Smith Students for Justice in Palestine (SSJP) is continuing to call for Smith College to divest its endowment from companies SSJP says are complicit in and associated with Israel’s destructive and violent campaign in Gaza.
At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 27, SSJP hosted a rally on Chapin Lawn that marched to the Alumni House, where demonstrators called on the Board of Trustees to divest and instead invest in Smith workers.
The demonstration began with SSJP organizers distributing masks, signs and chant sheets. SSJP gave a brief but in-depth overview of the purpose and schedule of the protest, as well as possible safety concerns and the measures to take. Student Campus Safety liaisons were present to help address any outside interference in the demonstration.
SSJP organizers told the crowd that in their preparations for the rally, they’d woken up at 4 a.m. to shovel snow from roughly 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. in front of the Alumni House to provide a space for protestors to gather. Shortly afterwards, the organizers claimed that the College covered the lawn again with plowed snow.
SSJP provided a blue tarp for protestors to stand upon when they made it to the Alumni House. The march involved passionate chanting, such as “Money for education, not for war and occupation.” At the Alumni House, SSJP members, members of other student organizations on campus and local community leaders each gave speeches. The speeches ranged from explaining the details of divestment to personal anecdotes about family history in Palestine.
SSJP organizers highlighted the importance of student activism, saying, “(it is) extremely important to examine why and how we have access to such privilege” at Smith, and therefore “(it is) our duty and responsibility to push back against the grievous and unethical decisions our institution makes.”
The rally featured many speeches from local community leaders. Cedric de Leon, a professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a speech as a representative of Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP). He generally spoke on the connections between the Palestine liberation movement and labor rights movements. “I’m involved with Palestine liberation work…and I’m also a union member,” de Leon said. “When Smith SJP asked me to come and speak to the connection between labor and Palestine liberation, it was a no-brainer.”
Smith alumni also attended the rally. Ella ‘21, who previously worked with student organizations advocating for Smith’s divestment from the fossil fuel industry, said her experiences matched similar struggles SSJP faces today. “As someone who has been in similar shoes of asking the administration to divest, it’s something that I really stand behind,” Ella said. “I’m really proud of the students who are working on it…they are part of a long lineage of students trying to make change at Smith.”
Each speech was interrupted multiple times for chanting and booing at the members of the Board of Trustees who walked past into the Alumni House. After the speeches, SSJP employed a new protest strategy: a sing-along led by local musician Ben Grosscup, an alum of Hampshire College who sings for different social justice movements in the greater Pioneer Valley area, followed by a Shabbat ritual led by Tzedek Tirdof.
With these strategies, SSJP leaned heavily into a community-oriented approach to protest. One organizer, a member of the class of 2027, who spoke about the experience of being Palestinian, explained how their speeches usually don’t include a call to action. They instead like to take emotional themes and “connect it to solidarity, community knowledge, community memory…because the Palestinian diaspora is so persistent and this is a nation of peoples that have been experiencing ethnic cleansing for decades and decades.”
“We’re at a point where my legacy does need to be passed on to people who are not Palestinian,” they added.
Passing on this legacy and the possible disciplinary consequences of calling for divestment is, in their eyes, miniscule compared to the larger issues at hand. “We’re living in times where we are strategically being isolated from each other. This action obviously (is) intended to have really tangible consequences…but also I think it’s just really good for community morale to look around and see your classmates, to see your coworkers and have that relief that okay, like, there’s still good in the world.”
An organizer ‘27 of both SSJP and Tzedek Tirdof said the sing-along and Shabbat aren’t “normally what you think of when you think about a protest, but we really wanted…people to get connected with each other.” As a Jewish student, they emphasized using this community connection to spread awareness combatting the conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which they say has been used as an excuse by institutions to not divest.
As the demonstration wound down, the organizer expressed their gratitude to those who showed up: “I started crying and I was just so happy to see that the things that we’re doing (are) not for nothing.”
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