A group of 19 students at Brown University have gone on hunger strike, calling for the school to divest from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine”.
The move follows months of protests and sit-ins at universities around the country, which have seen students arrested as they protest against Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.
The strike at the Ivy League university, which began on 2 February, will continue until Brown University considers a proposal on divestment, the students said. It comes amid a growth in protests calling for colleges and local governments to divest from assets linked to Israel and the Israeli military.
“We’ve gone through a lot of other means of showing the university where we were standing and what our demands were,” said Niyanta Nepal, one of the striking students.
“Organizing has been going on for over 10 years on this campus around this issue. We’ve had vigils, we’ve held various programs to get students tuned in, and since October 7, it escalated to sit-ins where, at this date, 61 students have been arrested,” Nepal, 21, said. “The hunger strike felt like the next appropriate step.”
Brown, located in Rhode Island, has been at the forefront of protests over the Israel-Gaza war. More than 60 students have been arrested during actions in the past three months.
In November Hisham Awartani, a Palestinian student at Brown who had been involved in campus activism, was shot, along with two friends, in an unrelated incident in Vermont. Awartani believes they were the victims of a hate crime – Jason Eaton, 48, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of second-degree attempted murder.
The hunger strike is taking place as more than 100 people were arrested at the Pennsylvania state capitol on Monday, during a protest against the state’s investment in Israeli bonds, while last week faculty members at the University of Michigan passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies “that profit from Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza”.
The Brown students’ divestment proposal follows a similar proposal made in 2020 by Brown’s advisory committee on corporate responsibility in investment policies (ACCRIP), an advisory board to the university’s president. The students are calling for Brown to divest from RTX Corporation, a weapons manufacturer; Northrop Grumman, a military company; and Boeing and Airbus, among others.
The students say they will continue their hunger strike until the corporation of Brown University, the school’s governing body, agrees to consider the proposal during its pre-scheduled meetings beginning on 8 February.
A spokesperson for Brown said the university “is not directly invested in any defense stocks or large munitions manufacturers”. He said Brown is prohibited by “confidentially provisions” from sharing details of what assets Brown holds through external investment companies.
Christina Paxson, the president of Brown, told students in a letter on Friday that she did not plan to raise the topic of divestment during the board meetings.
“It is not appropriate for the university to use its financial assets – which are there to support our entire community – to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree,” Paxson wrote.
However, given Brown’s history, students are hopeful for success.
“We’ve seen historically that it’s taken a lot of pressure from student activism, from local activism, to get the university to do the right thing. We’ve seen that with South African apartheid on this campus, we’ve seen that with [Brown] divesting from Sudan, from tobacco – all these things have stemmed from this greater student pressure,” Ariela Rosenzweig, a member of Brown’s Jews for Ceasefire Now who is taking part in the hunger strike.
It comes at a dramatic time for colleges in the US. In January, Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University, following a rightwing campaign sparked by her response to questions about alleged antisemitism on campus. Elizabeth Magill, the then president of University of Pennsylvania who gave testimony alongside Gay in Congress, resigned in December after facing similar animus.
In October, some companies said they will not hire students who signed on to letters condemning Israel for its bombardment of Gaza, which has so far killed more than 26,000 people. The military campaign followed an attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October, in which about 1,200 people died.
