Scientists Against

Genocide Encampment @ MIT

Press Release from organizers of SAGE @ MIT | Published Thursday, May 10 @ 2:30 PM

May 10th Statement from MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment Activists

Statement read by Zeno, graduate student | MIT Graduates for Palestine

We are the MIT Scientists Against Genocide activists, a broad collective of student organizations, asking MIT to end all research contracts sponsored or funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. We have been campaigning about this issue for months, and have joined hundreds of universities around the world in staging an encampment to bring attention to our institutions’ ties with a foreign military engaged in the genocide of Palestinians. And while MIT remains unwilling to cut research funding that amounts to just 0.03% of its total research budget, we have personally bore witness to how much money MIT is willing to spend freely on militarizing its own campus to target and surveil its own students.

Today at 4 AM, more than 200 armed riot police came to dismantle and destroy our protest encampment, and continued to arrest MIT students and workers engaging in peaceful protest. This was the second instance of violent arrests following the May 9th nonviolent protest, during which nine students engaged in peaceful civil disobedience against our institution’s participation in the slaughter of over 40,000 people. Despite 2 weeks of negotiations that we approached in good faith, MIT administrators and President Sally Kornbluth have decided to respond to us with physical assault. Just one day earlier, the Kornbluth administration suspended over 20 students and workers, including our entire negotiation team, and sent eviction notices to them, revoking their student housing and access to food.

History will remember today, and history will vindicate the students and workers who spoke truth to power, just as it has for the American invasion of Vietnam and MIT’s investment in South African apartheid. MIT’s administration claims that these historic parallels cannot be drawn, and that our movement is simply against another group of students on campus. This is a transparent attempt at deflection of responsibility by President Kornbluth and the MIT administration. We acknowledge that there are students and faculty on campus that disagree with our criticism of the Israeli military and government, but our fight is not with them. Our fight is against the continuation of unethical research and development happening between MIT and Israel’s military.

The MIT President and administration would have you believe that we are not representative of the student body; that we are aggressive, violent, and bring chaos to campus. However, we stand here as a multi-ethnic, cross-faith coalition of students and workers representing the democratic majority opinion of our campus. Over 70% of MIT graduate student-workers and over 60% of MIT undergraduates have voted definitively for MIT to get out of the business of genocide. This matter does not stop with students: we have a broad base of support from faculty, staff, alumni that are calling for MIT to stop research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Over 70 faculty and over 700 alumni have released statements in support of our demands.

The encampment is just a symbol of our movement, and the movement cannot and will not be arrested. As a collective of students, workers, faculty and staff across MIT, our organizing capacity remains strong to continue to advocate for our reasonable and moral demands.

We will not stop, we will not rest. MIT: disclose, divest.

Statement read by Samuel Ihns, graduate student | MIT Jews for Ceasefire

The administration wants the world to believe that we are campaigning against the interests of Jewish students. That this is an issue of Jews versus Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs. This is a lie. This lie causes unnecessary division and endangers us more. A large group of Jewish students, representing the MIT Jews for Ceasefire, myself included, and more Jewish staff, faculty, and alumni have all been an integral part of this protest from the beginning. Our Jewish values guide us in this moment to act, because we know that we are only safe if our Palestinian siblings are safe. We are only safe if we are all safe.

As scientists and engineers studying, working, and teaching at one of humanity’s most famous and prestigious scientific institutions, we believe that the goals, means, and ends of scientific and technological research must be guided by, and accountable to, the democratic views of those who do this work.

