The explosion of campus protest movements against Israel’s siege of Gaza, especially during the April 2024 encampments, has been historic. These movements showed the whole world that swaths of young people across the U.S. stand in solidarity with Palestinians who are facing a genocidal assault. The encampments created crises for college administrators who purport to defend values of justice and human rights while also looking to appease their trustees and donor bases who back Israel’s brutal war.
A generation has been galvanized and politicized, experiencing extreme repression for simply demanding their institutions cut ties with one of the great human catastrophes of modern times: Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza, the killing of tens of thousands of people, and the annihilation of Gaza’s universities.
These new research efforts that are unmasking university ties to militarism and war crimes are being carried out by union graduate workers from California to Michigan to Massachusetts who are organizing to stop the flow of their research into military projects and military technology. They’re being done by undergrad organizers from New York to Rhode Island who are campaigning for divestment and building out power maps to illustrate university ties to weapons’ companies. These organizers are forming research committees and working collaboratively. They’re sharing findings and skills through teach-ins and meetings. They’re building national networks and communicating across geography through group chats and webinars.
Toward the end of 2023, these grad workers were increasingly connecting with each other across campuses to discuss what they could do, as university workers, about Israel’s war on Palestine. This connecting was made easier because many of these grad workers were already plugged into a preexisting network of cross-campus union solidarity.
As Israel’s siege of Gaza intensified in the fall of 2023, flattening and starving the enclave while killing tens of thousands of people, students across the U.S., from Stanford to NYU, began protesting to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and that their institutions divest from and break ties with Israel. Grad workers, as laborers within their universities, wondered how to respond.