With hunger strike, students urge Brown to divest from ‘genocide in Gaza’

On day seven of a hunger strike, Brown University senior Ariela Rosenzweig said she was feeling weak and sore, with some tingling and numbness in her fingers and toes. But whenever she started to think about how she felt, she said she turned her thoughts to Gaza, and how people there don’t have a choice about what they are enduring.

Niyanta Nepal, a junior from New Hampshire, echoed Rosenzweig and said that despite the discomfort she has been grounded by the knowledge “that the struggle right now in Palestine is a thousand times worse than this voluntary experience that we are going through.”

Eighteen students have been refusing to eat since Feb. 2, demanding that Brown “divest from the genocide in Gaza,” and allow them to make their case to the university’s governing board. The students, who come from Jewish, Palestinian and other backgrounds and represent numerous campus groups, have been taking in only water and Pedialyte, according to a student organizer.

On Thursday, as the Brown Corporation met on campus, according to student protesters, more than 250 students and others began a 36-hour fast to support the strikers.

Christina Paxson, the president of Brown, expressed in a letter to students last week her hope that they would attend to their health and safety.

The bar for divestment is high, she wrote. “It requires a demonstration that the University’s investments in the assets of specific companies create social harm, and that divestment will alleviate that harm.”

The university rejects calls to use the endowment for political advocacy on contested issues, she said. Brown should be a place where ideas are freely debated, she wrote, but the university should not use its financial assets “to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree.”

It was another sign that, as the new semester gets underway at Brown and many other campuses, turmoil over the Israel-Gaza war continues.

At some, activists are calling for schools to ensure institutional investments aren’t tied to companies causing harm. Students at schools nationally, including eight City University of New York system campuses, staged walkouts and sit-ins Thursday afternoon, demanding, among other things, that the system divest from weapons manufacturers.

A spokesman for CUNY shared a 2022 statement from Félix Matos Rodríguez, the chancellor, stating clear opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Rodríguez also pledged to “do what I can to encourage all members of our community who hold strong convictions and opinions to come together and share them, to speak to one another with thoughtfulness and empathy.”

At the same time, many Jewish students at colleges have said they don’t feel safe on campuses amid a rise in antisemitic incidents since the war began. The U.S. Education Department has opened investigations into multiple schools for alleged antisemitism, Islamophobia or other bias, and a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism in December helped end presidencies at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

It has been a really challenging year, said Rabbi Josh Bolton, the executive director of Brown RISD Hillel. He said he doesn’t think Jewish students feel physically unsafe on campus but that “there’s just a tremendous amount of gaslighting of Jews,” with people telling them they’re coming from a privileged place and things aren’t so bad. “It’s a really disturbing moment.”

But he praised the university president’s “flat rejection” of divestment and her encouragement of all communities to foster a more civil campus climate, and said he’s optimistic. “It’s a college campus. It’s based on and energized by the roiling of feelings and emotions and ideas, and there’s something that can be celebrated in that – even as also there’s something, obviously, about this moment that’s kind of hard to stomach.”

Brown RISD Hillel has said it unequivocally rejects and opposes the BDS movement, saying it “painfully disregards the safety and refuge that Israel has provided to Jews for more than 70 years and the continued need for this refuge in today’s climate of increased global antisemitism.”

Paxson, Brown’s president, wrote to the students last Friday about resources on campus that could help them if they chose to hunger-strike, saying that while the university supports the right to protest, those that disrupt the normal functions of campus or create “a substantial threat to personal safety of any member of the community” are unacceptable.

She said she had met with hundreds of students in recent months to discuss how the endowment is managed and the process for requesting divestment.

Brown’s endowment is not directly invested in defense stocks or large munitions manufacturers, according to a spokesman for the university, Brian Clark. The endowment “is almost entirely invested through external specialist investment managers, all with the highest level of ethics and all whom we believe share the values of the Brown community,” he wrote in an email. “This includes the rejection of violence.”

Paxson told students they could submit a request to the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, and urged them to “safeguard your health and well-being as you exercise your right to protest.”

At Brown, students have pushed this particular divestment issue for years and in various ways, including an undergraduate student referendum several years ago.

But this year, as at many colleges across the country, has been intense. In the fall, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, protests over the war flared up. Twenty Jewish students from a group calling for an immediate cease-fire were arrested in November when they refused to leave Brown’s University Hall. The charges were later dropped.

In November, Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown, was shot in Vermont along with two other Palestinian-American students.

In December, 41 student protesters at Brown were arrested and charged with willful trespass when they refused to leave University Hall.

Last Friday, 19 students began a hunger strike. (One student stopped the strike after testing positive for covid.)

“I think all of our parents are worried,” Rosenzweig said.