Our request has precedent. After Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, MIT divested from research with Russia overnight. Our demand is simply that MIT be consistent in its ethics. While Israel bombs, tortures, and starves children and adults to death, MIT tells the world that what we are asking for is impossible, citing the “academic freedom” of professors to decide where they take research funding from. To quote our predecessors during the 1968 protests on MIT's campus: “the principle that people should not kill other people is more important than notions of freedom to do any kind of research one might want to undertake.[1]”

Instead of divesting from Israel’s genocide dropping research funds that are only 0.03% of total MIT research funding, and 0.2% of MIT’s defense funding, the administration has chosen to pay for countless staff and police officers to surveil, intimidate, harass, arrest, and brutalize its students. This is supposedly done for the sake of “student safety”. The only thing making us materially unsafe on this campus is the intense police state that this administration has constructed around us. The only physical violence that we have experienced since the erection of the encampment is from the police invited to it. We keep us safe, but the school has shown us time and again that it puts the interests of a foreign government above the interests of MIT students. MIT, there are 40,000 people dead, you’re arresting us instead!

Our encampment has been a peaceful and beautiful testament to the diverse community of MIT. We’ve held shabbats and a Passover Seder. We have danced, gardened, read, written poetry, and made art together. We have provided food security and community for MIT students in a way that the school has never done for us. And yet. MIT overtly prefers to arrest pro-peace students rather than enact disciplinary action on pro-war student groups and professors, who have intimidated, harassed, and doxxed us, who have blasted genocidal songs on campus calling for Palestinians to be “shot like rats.”

We call on MIT to stop using our intellectual power to develop weapons and tools for the Israeli government in violation of international law. The International Court of Justice ruled more than three months ago that Israel’s war on Gaza plausibly constitutes an act of genocide in both intent and effect. It has ordered Israel to immediately cease military operations that kill Palestinians. The Genocide Convention of 1951 itself criminalizes a secondary party’s complicity in genocide. Meanwhile, the international human rights community, including Israel’s own veteran human rights groups, have characterized Israel’s laws and institutions as enshrining a regime of apartheid – the domination of one group over another on the basis of a racial or ethnic identity. Israeli apartheid has become horrifyingly clear in the laws of Israel that restrict Palestinian rights to internal movement, marriage, habeas corpus, immigration, work, housing, free speech, voting, and water.

By providing both material and symbolic support to the Israeli military, MIT is violating the Genocide Convention. It is also violating the Geneva Conventions, the Apartheid Convention, and federal bans on providing material support to abusive militaries and state sponsors of terrorism. For political reasons, our national governments and university institutions have manifestly failed to hold themselves accountable to these obligations. It thus falls to students of conscience in the anti-war, anti-apartheid movement to pressure our institutions through peaceful but disruptive acts of civil disobedience. That is why we are here. We believe Palestinian life in Gaza is worth fighting for.

MIT now has an opportunity to lead by example: stop brutalizing your students. Show the world that you stand by your own mission to “work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.”

Statement read by Professor Erica Caple James | MIT Alliance of Concerned Faculty

I am here on behalf of more than seventy concerned faculty who are encouraging MIT's administration to come back to the table and negotiate to arrive at a positive solution regarding the conflict between academic freedom, freedom of speech, and campus safety. We faculty are here as educators; we are here because we believe that we are obligated to support and ensure fair treatment of our students; we are here because our students are here and have been here, peacefully protesting the war in Gaza and challenging us to think constructively about the issues of our time.

This must begin with a full and honest account of how MIT is not centering the needs of its students, staff, and faculty.

We are concerned that the administration has consistently refused to acknowledge the immense pain and suffering of Palestinian members of our community alongside the pain of many Israeli and Jewish students. They have lost loved ones, homes, and so much else over the past seven months, and the refusal to recognize their grief is an immense moral failure.

We are concerned that our own administration seems to have circumvented due process. They have short-circuited the standard Committee on Discipline process, issuing "interim suspensions" that are, in practice, functioning as full effective suspensions. Therefore, we ask the administration to rescind all interim student suspensions until many urgent questions regarding due process are addressed.

This concern about due process extends to the methods used to target students for suspension, a list that now, we are told, includes 75 students. Of the 23 we identified earlier in the week, a vast majority of thos targeted are students of Color, among them, Palestinian students. As we speak, we are circulating a letter that has garnered over 135 signatures from MIT faculty and academic staff that demands answers to these concerns regarding due process.

We are deeply worried about the well-being of our students. Students are being forced out of their campus housing and we have had to scramble to locate adequate housing to keep roofs over their heads (including at least one student with a 5-year old child).

