believe that we are obligated to support and ensure fair treatment of our students; we are here because our students are here and have been here, peacefully protesting the war in Gaza and challenging us to think constructively about the issues of our time.
This must begin with a full and honest account of how MIT is not centering the needs of its students, staff, and faculty.
We are concerned that the administration has consistently refused to acknowledge the immense pain and suffering of Palestinian members of our community alongside the pain of many Israeli and Jewish students. They have lost loved ones, homes, and so much else over the past seven months, and the refusal to recognize their grief is an immense moral failure.
We are concerned that our own administration seems to have circumvented due process. They have short-circuited the standard Committee on Discipline process, issuing "interim suspensions" that are, in practice, functioning as full effective suspensions. Therefore, we ask the administration to rescind all interim student suspensions until many urgent questions regarding due process are addressed.
This concern about due process extends to the methods used to target students for suspension, a list that now, we are told, includes 75 students. Of the 23 we identified earlier in the week, a vast majority of thos targeted are students of Color, among them, Palestinian students. As we speak, we are circulating a letter that has garnered over 135 signatures from MIT faculty and academic staff that demands answers to these concerns regarding due process.
We are deeply worried about the well-being of our students. Students are being forced out of their campus housing and we have had to scramble to locate adequate housing to keep roofs over their heads (including at least one student with a 5-year old child).
We are concerned that the administration has primarily disciplined pro-Palestinian students, despite consistent aggressive behavior and agitation from pro-Israeli students and faculty. Similarly, we are concerned that the Institute seems intent on framing the issue as one that pits Jewish safety against pro-Palestinian speech. This is despite the leadership of Jewish students advocating for Palestinian rights who have been participating in peaceful demonstrations.
Despite all of this, we know that there is a way forward - to come back to the table, to negotiate, to rescind the interim suspensions, and commit to dialogue going forward.
Today, police forces on MIT campus brutally handled, injured, and arrested at least 9 MIT students and grad workers peacefully engaging in non-violent protest. This escalation and violence comes 1 day after MIT’s decision to suspend 23 students for non-violent protest. MIT also evicted several students from campus housing, including those who have families with children, those with disabilities, low-income students, and veterans.
This violent escalation was in response to a non-violent action by students from the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (MIT SAGE). Students gathered outside the Stata garage on MIT’s campus to demand that MIT end all research ties with the Israeli military. This focused demand has majority support from the MIT student population, and is similar to actions MIT took after the invasion of Ukraine.
The action by MIT SAGE at the MIT Stata garage was intended to stop business as usual for MIT. Students are pressuring the University administration to end research ties with the Israeli military, the only foreign Ministry of Defense with whom MIT collaborates. This funding has been renewed as recently as this past March.
In response to the nonviolent student action at the MIT Stata garage, police at MIT forcefully handled and shoved MIT students to the ground, using unnecessary and extreme force to move, detain and arrest students engaging in the non-violent protest demonstration. Students have video evidence of the police assaults.
“The protest started peacefully as we linked hands in front of the parking garage of the Stata building, which is where much of the research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense is conducted. Within minutes, the MIT police turned things violent and attacked us, injuring several students. I was violently shoved and grabbed multiple times by the police before they arrested me.” states one of the arrested students, Ruth Hanna, MIT Graduate Student Union Vice President.
Today’s violent escalation in response to the anti-genocide student protesters follows the MIT administration’s decision to issue interim suspension notices to 23 participants in the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (MIT SAGE) encampment. In many cases, suspension notices directed students to “leave campus immediately” and barred them from housing, food, employment, extracurricular activities, and participating in commencement, without any form of due process.
Zeno of MIT Graduates 4 Palestine, who received a suspension notice and is being evicted from their housing, stated, “I have a wife and child. Leaving immediately is impossible for us and puts my child’s well-being at risk.”
Quinn Perian, student organizer with MIT Jews for Ceasefire stated, “It is clear that MIT is using its leverage over students’ well-being to shut down speech that threatens to expose its continued complicity in genocide.”
Students, faculty, and alumni have organized to document arrests, advocate for students’ rights to engage in nonviolent protests, and offer support, including meals and housing, to suspended and evicted students. The MIT administration is actively causing harm to peaceful protesting students while claiming that the suspensions are for “the safety and well-being of the MIT community”.
The context
MIT precedence
Nonviolent protests against collaboration with entities engaged in human rights violations and war have precedence at MIT.
In the late 1960s, MIT students protesting the Vietnam War engaged in nonviolent protest actions, including occupying the student center for 10 days and doing a sit-in at MIT’s Center for International Studies.
In the late 1980s, MIT students built a shantytown encampment in the same location as the current one to call upon MIT to divest from companies doing business in South Africa.
On February 25, 2022 — the day after the invasion of Ukraine — MIT cut funding ties with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), a Russian university, stating “This step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.” This precedent demonstrates that MIT can act decisively and quickly when it sees moral clarity.
[1] MIT Anti-Vietnam War Protests. “Johnson Confronted on I-Lab,” 22 April 1969.