Our goal is to develop a SUNY-wide Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement that involves students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members at all 64 SUNY campuses. The BDS Movement is a peaceful response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians through occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. Its aim is to pressure Israel to (1) end occupation and colonization of Palestinian and Arab land and remove the separation wall, (2) grant full equality to Palestinians living in Israel, (3) allow the right of return of Palestinian refugees as granted in UN Resolution 194. This movement began in 2005 in response to a call by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations and has never been more pressing than today, as Israel commits what amounts to genocide in Gaza. Through this coalition, we will work toward a variety of goals, including ending recruitment to major weapons manufacturing companies, divesting endowments and pensions from funds that support Israel, and implementing a boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions and organizations that profit from and perpetrate the genocide.

The mission statement of the BDS Movement promotes the principles of freedom, justice, and equality and recognizes the importance of these values to facilitate an open and free society. In line with this mission, the BDS Movement explicitly condemns all forms of hatred and discrimination including antisemitism, distinguishing between the state of Israel and the Jewish community. The conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is employed to delegitimize and undermine the Palestinian cause.

SUNY has numerous ties to Israel and to the weapons manufacturers supporting Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Examples of this include a homeland and cybersecurity research partnership between SUNY Albany and Ben Gurion University in Negev (Naqab), state retirement plans, which have over $250 million invested in Israeli bonds, and a partnership between Stony Brook and IBM, which provides technology to the Israeli military. Many of these companies are also targets of other boycott and divestment movements, including divesting from fossil fuels and the prison industrial complex, as weapons manufacturers and security companies contribute greatly to greenhouse gas emissions, have contracts with ICE, and use prison labor.

Through this campaign, we call on SUNY institutions to break their economic ties with and divest from Israel. SUNY’s consistent refusal to acknowledge and condemn the Palestinian genocide and call for a ceasefire represents a failure to live up to its mission to provide undergraduate, graduate, and professional education that “reflects the opportunity for individual choice and the needs of society.”
 
No society needs genocide. Currently, SUNY does not allow universities and their communities to make a choice to uphold their commitment to the needs of a just society. For as long as SUNY maintains its economic ties and partnerships with corporations that directly aid the Israeli state in their violent campaign, we are complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The New York State Executive Order No. 157 calls on state entities to “divest all public funds supporting the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel.” We call on New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to overturn Executive Order No. 157. However, this Executive Order has no clear mechanism for application to public universities and thus does not hinder our organizing. 

Our plan is to have campus-specific targets for divestment. We will be centralized through a group of representative students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members from all SUNY campuses with a BDS chapter who will set the mission of the SUNY BDS Movement. Every step we can take toward a full boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel matters, and every SUNY community member’s voice makes a difference. At the time the South African apartheid fell, less than 5% of US universities had fully divested. The pressure from the people, not the divestment of institutions, drove the apartheid state to its end. With Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, it is urgent that we grow our movement at SUNY.

As SUNY-BDS we affirm and amplify the BDS Movement’s three demands and abide by their antiracist principles. By signing this petition, you are showing your support for growing a SUNY-wide BDS movement.