We are concerned that the administration has primarily disciplined pro-Palestinian students, despite consistent aggressive behavior and agitation from pro-Israeli students and faculty. Similarly, we are concerned that the Institute seems intent on framing the issue as one that pits Jewish safety against pro-Palestinian speech. This is despite the leadership of Jewish students advocating for Palestinian rights who have been participating in peaceful demonstrations.

Despite all of this, we know that there is a way forward - to come back to the table, to negotiate, to rescind the interim suspensions, and commit to dialogue going forward.

Press Release from organizers of SAGE @ MIT | Published Thursday, May 9 @ 11PM

MIT suspends, evicts, and arrests their own students engaging in non-violent, peaceful protest against MIT’s continued ties to Israeli military

Today, police forces on MIT campus brutally handled, injured, and arrested at least 9 MIT students and grad workers peacefully engaging in non-violent protest. This escalation and violence comes 1 day after MIT’s decision to suspend 23 students for non-violent protest. MIT also evicted several students from campus housing, including those who have families with children, those with disabilities, low-income students, and veterans.

This violent escalation was in response to a non-violent action by students from the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (MIT SAGE). Students gathered outside the Stata garage on MIT’s campus to demand that MIT end all research ties with the Israeli military. This focused demand has majority support from the MIT student population, and is similar to actions MIT took after the invasion of Ukraine.

The action by MIT SAGE at the MIT Stata garage was intended to stop business as usual for MIT. Students are pressuring the University administration to end research ties with the Israeli military, the only foreign Ministry of Defense with whom MIT collaborates. This funding has been renewed as recently as this past March.

In response to the nonviolent student action at the MIT Stata garage, police at MIT forcefully handled and shoved MIT students to the ground, using unnecessary and extreme force to move, detain and arrest students engaging in the non-violent protest demonstration. Students have video evidence of the police assaults.

“The protest started peacefully as we linked hands in front of the parking garage of the Stata building, which is where much of the research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense is conducted. Within minutes, the MIT police turned things violent and attacked us, injuring several students. I was violently shoved and grabbed multiple times by the police before they arrested me.” states one of the arrested students, Ruth Hanna, MIT Graduate Student Union Vice President.

Today’s violent escalation in response to the anti-genocide student protesters follows the MIT administration’s decision to issue interim suspension notices to 23 participants in the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (MIT SAGE) encampment. In many cases, suspension notices directed students to “leave campus immediately” and barred them from housing, food, employment, extracurricular activities, and participating in commencement, without any form of due process.

Zeno of MIT Graduates 4 Palestine, who received a suspension notice and is being evicted from their housing, stated, “I have a wife and child. Leaving immediately is impossible for us and puts my child’s well-being at risk.”

Quinn Perian, student organizer with MIT Jews for Ceasefire stated, “It is clear that MIT is using its leverage over students’ well-being to shut down speech that threatens to expose its continued complicity in genocide.”

Students, faculty, and alumni have organized to document arrests, advocate for students’ rights to engage in nonviolent protests, and offer support, including meals and housing, to suspended and evicted students. The MIT administration is actively causing harm to peaceful protesting students while claiming that the suspensions are for “the safety and well-being of the MIT community”.

The context

• SAGE has a clear and focused demand to MIT: end all research contracts sponsored by the Ministry of Defense of Israel.
  
• Since 2015, MIT has received over $4 million in authorized research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel. This research is for the material benefit of the Israeli military and their war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
  
• These funds are only 0.03% of total MIT research funding, and 0.2% of MIT’s defense funding.
• There is broad support for SAGE’s demands across MIT. Both the undergraduate and graduate student bodies have passed resolutions via democratic election calling to cut research and financial ties with the Israeli military. 40+ faculty and 700+ alumni have released statements in support of SAGE’s demands.
• Hundreds of MIT alumni have signed a pledge to withhold donations from MIT until MIT makes substantial progress toward meeting SAGE’s demands.

MIT precedence

Nonviolent protests against collaboration with entities engaged in human rights violations and war have precedence at MIT.

In the late 1960s, MIT students protesting the Vietnam War engaged in nonviolent protest actions, including occupying the student center for 10 days and doing a sit-in at MIT’s Center for International Studies.

In the late 1980s, MIT students built a shantytown encampment in the same location as the current one to call upon MIT to divest from companies doing business in South Africa.

On February 25, 2022 — the day after the invasion of Ukraine — MIT cut funding ties with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), a Russian university, stating “This step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.” This precedent demonstrates that MIT can act decisively and quickly when it sees moral clarity.

Who we are

MIT SAGE is a coalition of students, researchers, faculty and staff who are organizing to demand that the MIT community immediately end all research ties with the Israeli military.

For more information and requests for interview, comment:

SAGE Media Liaison

Email: eyesonmit@gmail.com

Please include: preferences for the individual you would like to speak with (ex: a graduate student, a member of a particular organization), a question list and a timeline for your piece to be connected to the appropriate folks faster.

Immediate support for the affected students

Demands from the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment:

Press Release from organizers of SAGE @ MIT | Published Monday, April 29th

MIT student demands re: Gaza war are focused and actionable — and with precedence

MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (MIT SAGE) has a clear and focused demand to MIT: end all research contracts sponsored by the Ministry of Defense of Israel.

Since 2015, MIT has received over $11 million in authorized research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel, with nearly $4 million of these contracts spent. This research is for the material benefit of the Israeli Occupation Forces and their war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

MIT SAGE has chosen an actionable, achievable demand that has precedent at MIT because we want impact now. This is a uniquely targeted ask versus broader demands from protesters at other universities. SAGE chose this focused ask to meet the MIT administration in good faith and start negotiations from a mutually beneficial place.

The facts

• MIT has research contracts across campus funded by the Ministry of Defense of Israel, with projects requested for renewal as recently as March 2024.
  
• Student organizers have just released a new list of projects at MIT that are funded by the Ministry of Defense of Israel.
  
• This list was uncovered through research by student organizers using internal MIT financial documentation
  
• One of these projects is Autonomous Robotic Swarms, which would have a military use case of enhancing drones’ ability to track moving targets—whether surveilling Gazan citizens or American protesters
  

SAGE organizers’ statement reflects this reality: “To MIT, we charge you in the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people for your explicit role in providing scientific and technological support for the Israeli Occupation Forces' and their crimes.”

MIT has already done this before. This is doable.

On February 25, 2022 — the day after the invasion of Ukraine — MIT cut funding ties with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), a Russian university, stating “This step is a rejection of the actions of the Russian government in Ukraine.” This precedent demonstrates that MIT can act decisively and quickly when it sees moral clarity.

SAGE organizers ask for MIT to act in alignment with its values. In response to MIT’s inaction on the genocide in Gaza, they state: “It is unconscionable. It is immoral. It reflects a gross disdain for human life and human dignity that this institution, MIT, has chosen to embody.”

MIT students overwhelmingly support this ask

There is broad support for SAGE’s demands across MIT. Both the undergraduate and graduate student bodies have passed resolutions via democratic election calling to cut research and financial ties with the Israeli military.

The MIT Undergraduate Association (UA), which is the undergraduate student government at MIT, passed a referendum in March 2024 calling for MIT to cut all research and financial ties with the Israeli military and a permanent ceasefire in Gaza that 63.7% voted for, with over 41% of the undergraduate student body turning out to vote.

The MIT Graduate Students Union (GSU) passed a referendum in April 2024 that stated MIT as an institution is complicit in furthering violence against the Palestinian people and called for the MIT community to take immediate steps toward cutting all research and financial ties with the Israeli military. The resolution was adopted with 70.5% of votes in favor of adopting the resolution

Who we are

MIT SAGE is a coalition of students, researchers, and staff who are organizing to demand that the MIT community immediately end all research ties with the Israeli military.

For more information

Our collective action is supported by a large and diverse coalition; please send requests for comments from MIT SAGE organizers to: mit-caa-exec@mit.edu and eyesonmit@gmail.com with any preferences for the individual you would like to speak with (ex: a graduate student, a member of a particular organization), a question list and a timeline for your piece to be connected to the appropriate folks.

Statement by student organizers of SAGE @ MIT at the initiation of the protest:

“We are over 6 months into the genocide in Gaza.”

Which research projects at MIT are funded by the Israeli military?

Since 2008, MIT has received millions of dollars in research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel.

Which departments have received or are currently receiving this funding?

Specific research projects at MIT with the Israeli military that we call upon MIT to end immediately and not renew:

How do I support the SAGE at MIT?

Where is the MIT Scientists Against Genocide Encampment located?

About the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment & what’s happening there:

Why encampment as a protest method?

Why is the encampment located there?

Happenings at the SAGE at MIT:

for more join the telegram channel, or follow MIT Coalition for Palestine member organizations online.

Do most students at MIT want divestment from research that directly develops Israeli military weapons?

Undergraduate Association at MIT

Excepts from the passed resolution by the Undergraduate Association at MIT

Graduate Student Union at MIT

Excepts from the passed resolution by the Graduate Student Union at MIT

Which MIT organizations support the campaign to divest from the Israeli military?

Do MIT Faculty + Staff support the Students Against Genocide Encampment at MIT? Yes.

MIT Staff for Palestine is an unofficial loose group of people employed by MIT (staff, researchers, and faculty). We formed in November, 2023, after authoring an open letter to President Kornbluth on our concerns regarding the administration’s treatment of student protestors. We have no leadership or official member lists.

We Are:

• a group to support to each other at MIT, to listen to and problem solve around issues arising at work related to silencing pro-Palestine positions
  
• a group to support the CAA and other pro-Palestinian student groups including but not limited to Reading Revolution, MIT Jews for Ceasefire, and Palestine@MIT.
  

MIT Staff for Palestine has authored multiple Op-Eds in The Tech in solidarity with student activists organizing to support justice for Palestine.

“As the Alliance of Concerned Faculty at MIT we support and affirm our students’ right to peaceful political expression and support their rights to free speech. We thus express our support for the students currently staging a peaceful and multi-faith encampment on Kresge Lawn.”

“We affirm MIT student groups who demand that MIT protect Palestinian students and their allies from discrimination, defend their rights to free speech and free expression on campus, and provide a safe environment without exceptions. Such peaceful expression of moral and political concerns in academic settings is a part of a long tradition in which young people find their voice to participate in democracy, and their voices should not be chilled or silenced by threats of arrest or disciplinary proceedings.”

“We call on all faculty – whatever your political views – to stand up for students’, staff’s and faculty’s rights to free speech and political self-expression by making their presence and solidarity known and felt. “

Statements + artwork on the campaign for MIT to divest from the Israeli military and about the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment at MIT:

Opinion in MIT’s The Tech

“To divest a university like MIT, or strip it of ties to Israeli military, or announce a major strike pledge to withhold our labor from firms complicit in the Israeli occupation sends a costly signal about our values. The struggle against oppressive regimes is a struggle against their legitimacy as much as their material capabilities. If Israel can oppress Palestinians with our science, let them do it without us. We do not need to participate. MIT should, instead, affirm human life.”

“...the cynics might see us as deluded peaceniks – utopian, cringe, stupid. Yet I am similarly struck by the pessimism of those who until the very last moment could not imagine the Berlin Wall falling, who saw “one man, one vote” in South Africa as a pipe dream, and who believed Jim Crow was etched in stone. For this reason, I think we must commit to an irrational, radical hope – to a solidarity that is global and indivisible, that is founded as Robin Kelly once wrote, “not on shared experience but shared principles.” No one can fully grasp what lies beyond the moral horizon. But we can continue the long march to that horizon, undaunted by the world’s grief – committed to “mourn the dead” as the protest slogan goes, “and fight like hell for the living” – from the river to the sea to every mountain top. I hope you join us. People are dying.”